Learning Without Frontiers
We spent the early part of this week in London with Learning Without Frontiers who were exploring the future of learning at the intersection of games, mobile devices and the internet. It was a pretty amazing couple of days with some of the best and brightest minds in education sharing their thoughts on how technology combined with...
Memrise Streetview
Our wonderful French learners have been demanding that we communicate a little more of the life and culture of France in the learning cave. It stands to reason, for words have much more meaning and nuance than can possibly be expressed in a mere definition. Such thoughts gave us the idea of crowd-sourcing a few...
Friday’s feature request
Early last Friday morning, one of our users -a girl named Kristin- made good use of the feedback box to detail something she felt would help her learn SAT words better. The message read: “please include, along with the definition, a phonetic spelling of the word so I know how it is said. I know...
Spencer Davis
Introducing Spencer Davis, our Vice-President of Technology. Just to be clear, while Spencer is an admirer of such hits as “I’m a man” and “Gimme Some Loving“, he is not their author. And while the guitarist of The Spencer Davis Group (who is still going strong at 70) also shares the nickname ‘The professor’ with our Spencer, he...
What is an etymology?
Hello! I’m Katrina and I’m in charge of researching the etymologies of English words here at Memrise. Etymologies are the histories of words: the stories of where they come from, and how they came to mean what they now do. Etymologies are a great tool for learning words, because they have intrinsic value and the...
What’s a mem?
Mems are little ways of remembering things. You’ll already know and use lots of them, without perhaps being aware of the fact: I’m talking about little phrases like “30 days has September, April, June and November”. Mems, I should of course note, are also known as mnemonics. Excellently, the word ‘mnemonic’ is so difficult to remember...
Sean Emmer
Sean “The Memmer” Emmer was surely destined to work with Memrise; and he has made diverse contributions to our evolution. He played a vital role in the early development of our interface, and has been a source of impressive guidance on matters of taste- most notably, he astutely insisted in the early days that Greg...
The Mem Team
Down in the engine-room, we have a formidable team who have been producing a wealth of entertaining content for our SAT word learning game. It is high time they were introduced. First, though, it is worth explaining how there are two strands to the content we are generating. On the one hand, we are creating...
Memory in Perception
One of the many reasons that we at Memrise are so convinced it’s still worth learning things in a world where information is never more than a few clicks away, is the clear role that memory plays in perception. Because memories inside the head influence what we notice in the world, knowledge serves to deepen...
Kevin “Picasso” Rooney
Users have been wondering why our learning-game looks so good. The answer is, quite simply, Kevin “Picasso” Rooney. The story of Kevin’s nickname deserves repeating. It has changed frequently over time due to a variety of circumstances, most notably the fact that, for the last 15 years, the world’s best soccer player has, with the...
Welcoming Charlotte Salasky to the Memrise team
We are delighted to announce the addition of Charlotte Salasky to the Memrise team. As befits her role as Employee no. 1, Charlotte brings passion, integrity, imagination and intellectual lucidity to her work with Memrise. Charlotte’s initial responsibilities will be to oversee Memrise’s marketing and PR, focusing in particular on the organisation of our summer...
