Memrise's ace team of investors. Click for detail!

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 young company like ours is of the utmost importance. Without the faith, patience and imagination of investors who, like us, believe that learning should be a joy  -and without people who understand that it will take time to build our cathedral of learning- we wouldn’t be able to pursue the path we’re on, and learning might remain, well, a bit boring.

To understand why the character of our investors is so important, you need to know, first of all, that Memrise is in this for the long haul: we want to create a place where anyone can learn anything, quickly, easily and with bundles of fun. We’re applying everything we can garner from the science of memory to make learning fast; we’re philosophically opposed to any kind of learning that isn’t fun; and we believe that the imaginative power of ordinary individuals can transform learning for everyone.

So our plans revolve around enabling you, our community, to express your imaginations in making learning gorgeous, while we, on our side, apply all of our industry and ingenuity to helping deliver your imaginings to help anyone learn as effortlessly and pleasurably as possible- beginning with our wiki for learning all the world’s languages.

All of this is round-about preamble to explaining how we insisted, as we sought funding to help build out our vision, on only the most cheerful investors: people who share our belief that a product is above all an attitude to life, and that a company is much more than a device for funnelling money around. We sought people, in a nutshell, with a sense of humour, a commitment to building wonderful things, and patience and experience enough to know that we are doing things that may take some time to perfect.

These people deserve all of our thanks, because Memrise wouldn’t be able to improve as it now can without their help. So I thought it would be nice to introduce our team of investors and advisors, who are really a splendid group, and who would probably appreciate a box of chocolates or two (you can send them to [investor name] c/o Memrise, c/oTheCreativeCube, 155 Commercial Street, London, E1 6BJ, UK, and we’ll forward them on- we promise).

So here are the noble backers of our site: presented, metaphorically, in the form of a soccer team:

Goal keeper: Bill Phillimore. Bill is Ed’s Uncle, and farms pistacchio nuts and pomegranates in California. He gave us our first few dollars to get the show moving. He is our main source of realism.

In defence

Left back

Bill Warner (and partner Scott Heller). Bill is a core mentor, someone who preaches building start-ups from the heart. Establish your intention, says Bill, and everything else follows. Our intention is to make learning joyful. We’re hoping Bill’s right.

Central defence

Mark Evans and Harry Briggs from Balderton “Rio Ferdinand” Capital. Mark and Harry are the rock at the centre of defence. Mark has an Olympic Gold Medal in rowing, which used to be a closely kept secret. Harry co-founded Firefly tonics. When these two speak, one listens.

Rich Levandov and Brady Bohrmann from Avalon “Nemanja Vidic” Ventures. Rich and Brady were early investors in Zynga, and they have comprehensively dominated the game of providing us with free-dinners, earning them their status as highly respected leaders.

Right back

Walt “Gary Neville” Winshall. Walt is a director at the gaming company Harmonix, and very wise. He invested in Memrise because it sounded like fun (we think).

Midfield.

These are the young guns, the engine of the investor-team.

Left wing: Alex “Ryan Giggs” Gezelius and Stephen Hartley-Brewer. Both are London-based investors who gets “social media” and the value of moving fast. They alternate on the left wing.

Centre midfielders:

Jeff “Roy Keane” Hammerbacher: Jeff invented and ran the data-team at Facebook, and is the leading investor on the Memrise boards, having learned the small matter of 4426 words so far.

Matt “Paul Scholes” Mullenweg’s Audrey Capital. Matt founded WordPress. ‘Nuff said.

Right wing: Ken “David Beckham” Lerer. Ken was the co-founder of the Huffington Post, and with his crack team -Bruce, Steve, Kate, Elizabeth and crew- he brings style and media-savvy to the outfit.

Strikers: these are our most glamorous signings.

Ken “Christiano Ronaldo” Baumann. Ken is the 22 year-old star of “The Secret Life of an American Teenager”, a publisher, and easily Memrise’s best looking investor. He found Memrise before an Italian holiday, subsequently charmed the locals with his expert lingo, and couldn’t help getting involved. Being of that generation, he also gets the internet.

Nabeel “Wayne Rooney” Hyatt. Nabeel is the head of Zynga Boston, an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur, and guides us in making things fun. He has a supernatural ability to see into a product, tell you what’s wrong with it, and not hurt your feelings. Has twice won the investor of the month competition.

And it would be remiss not to mention Katie “Alex Ferguson” Rae, director of Techstars Boston, who acts us coach to our rag-tag outfit, and introduced us to many of this crew.

That’s it! We raised a million dollars from awesome people, we’re spending it on making learning joyous, and we’re going to devote all our time and energy to helping you, our community, help each other and yourselves learn.

Thank you so much for all your support, feedback and creativity- we couldn’t have done it without you!

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 again will you be stranded in the arms of a Lithuanian paramour and lost for words!

To get the videos together, we spent the weekend roaming the streets of London accosting anyone with a bi-lingual look and inviting them to record an “I love you” in their native language. It was terrifically good fun- about which, more below.

In any case,  here’s the video our creative man Kevin came up with to summarise the weekend’s activities.

Do please share with your friends!

Many thanks to Henrietta Williams for camera-work, Kev Campbell, who strummed the soundtrack, and to Hugo, Silvio and John for their good humour and fun around the markets of London.

To finish up, I thought it might be worth sharing a few reflections on London, love and faces.

The first is that London is a really spectacularly cosmopolitan city. On one crossing of (an admittedly touristic) pedestrian bridge, we were able to harvest I love you’s in, no joke, Serbian, Malay, Portuguese, Spanish, Afrikaans, Cantonese, Korean, Catalan, Russian, Armenian, English (!) and Greek. Pretty cool. We only wish we could have allow ourselves to cross the same bridge twice, but that’s against our belief in constant forward motion.

