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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Why Chinese is getting easier and easier to learn
Chinese has a reputation for being incredibly difficult for English speakers to learn. This is really for two key reasons: the sheer number of characters that you need to learn in order to be able to read to even quite a basic level, and the fact that the meaning of each syllable can be changed...
Are Chinese characters pictographs?
I am currently staying in a small village in Yunnan province inhabited by the Naxi ethnic minority. We are staying in a truly idyllic courtyard house of almost absurd beauty. I’m not sure that this photo gets close to doing it justice, but it may give you a flavour. What you will certainly not be...
How to use your brain like a pro
If someone told you that they could change you from a normal, forgetful person into the US memory champion in just one year, would you believe them? Josh Foer didn’t. Memrise’s co-founder, Grandmaster of Memory Ed Cooke, met Josh at the US memory championships a few years ago. Josh was there as a journalist covering...
An Ancient Chinese Wordplay
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三国演义) is one of the great Chinese novels. Not only is it a rip-snorting tale of adventure, but it gives a wonderful insight into Chinese culture and history. If you haven’t read it, you should. I will not try to explain why the book is so wonderful, nor give...
Some Mnemonic tips for the Tiger Mother
I heard the currently infamous Chinese “Tiger Mother” on the radio this morning, espousing her view that it is essential to go through a certain amount of rote learning of any subject or skill before you can go on to be creative with it. This actually seems to me to be, in general, not a...
Using memory techniques to design the perfect school
One of the things that’s very obvious is that the best schools are richly decorated by things relating to the kids themselves: photographs, paintings, project-work. Unlike the classroom on the right. A second obvious thing is how much schools-building has been going on in the recent past. All over the place, new 20 million pound...
