Memrise facts for kids
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Type of site
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Privately held company |
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| Available in | Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese |
| Founded | 2010 |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Founder(s) | Greg Detre Ed Cooke Ben Whately |
| CEO | Steve Toy |
| Website | memrise.com (community courses) |
| Registration | Yes |
| Launched | September 2010 |
| Current status | Active |
Memrise is a cool online platform from the UK that helps you learn new languages. It uses a special way of showing you flashcards, called spaced repetition, to make learning faster and easier. Memrise is based in London, UK.
Besides languages, Memrise also has lots of content created by its users on many other topics. The Memrise app offers courses in 16 languages. But if you check their website for "community courses," you'll find even more languages, including some less common or very old ones. By 2018, over 35 million people had signed up to use Memrise. The company has been making a profit since late 2016.
Contents
History of Memrise
Memrise was started by three smart people: Ed Cooke, who is a Grand Master of Memory; Ben Whately; and Greg Detre, a brain scientist from Princeton. They launched the website in a special test version after winning a competition at Princeton University in 2009.
In 2010, Memrise won a competition in London and was also a finalist for a "Start-up of the Year" award. In 2011, it was chosen as one of the promising new companies by Techstars Boston. Later, in May 2017, Memrise won the "Best App" award at the Google Play awards.
A full version of the website, called Memrise 1.0, was released for testing by 100 users in October 2012. By May 2013, you could download the Memrise app on both the App Store (iOS) for iPhones and Google Play for Android phones. By January 2020, Memrise had received over $21 million in investments to help it grow.
How Memrise Helps You Learn
Spaced Repetition Learning
Memrise makes learning languages feel like a game, similar to other apps like Duolingo. It uses a method called spaced repetition to help you learn languages faster. Imagine you have flashcards: spaced repetition means the app shows you words you're learning at just the right time. If you know a word well, it waits longer to show it again. If you're struggling, it shows it more often. This smart way of learning helps your brain remember things better over time.
Community-Made Courses
One cool thing about Memrise is that anyone can create their own "courses." These courses are like special lists of words and phrases. You can add sounds and pictures to them. You can use these courses just for yourself, or you can share them with everyone on Memrise. This means there are tons of "community courses" available. They are super helpful for learning languages that might not have many learning materials, especially less common or very old languages.
By 2012, just two years after it started, Memrise already had courses for about 100 languages, from Catalan to Haitian Creole. People have even made courses for invented languages like Klingon (from Star Trek), Toki Pona, and Esperanto. You can also find courses for Classical languages, such as Latin and Ancient Greek.
In Taiwan, the government in Keelung City has used Memrise to help teach local languages like Amis and Taiwanese Hakka. A journalist named Joshua Foer even used community courses to learn Lingala, a language spoken in Africa, to talk with people there.
Memrise is also used to help bring back endangered languages. For example, people are using it to help save Ume Sámi, a language spoken by fewer than 50 people in Sweden. In the United States, Native American nations have created courses to help teach their heritage languages, like Cherokee and Choctaw. In Singapore, a project called Kodrah Kristang uses Memrise to help save the Kristang language. This project has inspired others to start similar efforts for languages like the Aleut language in Alaska. You can find courses for many other endangered languages, including Hawaiian, Yiddish, and Irish.
In 2018, a workshop was held at the University of California to teach people how to use Memrise for teaching and learning endangered languages. They believe Memrise is great for this because it's flexible, community-focused, easy to use, fun, and free. It's a good way for older fluent speakers and younger tech-savvy people to work together. In 2023, the success stories of Memrise projects for Ume Sámi and Kristang were even mentioned by UNESCO as inspiring examples for digital language efforts.
Besides languages, the Memrise community has also made courses for other school subjects like geography, history, math, and science. Some are just for fun, and some help you get ready for tests.
"Mems" for Memory
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Memrise used to have a cool feature called "mems." These were like little memory tricks or pictures that users created to help remember new words or facts. Mems were often funny or silly to make them easy to recall. For example, to remember the German word "Abend" (meaning "evening"), you might see a picture of Abraham Lincoln listening to music with the caption "Abe ends work in the evening." For Chinese characters, mems helped connect the character's look to its meaning.
In 2012, Ed Cooke explained that the more people used Memrise, the more new and helpful mems would be created. In 2013, the team even talked about using cute cat pictures in mems because they found that cuteness could help people remember things better!
However, since September 2022, the "mems" feature has been completely removed from the site. Many users were very unhappy about this, and they shared their negative feedback on the official Memrise forums.
Official Memrise Courses
As of March 2024, Memrise offers official learning materials for 23 languages for people who speak English. They also have an "AI Language partner" that uses advanced technology (like GPT-3) to let you practice talking in a way that feels like a real conversation. Memrise believes this can help learners feel more confident when speaking a new language. These official courses don't cover as many languages as the community courses, and they don't have non-language subjects.
Fun Game Elements
In late September 2012, the leaderboard on the Memrise website was temporarily stopped. This happened because some users were cheating by using special computer programs or easy courses to get really high scores that didn't show real learning. To fix this, the people in charge of Memrise created a new leaderboard after making changes to prevent cheating.
See also
In Spanish: Memrise para niños
- Anki
- Computer-assisted language learning
- Duolingo
- Language education
- List of flashcard software
- List of language self-study programs
- Rosetta Stone