The sheer intensity of cosmopolitan-ness around London was something of a revelation to us. Although we’re of course aware that people here come from all over the place, we’d no idea just how much this was the case till we began asking them individually. Way more than half of the people we approached seemed to hail from overseas- if not personally, then at least through their families. Just think of all those stories!

Another thing which struck us was how quickly spotting foreign origin can become a perceptual habit (in a good way). If you spend two days, as we did this weekend, roaming the streets in a state of hyper-attention to any signs of being-from-abroad (thick accent, I love London T-shirt, Scando-vibe, public displays of affection, ruly children, physical health, colourful capes, amusing beards etc) the world seems to respond in kind, and these stimuli become amplified in one’s visual experience to the extent that the world just looks richer. Where Nietzsche said “if all you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail” so Memrise says, “if all you have is a Canon and a Valentine’s day deadline, everyone becomes a nuanced speaker of foreign tongues.”

We discovered this Russo-Armenian pairing on the Millennium bridge

And how very loveable faces are if you pay attention to them like this! Makes you realize how little one looks at other people in going about one’s business. I’m left, two days later, with a much better emotional reaction to a normal face than I typically enjoy.

Perhaps the most heart-warming aspect of the whole experience this weekend was how keen people were to share their language, and how energized they were by the act of saying “I love you” (this was unrelated, I think, to my attractive manner). A typical conversation would go like this:

“Hello, do you mind if I ask whether you speak any foreign languages?”

“Yes, I do. I speak only English. Excuse me, I’m busy.”

“Well, the reason I ask is we’re collecting “I love you’s” in as many languages as we can for our language learning website, so people around the world will no longer be inhibited by linguistic barriers in their search for the discovery, and expression, of true love”.

“But you should have said. With pleasure will I teach you how to say “I love you” in Pashtun!”

Anyhow, enough wittering. Time, reader, you went off and expanded your romantic horizons through the sheer power of your brain.

Memrisers will soon know full well that this is an Anglo-Arab

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 some of the other mysteries of our mnemonic powers. Naturally, there are plenty of tips and tricks, but there’s also a fair amount of exploration of what the concept of memory really means- and in particular  of how it can only be understood if we recognise its intimate connection to emotion, perception and attention.

Meanwhile, here at Memrise, we took the opportunity to create lots of interesting content to accompany the guide.

Perhaps most excitingly, we’ve given the famous Guardian wallcharts the Memrise treatment, with their well-worth-remembering selections of different kinds of cheese, horse, mammal, fish, reptile, cow, insect, herb, flower and much much more.

With our splendid community, we also created some general knowledge sets to help teach the leaves of trees, the names of important American and British politicians, members of the Chinese politburo standing committee, Hobo symbols -which should come as a great relief- and it would meanwhile be remiss not to mention constellations and famous paintings.

Of course, our primary mission remains for the moment to bring languages to life, but we’d love to know your thoughts on these interesting new materials.

William James: would have loved Memrise.

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 retain it as to connect it with something already there (cf. Piaget’s principle of assimilation). The connecting is the thinking; and, if we attend clearly to the connection, the connected thing will certainly be likely to remain within recall.” (pp. 101–102).

This would serve extremely well as an explanation of and justification for our beloved ‘mems’, whose function is precisely to enchant and ease the process of connecting new knowledge to that which one already knows.

This is why mems come in many different forms: there are after all myriad different ways that new knowledge can be made to connect with the wild, infinite universe of connections that make up our minds.

It’s interesting to consider how the different kinds of mem we get on Memrise invent different kinds of connection.

- Verbal mnemonics: these connect a new word to our existing knowledge of our native language. For instance, you’re trying to learn that “il compito” is Italian for “homework”. You imagine people in a *compi*tition to do *comp*lete their homework. New knowledge (“il compito”) connects with existing knowledge in your native language (“competition”) as well as your existing concept of homework, and so finds an immediate home in the network of connections in your mind.

A visual mnemonic by David Roche: "woman" in Chinese

- Visual mnemonics: in Chinese, for instance, we can use our knowledge of the look of a woman, for instance, to help connect the new form of a Chinese character. That’s what these choice illustrations by our resident Irish artist David Roche help make happen:

- Etymologies: these connect new knowledge semantically with our existing knowledge of languages ancient, modern and native. So I’m an ESL person learning the meaning of the word “negligée” and I discover that it’s from the French for “to neglect” because, relative to the elaborate garments typically warn by 18th century women, negligées are, well, a little neglectful. Recall James: “The connecting is the thinking”. Merely by having this thought, we’re laying down a vivid, accessible memory.

- Example sentences: sometimes, to see a word in use is to find a way to make sense of it. Let’s say I’m learning that “cielo” means “sky”. Perhaps I’ll select a mem such as this one by a member of Memrise’s community named Aurora: “Il cielo è pieno di nuvole- the sky is full of clouds“. Here, my existing knowledge of the Italian language (pieno means full, nuvole are clouds), provide a mental context into which to integrate the new word “cielo”.

This process of connection is a more or less explicit feature of anything getting learned at any time. Most of the time, the connections are implicit and we don’t realize our brains making them. But one of the fundamental features of memory is that every new memory has to find a place amid all the others. Nothing is learned “just like that”.

We cannot wait for the next couple of years on Memrise. The art and science of mem creation and selection is only just beginning. We are looking forward to being surprised and astonished by what our community comes up with here: there are surely a million new ways of connecting the old with the new that we haven’t yet begun to imagine.

And we should blog more about William James, and re-read him. Thanks Juliette for the wonderful spot!

some partially organised neurons; perhaps pre-Memrise

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, but we are only just getting started!

