We’re delighted to announce today that we have raised a million dollars from a wonderful set of investors to pursue our mission to make learning joyful. Now, not unreasonably, our dear community may not be that interested in how we keep the ship afloat, but in fact the character of the people who back a...

Since language is the true food of love, and also because today is Valentine’s day, we decided to tee you up for all current and future romantic endeavours with a comprehensive guide to saying “I love you” in a hundred different languages. It’s difficult to understate the importance of this life-skill, so get to it! Never...

I’m pleased to be able to say that today’s Observer included a long supplement on memory written by yours truly – it’ll come onto the Guardian website tomorrow. It’s quite a fun piece, with lots of exercises to test and grow your memory, and a few inventive games exploring the re-discovery of neglected memories and...

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,...

Our very own man of memory, Ed Cooke, just appeared on NPR radio’s “How to do Everything” series. The topic was memory, naturally enough, and the podcast is well worth a watch, not least because Justin Witte illustrated it in very entertaining fashion. In the video you can listen to Ed interviewed by Mike Danforth and Ian Chillag as...

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...

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...

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...

This might seem like a rather unusual title, given the amount of time people devote to harping on about how impossibly hard it is to learn Chinese. But there really are a lot of reasons why Mandarin Chinese is in fact a very easy language to learn. I struggled with European languages through my school...

The method of loci is a famous memory technique that exploits our incredible spatial memory, borrowing its clarity and organization to help you learn totally unrelated information- sequences of ideas, objects or anything else. The best way to introduce yourself to this amazing spatial memory technique is to try it out in a real space. This is...