Cool new Memrise stuff to learn, accompanying today’s Observer
I’m pleased to be able to say that today’s Observer included a long supplement on memory written by yours truly – it’ll come onto the Guardian website tomorrow. It’s quite a fun piece, with lots of exercises to test and grow your memory, and a few inventive games exploring the re-discovery of neglected memories and...
Mems, as explained by William James
Memrise enthusiast and French child-psychologist Juliette Danjon brought this marvellous quote by William James to our attention today: “The art of remembering is the art of thinking; … when we wish to fix a new thing in either our own mind or a pupil’s, our conscious effort should not be so much to impress and...
The Christmas Creative Challenge!
It has been a pretty awesome first full year of operations for Memrise: tens of thousands of users have learned millions upon millions of words. Which means that trillions of neurons all over the world have been coaxed into shape and a veritable forest of memory flowers has been grown. We’re pretty stoked about this,...
Sunday Summary- Week 2 (a short history of Memrise)
This week, the Memrise team has splintered to the four corners of the globe. I therefore thought it might be a good moment, not least since we have been oddly silent on this blog about some of the bizarre locations from which we have operated, to give a brief history of our roaming existence- it...
Learn to read a sentence of Chinese in 3 minutes!
汉字好学! Do you have no idea what that means? Well allow me, for a moment to set off on what might appear to be a bit of a tangent and all will soon become clear. I want to talk about the way children learn, and the way that I believe that they *should* learn. Since...
Week 1: Sunday Summary
A few of our community have been wondering on the forums what we’re up to, so here’s a first instalment of what we’ll call the Sunday Summary- an end-of-week overview of what we’re working on, the state of our morale, our plans for the future and any anecdotes from the week’s work. First thing to...
5 lessons from the way that a child learns a new language
Children learn new languages with enviable speed and ease. I think that everyone is agreed on that. The received wisdom seems to be that when a child is surrounded by a new language, they simply absorb it like an eager little sponge, emerging effortlessly fluent within a few weeks. So admired is this magical ability...
Why childhood memories are dangerous
Childhood memory can be something of a treasure-trove for thinking about the mind. So much deep conceptual change happens in early childhood, and so little in adulthood, that childhood memories can be uniquely helpful in understanding what it is to have a truly different perspective, and so what is going on with the normal perspectives...
The Emperor of Dreams
Earlier this year, when I was desperately trying to enthuse my three year old daughter with the idea of leaving our rural Devon idyll and coming to live in Beijing, I took the arguably eccentric route of writing a lengthy mock-epic poem for her based on an old Chinese myth. However, my daughter was only...
Some thoughts on Chinese Tones
The tones in Chinese give rise to a lot of confusion and discussion. I am always trying to come up with different ways to explain them and different ways to think about them to make them stick more easily to English-speaking memories. Having received a recent barrage of questions regarding the tones, it seemed like...
Ed teaching BBC man the periodic table in an afternoon
I’m appearing tonight on BBC1 at 7.30 p.m. in an episode of ”Bang Goes the Theory”, which has devoted tonight’s episode to memory. They wanted me to teach presenter Dallas Campbell the periodic table, so he knew it by heart. I was to have no more than a few hours with him. The periodic table...
The Master Calligrapher
Creating Memrise has caused me to do many strange things (taking my family, including two year old daughter and seven-month pregnant wife, to live in a yurt in Ed’s garden for two months is one that springs to mind, but there are plenty of others), go to some strange places, and to come across some...
