Memory

Why does Memrise teach the meanings and pronunciations separately?

If you have just started to learn Chinese on Memrise, then the perfectly reasonable thought might have occurred to you, “Why does Memrise let me choose to learn either to read a character or to pronounce it? Can’t I do both?” It is a fair question, and one with (I think) quite an interesting answer....

Why should I learn Chinese characters, can’t I just learn pinyin?

Pinyin uses letters that we are familiar with. Familiar things are easy to remember, so we find it easier to learn the pinyin spelling of a Chinese word than we do to remember an unfamiliar character and the sound that we are supposed to make when we read that character. So, by this logic, we...
Mems & Puns - an Introduction

Mems & Puns – an Introduction

As you know, mems are ways of linking words to vivid images to make the word more memorable. Mems work because we remember seeing things much more strongly than we remember thinking things. A vivid image comes into your brain much more readily than the meaning of a word. But the ears are important, too:...

Mem of the Day: Sunday, November 8th 2009

Hello – my name’s Jonny and I head up the team that is creating mems for the site. If you are new here, mems are the individual mental images that help you remember a specific word by tying it to something memorable. Each word you learn has a number of mems to choose from, or...
Memory in Perception

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...