The Memrise mission has always been to help *anyone* learn *anything* in a fast, fun and engaging way. So far we have focused on vocabulary. This will always continue to be a key part of Memrise, and we have got a ton more awesome developments in the pipeline to make vocab learning even faster and more effective. But as the year draws to a close and we each take stock and make resolutions about the year ahead, we think that the time is ripe to ask our users, “what else do you want to learn?”.

A glance through the fertile backwaters of the “beta topics” uncovers the fact that a lot of people have been having a lot of fun with this already: sets teaching everything from capitals of the world to

You are a mammal, so it is only polite that you learned to identify some of your fellow ones isn't it?

musical theory terms to the Californian penal code have already been created. To these we have recently added, courtesy of the artist Alan Baker, a range of courses to teach the different mammals, reptiles, wild flowers, fruits and creepy crawlies found on The Guardian’s famous wall charts.

But we want more, and we want to bring these courses to centre stage!

To achieve this, over the next three weeks we are going to be running an online Memathon – a burst of focused activity to create courses to learn anything and everything. All you have to do is to come up with lists of things that you want to know, and then we will all set about making them gloriously memorable. At the end of the Memathon, on the 7th of January, the best 12 courses will be promoted to a featured spot on the home page so that everyone can easily find them and learn them. Course creators and mem writers alike will be honoured and will bask in eternal glory.

What sort of courses might you make? Well, I live in a country (China) where good cheese is all but

I am going to be eating all of these and then writing mems as a feeble excuse for my gluttony.

unattainable; however my parents are visiting for Christmas and bringing with them a cornucopia. So we are going to to indulge ourselves on these long winter evenings by adding tasting notes and identifying descriptions to as many of the 36 cheeses in the Guardian wall chart that their packing allowed room for. Mmmmm. Greg’s festive season meanwhile will be spent elucidating the differences between styles of classical music, while Ed tells me that he plans to curate the definitive guide to the 200 sexual configurations of the kama sutra. Ahem… moving on.

So think of something that you wish that you knew: maybe you always wanted to be able to identify birds by their song? Or to impress your friends with your encyclopaedic knowledge of wine varieties of northern Italy? Or perhaps you long to be able to quote, at will, the famous last words of historical figures or the first lines of famous books?

Whatever it is, now is the time to learn it! Take a look through the courses that are already available:

• check out the courses made from Alan Baker’s illustrations
• try adding some mems to glorify them
• see what ideas they give you of other things that you want to learn
• search through the “all languages” section to see what you can unearth

If you can’t find the course that you want to learn, then that is the best possible news – you can now become the founder of your own topic! Just:

• go to languages
• click “create your own” – and you are off!
• Then post to the general discussion forum to let us all know that you are getting started, and ask other people to help you to make the course great.

We are on constant call  to advise on all matters mnemonic, answer questions and offer kind words of encouragement. There are a multitude of cunning tricks that you can employ to make the system work better for you: you can add in images instead of words; add music as an audio accompaniment; embed videos and make full use of all the testing types that are available to you.

The richer the content the more fun the course will be to learn. Just get in touch and we will be more than happy to help!

And, as if that weren’t all excitement enough, Ed has personally pledged to send a peat-smoked scottish salmon to the creator of the best course. So what do you wish you knew? Whether it be Guardian wallcharts or a new language, get creating and get learning!

This is the giant green chair where Memrise was born

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 might be of amusement to the interested community-member.

A brief history of the location of Memrise

The idea of Memrise first began to get going in earnest after a conversation on a giant green chair on London’s South Bank in 2008- at which point in time the team was Greg and me. Greg was deep in his neuroscience PhD in Princeton, New Jersey, and I was living in innumerable inns and motels roaming round the UK doing talks at schools on things like how to learn. We worked on Memrise in every spare moment from that point on, and Skype was the lifeline that made our collaboration possible. It has remained completely indispensable ever since, as will be clear from the following narrative of where the company has travelled since.

It was more than a year later, while we were still many ideas and not much website, that we first experienced the joys of working from the same location. This was the summer of 2009, when my superhumanly cool and tolerant cousin Charlotte allowed us to spend a couple of months building and brainstorming from her flat on the upper-east side of NYC  (close enough to Princeton to allow Greg to continue scanning brains half the time).

Our NYC abode provided some striking visuals

It was a truly spectacular location for an extended two month burst of creativity, and it was there we first developed something that hints at the current Memrise.

We had by this stage been joined by Kevin Rooney, our designer, source of common sense and Facebook presence. He’s also a photographer of no small talent, and he didn’t neglect to pick up a few choice snaps of how we rolled back in those early days. The most fun element of all was that we had some super hipster neighbours, called Bernie and Dovid, theatre and marketing creatives who used to get their projector out on the roof, for some really quite picturesque late-night film viewings. No better way to un-wind after a hard day’s labour.

The first versions of Memrise live in a shared folder called NYC.

After that summer, Greg resumed the last year of his PhD at Princeton, and I went off to Antwerp, Belgium, to resume an attempt at one of my own. The next design phase of development ended up being called after Antwerp, after Kev joined me there for a week or two in December of 2009. By this stage Spencer, at the age of 18, had joined our rag-tag crew to do a bit of programming while Greg was entering the final intense phases of his study. Spencer cunningly proved himself indispensable, and he’s with us now as full-time website-engineer in chief.

(Irrelevant anecdote: when I casually invited everyone to my birthday party during one of the Antwerp group Skype calls -I had in mind people in Europe- Spencer googled Antwerp expecting it to be in the US, which for some reason he hadn’t realised my Skype voice didn’t originate from, and found that it wasn’t. Imperturbably, he ordered himself a passport. Notice was too short, alas, and he missed that epic night- which ended, in a more Memrise-related sub-anecdote, in perhaps the most inherently memorable thing I’ve ever seen: a crowded bar going into pandemonium when someone released a scuttling bag of live rats).

