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...
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...
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...
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 Memory Garden
Learning is one of the great pleasures of life, yet the most common emotion in learning is fear. A common object of that fear is the time and effort it will take to come to know something; relatedly, we sometimes think that to learn a little is not something to be proud of. Fear that...
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....
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...
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...
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...
