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...
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...
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...
Neuroscience and education: how the brain works and why it sometimes doesn’t
Over the coming months, we’ll be publishing a series of short pieces on how the brain works, with news you can use from the world of neuroscience. 3 reasons why learning a language is like teaching two thousand toddlers to ride a bike Do we only use 10% of our brains? How is memory stored...
Never lose your keys again!
Memory, it’s said, rejoices in the unusual, the delightful and the socially unacceptable. Does the whereabouts of your keys fit any of these descriptions? No? Well there’s your problem for you. Almost everyone finds it difficult to recall where they’ve left their keys. There’s no doubt that it’s just much more difficult than recalling where,...
Apps for the oppressed?
In “Pedagogy of the Oppressed“ Paulo Freire‘s blunt assessment of the world of formal education is that it actively undermines human development, and that it is therefore an instrument of oppression. Teaching, he says, is inevitably narrative-making (a point Stephen Heppell explored at the LWF conference on Tuesday). To teach, we tell stories, whether they be about chemicals, humans, French...
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...
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...