Casting for crayfish at lunch during our rural phase

Antwerp (Europe’s most under-rated city, incidentally) gave the name to the second phase of Memrise’s evolution, still found in our shared folder “Antwerp re-design”. This was where we introduced multiple mem-types (somewhat prematurely!) and articulated a road-map of features some of which we’ve still not built. We then resumed our studies and love-affair with Skype.

We carried on like that until we’d finished our studies (well, Greg finished), and we eventually got together full-time a little more than a year ago in a barn in Long Hanborough (England’s longest village, fyi). At this point in time, Ben, who’s now our community manager, joined the team to work on the Chinese. The barn was small, though, and there wasn’t room for him in it. Ben saw an easy way round the impasse, as he tends to with impasses of all kinds, and erected a Mongolian yurt in the meadow outside, into which he moved himself with his heavily pregnant wife and 2 year old child. Folders entitled “Hanborough” bear witness to this phase.

Starting up in a barn: the European answer to a garage

Starting a start-up in a barn, incidentally, is not, finally, to be recommended. We had figured that “the internet is everywhere, just as much in our barn as in downtown SF”. Indeed, we actually thought that the barn would be better than the centre of the world of start-ups- since it combined both the internet and the opportunity to de-tox our minds by looking after the beehives at breakfast, crayfishing at lunch or observing the social life of chickens at tea.

However, it was all a bit isolated and we still didn’t have any users, so we thought we’d better get ourselves into the thick of things, and just at that moment had the unbelievable luck of being accepted into Techstars, a start-up accelerator in Boston. So we left the barn behind, and piled off over the pond- all of us except Ben, who’d gone off to China with his legendarily adventurous wife and family- thanks again, Skype.

Ben lived in a Yurt all summer with pregnant wife and child

We were given about four days notice that we’d got in to Techstars before it began, and we rapidly set about searching for accommodation (never easy in a student-heavy rental market like Boston’s). The place we found, by a quite amazing coincidence, meant that life in Boston ended up with precisely the same spread of fauna as life in Hanborough.

This is because we ended up living in the family home of arguably the world’s leading roboticist, whose wife  had gone to Africa for the summer with their four children to install medical devices. An inveterate tinkerer, aside from building mind-blowingly cool robots, our landlord was also in the process of trying to invent an entirely self-sufficient food-producing eco-system for use in Africa, which involved an elaborate set-up of bees, fish-tanks, algae-tanks, flower beds and chickens, all connected together throughout the flat and its balconies with elaborate pumps and waste-disposal-systems. All of which meant, that we were able to continue communing with bees, chickens and fish, despite being in the world’s most technologically inventive city. (Incidentally, our landlord named the three chicks after me, Greg and Spencer- and I found on a recent return visit, that I’ve grown into a marvellous Cockerel, and Spencer and Greg are my girlfriends).

The view from Techstars proved more urban

Urban Massachusets turned out not to have exactly the same vibe as the barn, however. There was a bit more tech involved. And energy. And fun. It proved a bit of a whirlwind: twelve start-ups in one room working at a ferocious pace for three months, while being exposed to so much well-judged and kind expertise and friendship that it was barely possible to keep up- emotionally or intellectually.

It was in this phase that we introduced the garden metaphor (first talked about in Antwerp), began expanding our languages, and expanded the possibilities for user-generation.

Alas, due to the intricacies of American visa law, once Techstars was over we were soon exiled to London and back to using Skype as our primary mechanism of communication.

That was three months ago. After a month or so, we began to gather a few more team-members together again in the same place, and with South London as our base, we worked, gathered each day around the mem-brain (thanks Guerilla Science!) out of my flat. Here we began to grow out the community elements of the site, with

New friends at Techstars: Dave and Ralph, who make Tap City, one of the most fun mobile game around

leaderboards, forums, emails to tell you when your mems are being admired and other things of that character. Evan, Dan, Eliot and Coralie had joined us at this point, in more or less part or full-time fashion, and we were beginning to hit our stride. Unfortunately, my flatmate eventually ceased tolerating the hoopla of having six permanent residents in his home, and politely suggested we find another home. So we moved out in steps to a shared co-working space at TheCube in Shoreditch, which is where we are now.

TheCube feature-blitz is on its way, and will add up to the sexiest development burst yet: we’re working on multiple fronts all at once: iPhone, improvements to the garden, settings for individual languages, more variety to learning, a more just points-system, a greater dynamic of sharing and collaboration, and sweeter navigation all round. A happy hum of activity. Can’t wait to show you all. we’ve also been enjoying what feels like some degree of stability at last.

Except, oh wait- everyone just disappeared again.

Indeed, we’re back down to two at Memrise HQ, and back onto Skype. Spencer’s returned home. Greg’s hopped off for a couple of weeks to Princeton to visit his girlfriend for thanksgiving; Dan’s returned to his own family and girlfriend, and Kev left this morning for Sligo, Ireland, to see his own long-suffering nearest and dearest. Evan and I have no romantic lives to speak of, we write investor reports and code, so we’ve remained in the office keeping the candles burning.

Don’t worry though, work doesn’t cease when we fragment like this: quite the opposite, it often increases. Greg, admittedly, reduces to 13 hour work days while travelling. Spencer, on the other hand, often rises in industry, since he finds the mental space to work as he likes best: in three apocalyptically intense ninety minute bursts that arrive at unpredictable points at day or night. Kev goes completely off radar, and often returns with a thrilling design or three.

Anyhow, that’s a quick overview of the history of the pirate-ship that is this company.

Mem-maker Luna: so French, it's almost unbelievable

But this is supposed to be a Sunday summary -and yes, I do know it’s Thursday. What have we been working on? Well, lots of things, but here’s one we could use your feedback on: it’s an experimental word-set we put together with Luna, one of our more ingenious and, err, French community-members. It’s a set of French words with sub-titled videos as the primary mem. Let us know how you like this mem-style, and we’ll see whether we should try to make this one of the primary styles. Personally, I like the high bandwidth of actual frenchness, as well as memorability, you get from these. I’ve always been amazed by just how French French people manage to be, it’s one of the pleasures of learning the language, and Luna exudes so much Frenchness it’s kind of amazing. In any case- do please try it out and give us your feedback.

Here now, this is where you click to try it out.

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 this is the main thrust of this post, I am going to be talking about children quite a bit. I am incurably idle by nature, and detest expending unnecessary effort. So would you mind if I just created a bit of shorthand for the word “child” or “children”? How about a picture of a child? a simplified line drawing so that I can type it easily. How about this one below:

a CHILD

Right, that will be much easier. I can just fit that into a normal sentence like this: 子. So if I need to write “child” or “children” I will just write 子 instead, ok?

Sorry, where was I? Oh yes, how 子 learn. 子 are exceptionally imaginative people. Much more so than adults. They also have much shorter attention spans and much more energy to go rushing about and generally wreaking havoc.

When we teach 子 though, we often seem to teach them as though they were adults. We try to force them to sit still and concentrate for long periods and try to hammer facts into the poor little heads without taking advantage of their most powerful skill: their imagination.

This is well exemplified by the old teaching style for teaching Chinese characters. 子 just had to write out the characters over and over again, thousands and thousands of times. Nothing could be less imaginative. It was miserable and it made 子 miserable and it stopped them from enjoying the process of learning. And that is a truly detestable thing to do to a 子.

Sadly, because this practice is so widespread and has been around for so long, it has become the way that characters are thought of in China. Every Chinese adult thinks of characters and immediately pictures their childhood spend sitting inside copying characters.

I am writing “characters” quite a bit too, so let me just sum up this loathsome attitude to *characters* with a picture of a 子 sitting inside under a roof, copying character and feeling bored and miserable. Like this one:

a child under a roof, copying out CHARACTERs. Tedious.

I want you to really imagine and to empathise with the boredom that the poor 子 is feeling while copying out those characters, those 字. Isn’t it just dull? What 子 could enjoy 字 if they are taught like that?

What we want to do with Memrise is to bring the process of learning to life. Even the process of learning something so traditionally dull as learning Chinese 字. We want to change the conception of what it is *to learn*.

To contrast the kind of learning that I am talking about with the traditional ways of learning 字, it seems to make sense to just tweak the boring 字 shorthand and make it a bit more lively. Let’s put some sparks on the top of that symbol. like this:

injecting a touch of colour helps children TO LEARN

That should make it clear: it is like the way that children are made *to learn* 字, but supercharged with some flashes of lightening to make it more fun. 学 – the symbol to represent what it should be like *to learn*, and hopefully that will take the form of this more exciting, imaginative form of learning that I am going to tell you about.

Now this might be controversial, but my experience is that more men tend to be advocates of the old rote way 学 than women. In contrast, women seem more naturally drawn to a more creative way of to teach. Women, in general, seem more inclined to try to engage with children and to tap into their imagination rather than to lecture and drill them.

We are doing pretty well on this shorthand, so let’s throw in another bit: how about this to represent “woman”:

a WOMAN; the more imaginative sex?

女. Woman. Because of their generally superior ability to engage with children’s imagination (and I am not suggesting that no men are good at engaging, just that the proportions might be less) I might argue that the only 女 should be allowed to teach 子 because it is such an important task, and men are too imagination-less and boring to do it.

So in terms of methods of teaching children, I am suggesting that 子 can be helped 学 best when their teachers engage their imaginations rather than force them to learn by rote. 女 tend to be better at this than men.

In fact I might even try to argue that when a 女 and a 子 are combined, it creates that very magic that lies at the heart of this imaginative way 学. So a 女 teaching a 子 is the very epitome of goodness. It is the very best thing that can be, in my view. It means that all is well, and that the 子 are going to find is very *easy* and enjoyable 学.

Try to remember all those concepts together: *good*-ness, *well*-ness and things being *easy*. We don’t have a single word for that in English, so let’s just create one: a picture of the 女 and a 子 combined will tell the story nicely. Like this one: 好 – good, well and above all, for these purposes, *easy*.

So, to recap, I think that 子 being made 学 字 by just sitting inside and copying them out is not a good plan. It is the sort of scheme cooked up by overbearing Victorian fathers to force knowledge into helpless 子. In the modern age it is surely better to rely on the creativity of 女 to bring dry 字 to life and really get 子 to 学 in a fun way. I am summing up the easy-ness and good-ness of this kind of study in shorthand to distinguish it from the difficult and tedious teaching that happens otherwise: 好. Easy and good.

Actually, I should just clarify for a second. I am not talking about Victorian fathers, but their Asian equivalents; stern Chinese fathers.

Since we are talking a lot about China, it seems strange not to have a shorthand for that as well. So let’s make one.

I am going to take advantage of an arbitrary instance of two words sounding the same in English: China the country and China the substance that teacups are made of. So let’s make a picture of a China tea cup to remind us of China. And you will just have to remember that it means China or Chinese as in the nation, not the material, China. Shouldn’t be too tough though, should it? So, here is the picture:

a CHINA cup, to remind you of CHINA

So there it is, 汉 as a shorthand for China or Chinese.  Well, it seems that 汉 fathers in the past were keen to punish their 子 by tedious and repetitive methods 学 字. In fact, to be precise, 学 汉 字, because they are having 学 汉 字 and not any other 字, aren’t they? But in my opinion, this is ridiculous because if you use the right methods, and engage your imagination, then, as you now know,  汉字 are 好学.

Or, in a condensed form,

汉字好学!

Especially when you have got Memrise to help you!  If you enjoyed that, then why not give it a go?

Thecube features a Memrisian plant

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 say this week is that we have moved into TheCube, a trendy and friendly co-working space off Commercial Street in London. It’s a great space, the brain child of Araceli Carmargo-Kilpatrick, a New Yorker with fabulous hair and an understanding of the connections between physical and mental space.

So we’ve all moved into the Cube, and we’re having a great time as we gradually get to know the other Cubers: a magic hotchpotch of hipsters and geeks- just like us.

Katie Rae from Techstars Boston

On the Monday of this week, we had the luck to be able to welcome Katie Rae, director of Techstars Boston, to the Cube. Techstars Boston is the (amazingly valuable and beneficial) incubator program from which we recently graduated.

Katie has been in a whole crowd of startups, is something of a phenomenon and much loved by the team. She oversaw a delightful all-day brainstorm on Monday, as we carved out what our mini-goals are going to be over the next couple of months. We’ve emerged with an unusually organized plan centred on amplifying the fun of using Memrise, enriching the content and variety in the learning and getting a fully-synching iPhone app operational as soon as possible.

So after we bade Katie goodbye, we got to work on the plan.

TheCube gives onto a splendid courtyard

Spencer and Greg immediately threw themselves deep in the scheduling algorithm, brows furrowed. This is a very complex piece of the Memrise machinery, the part responsible for making sure that you are reminded and tested on what you have learned at the optimal moment.

We’ve been looking forward to updating this for a while, and some of our community have also recently been struggling with a somewhat torturous bug where a single wilting plant, no matter how much water it is given, refuses to unwilt itself. Madness. Sorry if you’ve been suffering this one. We should now have fixed that and we’ve also made some huge leaps in the sophistication of the reminders (especially for items that you have not seen in a while). Hopefully, a few tremors notwithstanding, this should greatly smooth your learning experience.

Meanwhile, Evan, our back-end guru (also the most musical and least flappable member of the team, operating like a mystic from his minute little computer in the corner) has this week rather smoothly picked us up from our previous hosting service and deposited us into the arms of Amazon’s servers. This means that we are going to run slightly faster, and be much less susceptible to clamming up than we have in the past to big bursts of traffic.

Across from Evan, Dan Fast, our games-designer and game iPhone developer, has been busily working away on the menu infrastructure for the iPhone app. It’s taking lovely shape, and we’re hoping to get something out in time for Christmas. We’re joined next week by Mathias, who’ll be boosting our power in this department to get a gorgeous app into the store as soon as possible. Train rides will never be the same!

On the content front, Coralie has been busy adding videos of suave parisian enunciating words, and putting together the centralized database of 5000 French Words which should soon allow all mems to gather on the same  fact-checked words, rather than being dispersed all over the database (because people can create their own flashcards on Memrise, the system naturally tends towards massive redundancy- hundreds of different versions of the same word)- we’re working on a long-term solution to this, but it’s a work in progress so hang on for the full functionality which will gradually develop in the coming months, and will allow you to create in seconds sets of words replete with video, audio, mems and the rest.

We work alongside some very hip people at TheCube

Over to the front end department. Kev, our designer and visuals man is on a bit of a mission to improve, enrichen, simplify and make beautiful many of the pages on the site (some of which he’s been known to describe as “like an anxiety-attack”).

He’s being egged on by Eliot, our front-end man, in devising new pages for the individual languages, which should roll our shortly. It’s fun watching the two of them work: conspiratorially, languidly and with deep attention to detail. They remind me of two elves cobbling shoes secretly in the middle of the night.

Ben, our community manager, operates from Beijing. We Skype with him all the time (easy to forget just how amazing the internet is, obliterating illusions of distance so effortlessly!) an experience that’s only improved by the noisy presence of his two young girls screaming around in the background all the time. Goodness knows how he’s so productive.

Ben’s been busily organising our content-creators around the globe to improve the German, Spanish, Italian, French, Chinese and SAT-vocab content forward another few steps. He’s endlessly on Skype and in Google hangouts talking to Berlin, or Peru or San Francisco. His army of volunteers are doing wonderful things.

For my part, I have begun to turn my mind a little to increasing the size of the Memrise community. We’re really quite a powerful and enjoyable way to learn now, and we deserve a few more members (don’t be afraid to invite your friends, now!). So hopefully in the next couple of weeks, we’ll be seeing a little bit of press and a few more people learning a language for fun. We had a couple of little appearances in the Independent this week (here and, absurdly, here) and hopefully there’ll be more to follow.

The week finished on a peak, when we had our friends Brent, Jesse and Eric from Evertue to dinner on Saturday. Evertrue were one of our fellow teams at Techstars Boston 2011, and the bond of that experience you already feel runs deep. They’re doing wonderful work in connecting non-profits to their alumni and supporters. Currently on a quick tour of the UK.

And  our week ended in a nightclub somewhere under a railway bridge in South London, dancing with Evertrue.

If you have any questions or ideas for development, do let us know in the comments section!

Till next week.

p.s. If you’re wondering why the team is so, as the Americans might say, dude-heavy, well might you. Our ambitions to be a feminist start-up are suffering from the lack of female coders applying for work with us. Women, if you already code, get in touch; if not, learn!

a sponge: as absorbant as a child's mind?

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 of youth, that language learning programs often tout the phrase “it is how children learn” as conclusive proof of the efficacy of their language learning system. But is it really that simple? And should we really be trying to emulate their method of study?

Well over the last five months I have been observing my three-year-old daughter Rommy starting to learn Chinese, and it has – in a totally un-scientific way, at which I am sure my fellow Memrisers will scoff – led me to a few conclusions.

Firstly, one often hears that children never translate between languages. Well, in that dogmatic form, it is patently untrue. Every day I get questions from Rommy on translating into Chinese. She not only asks how to say particular things in Chinese, but she can translate words when I ask her. She translates, no question.

Not only that, but I actually believe that translating was totally crucial to her beginning to learn the language. We tentatively dipped our toes in the “full immersion” pond when we first arrived in China, but found that being surrounded by such an utterly unfamiliar language only served to frighten, worry, confuse and annoy her and generally to set her firmly against the idea of ever trying to learn Chinese. Of course we could have persisted with it – and refused to converse in English with her at all, at least outside the home. This might have worked. But I don’t think it would have been any quicker. Indeed evidence from another child of the same age who started fairly full immersion at that time seems to lend tentative support to this.

Instead we started to teach her word by word. And as she learned words, she found that she loved the reaction of delight that she got in shops and from Chinese friends when she spoke them to people: when she said, “older sister,” and pointed at herself or, “younger sister” and pointed at her younger sister. The audience would clap and laugh in delight and Rommy would bask in their attention. She became enthused and excited about learning, and began to pick up words fast.

Rommy's first language partners

Secondly, Rommy studies hard. It is true, her study technique is not one that is very common amongst adults. But perhaps that is our problem. The way that she studies is by constant repetition and practice. Even when she knew only two words of Chinese, those words would crop up constantly in her play. Her dolls were calling each other 姐姐 and 妹妹 before she could even say hello in Chinese. Now entire stories are played out in a bizarre bilingual mishmash, often requiring elaborate imagined situations to fit whichever word and phrase she has happened to catch hold of and learn. (“You don’t want to wear a seat belt? You must wear a seat belt. Where is the seat belt?” I overheard her toys frantically shouting at one another in Chinese this afternoon.) And this goes on all day. She basically never takes a break. I have never seen a student put so much time in. The fact that she clearly enjoys this study is part of the cunningness of children’s learning; they do naturally exactly what we are trying to do at Memrise by making a compelling game out of their learning.

Thirdly, now that she has some ability in the language, she is more than happy to talk in Chinese even when she lacks the ability to say what she wants to express. This is the real nub of the “children don’t translate” idea, I think. For example, yesterday her younger sister was trying to give Rommy an orange. Rommy didn’t want it.

“我不要, 不给你, 我回来,” she said, roughly translating to, “I don’t want it, don’t give it to you, I am going

oranges: not what Rom was after

back.” Clearly nonsense. Then she turned to me and said with great earnestness, ” I am telling her that I don’t want it and that she should keep it because I don’t like oranges.” But she didn’t have the grammar to express that, although she actually knows all the words that would be needed. Instead she came out with a series of phrases that she *could* say, although they didn’t actually express her meaning at all.

What to learn from this? Well, it suggests to me that on a sentence level she is not translating. She has got a series of phrases that fit very roughly with the feelings that she is wanting to express, and she wheels them out. She doesn’t concern herself with the details. Should we then do the same when we learn a language? Should we jabber away talking nonsense that we know rather than trying to say things that we don’t know how to express? Well, perhaps, in a sense, we should. When I look closely at the way that I express certain ideas and thoughts in Chinese, it occurs to me that there are instances when I do so in a way that a Chinese person probably wouldn’t do. These instances almost always have their root in my trying to express ideas that I don’t know how to express, and then translating from English to try to get my point across. After I have said this kind of sentence once, I am more likely to say the same sentence again. Each time I say it I am just about understood, because even if the grammar is clumsy, they can usually pick out the gist of what I am trying to say. And each time I become surer of what I am saying. But I am wrong.

fitting the pieces together

So what if, instead, every time I felt myself unable to express myself, I stopped, made a note and then later went and found out how to say it right? Learn the language *phrase by phrase* and not try to actively avoid over-stretching myself and thereby set up incorrect habits? I don’t know. And I suspect that I would find it impossibly hard to try now; my enjoyment from speaking Chinese comes from talking with friends, discussing ideas and debating opinions. And most of these conversations will keep me constantly at the very furthest edge of my ability to express myself correctly. If I could only say things that I was confident of saying correctly, then I wouldn’t want to have any of the friends who would be so catatonically dull as to be interested in what I had to say. A bit of a Catch 22.

The important implication for us at Memrise (which, like all good conclusions, was in fact pretty much what we thought anyway) seems to be that we are going to need to build a tool that goes beyond the vocabulary learning that helps with learning of full sentences and phrases – that way, when you do speak to friends (or try out a bit of language role play by yourself at home), you can be more sure that what you’re saying is right.

Fourthly, and this is not a great surprise, children find tones really, really easy. Rommy’s tones are just spot on. Completely, consistently flawless with no effort at all. She just says them right. Sometimes I even think that she has made a mistake, but am contradicted by a Chinese friend who says that she is actually right.

the knowledge that someone is champing at our heels can drive one to ever greater heights

Which, fifthly, leads me to my final, and most personal observation. I have spent years working on and off to wrap my brain around Chinese, only to watch my three year old daughter make boundless progress in a few short months. She is learning to speak with an accuracy that I will never have. This is causing me to experience a very curious mix of profound paternal pride and subtle irritation.

For the moment the pride is winning out. But what about, in three or four months’ time, if her Chinese overtakes mine, what then?

Well one thing is for sure: I am finding myself driven to keep studying to put off that inevitable moment for as long as conceivably possible by keeping hard at my studies.

Christ, let me just say that again: I am in a genuine competition with my three year old daughter. Talk about a competitive dad! And what’s worse is that it is a competition that I am almost bound to lose. Which, as well as being shameful and pathetic, does remind me of the immense motivational power of competition.

And there is a lesson in that for Memrise, too.

Children: much derided for their theories

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 we carry around with us.

It’s also very easy to forget just how reasonable it is completely to “misunderstand” the way something works. We tend to think that everything is obvious. It isn’t. That should be obvious. Yet it isn’t.

So anyhow- here are three of my favourite early childhood memories.

Difficult to tell when the water becomes hot

Cause and effect

When running me a bath, my mother would every so often hold her hand beneath the tap, as one does, to check the temperature. Watching her, I must have misunderstood what was going on, for I came to think that she performed this hand-dipping not in order to test the heat of the water, but to actually make the water hot: that something happened with the impact of the water on her hand that magically heated it up.

When I took to running my own baths, I put my mother’s technique into practice. So I’d carefully hold my hand beneath the hot tap so as to ensure the water heated up. When the flow became so hot that I could no longer stand it, I’d hold a plastic soapdish beneath the torrent to get as much warmth into the water as possible.

Interestingly, I obviously thought my power to change the temperature of water worked in both directions: I also recall that when running water to drink, I would hold my hand underneath the cold tap to cool the liquid down before filling a glass.

Xerxes: unfairly mocked for having his soldiers punish the sea with whips and chains

I think it’s perhaps as a result of this childish superstition, that I have always been able to relate to the satisfaction that Xerxes experienced when whipping and burning the sea for what it had done to his bridges. I really remember what a wonderful sense of connection I used to have with water when I changed its temperature through my touch.

A vestige of this conception of physics lasted into my twenties, incidentally, when I finally discovered that hot water cleans plates more effectively than cold water not because the molecules have greater speed with which to knock dirt off, but instead because hot water melts the solid deposits of oil that cause food to stick to the surface of plates.

High and low

When my father first told me which were the high and the low notes on the piano, I was very confused. First of all (perhaps) I had no notion why sounds should be called high or low, what the connection was between height and pitch. I might be making that up- I can’t find the source-memory- but I very clearly recall that even after coming to terms with the idea of calling notes high or low, it took weeks before I could get my head round which was which: if it was going to be either, I felt that the “low” notes should be called ‘high’, and “high” notes called ‘low’.

It could very easily be the other way round

I can sadly no longer really recall what it was about high-pitched sounds that seemed so low, and vice versas. The opposiste connection now seems inevitable, self-evident. Very surprising to think that I had to learn that association.

I remain sympathetic to people who don’t know which end of the scale is which when asked “on a scale of one to ten how would you rate your holiday?”; equally, I know the pain of anyone who, on being told that the “meeting will be moved forward a week”, doesn’t understand whether the appointment has been repositioned sooner or later.

Trees.

Light and vision

One day, I was looking at some trees in the distance and for whatever reason my dad told me that light from the sun was bouncing off the moving leaves and travelling into my eye, and that was how I could see them shimmer. I remember being quite deeply shocked by that.

It seemed impossible. I had always intuitively thought that my eye somehow reached out to touch distant objects as I looked at them. It didn’t make any sense at all to think that light just passively fell on my eye- my experience clearly pointed in the other direction.

Curiously, after the shock had subsided, I recall comically compromising with him and adopting the belief that my eye met the light halfway between me and the trees, somewhere in mid-air. I don’t know how long I held to that compromise, but eventually of course I just knew that light goes from the world into the eye, and that vision is a passive process.

All of which is to say, in summary, that my childish imagination, on all of these counts, was at times hopelessly confused. My education in late childhood was naturally dedicated to ironing out all such absurdities in my childish guesses about the world, a trend which continued into university. For instance, over my undergrad degree in psychology I received a lengthy schooling in the mechanisms by which the human visual system passively receives and processes information.

Plot twist

How the mind worked

By chance my curiosity about all this was re-awakened when I discovered that Ptolemy believed that the eye emitted light in order to see- that sight reached out. This was the so-called extramission theory of perception, which, it turns out, was the dominant mode of understanding sight in the ancient world (amazing though it might seem).

By all accounts, it was only really after about the year 1000 that it became generally accepted that intromission (e.g.”photons stimulating the retina”) represented a better theory of how seeing works with  the work of the Iraqi philosopher and scientist Alhazen.

The first reason that this is interesting is that it hints that there’s something in the basic experience of human perception that makes sight feel active, like reaching out. It’s also cool to think that children might naturally have access to the Ancient Greek mode of world-perception.

But it actually gets much more interesting than that. For while most psychology and neuroscience largely stick to the idea of the brain as a passive receiver of information, some of the best recent theorists of perception have actually gone back, in some sense, to the view that sight is active..

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, JJ Gibson and Kevin O’Regan were some of the most subtle students of perception in the twentieth century, and all of them understand vision as an active process of “palpation” with the eye, in which movement and exploration are at the heart of seeing. Although the physics of light says it goes in, the experience and process goes just as much in the other direction.

All of which is to say a few small things:

- Memory is fun.

- Childhood memory especially.

- We shouldn’t be surprised the Ancient Greeks were so good at philosophy.

- We should think twice before teaching children what’s going on, truth isn’t always simple.

To finish, an amusing quote from JJ GIbson about the profession of psychology:

“I seem to be, to my surprise, a member of a large profession. There are some 20.000 psychologists in this country alone, nearly all of whom have become so in my adult lifetime. They are all prosperous. Most of them seem to be busily applying psychology to problems of life and personality. They seem to feel, many of them, that all we need to do is to consolidate our scientific gains. Their self-confidence astonishes me. For these gains seem to me puny, and scientific psychology seems to me ill-founded. At any time the whole psychological applecart might be upset. Let them beware!”