Memrise is a British language platform that uses spaced repetition of flashcards to increase the rate of learning.[2] It is based in London, UK.
Memrise offers user-generated content on a wide range of other subjects. The Memrise app has courses in 16 languages and its combinations, while the website for "community courses" has a great many more languages available, including minority and ancient languages.[3] As of 2018, the app had 35 million registered users.[4] Memrise has been profitable since late 2016, having a turnover of $4 million monthly.[5]
History
Memrise was founded by Ed Cooke, a Grand Master of Memory, Ben Whately and Greg Detre, a Princeton neuroscientist specializing in the science of memory and forgetting. The website launched in private beta after winning the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club 2009 TigerLaunch competition.[6]
In July 2010, Memrise was named as one of the winners of the London Mini-Seedcamp competition.[7] In November 2010, the site was named as one of the finalists for the 2010 TechCrunch Europas Start-up of the Year.[8] In March 2011, it was selected as one of the Techstars Boston startups.[9] In May 2017, Memrise was named as the winner of the "Best App" award at the second edition of the Google Play awards.[10]
On 1 October 2012, 100 users were allowed to sign up to test a non-beta version of the website called Memrise 1.0. As of May 2013, a Memrise app has been available for download on both the App Store (iOS)[11] and Google Play.[12]
As of January 2020, the app received $21.8 million of investments in a total of seven seed rounds.[13]
Memrise makes language studying a game, like its competitor Duolingo. Memrise uses spaced repetition to accelerate language acquisition.[2] Spaced repetition is an evidence-based learning technique that incorporates increasing intervals of time between subsequent review of previously learned material to exploit the psychological spacing effect.[14] The use of spaced repetition has been shown to increase the rate of memorization.[15]
Community courses
The catalogue of community courses on the Memrise website. The available languages are grouped by geographical regions. For instance, Persian courses are under "Middle Eastern", while "Asian and Pacific" encompasses languages from Mongolian to Marshallese.
Users of the platform have the ability to create personalized "courses," which consist of curated lists of words and phrases that can be accompanied by audio and pictures. These courses can be used for individual learning purposes or shared with the community by making them publicly available in the course catalogue. This feature has led to the accumulation of a diverse range of "community courses" over time, which has proven useful for studying languages with limited resources or those of niche interest, in addition to the more popular languages.
The Institute on Collaborative Language Research, founded at the University of California, organized a workshop in 2018 to teach participants to use Memrise for teaching and learning endangered languages with the aim of revitalization, considering that Memrise is "an ideal tool for language revitalization because it’s flexible, community-oriented, easy-to-use, fun, and free" and "a great way for fluent elders and more tech-savvy young people to collaborate on a revitalization project".[33] A research conducted by NEȾOLṈEW̱, a Canadian partnership working on indigenous language revitalization, praises the motivational effect of Memrise' leaderboard for learners,[34] but raises concerns about the issue of data sovereignty.[35][36] In 2023, the successes of the Memrise projects for Ume Sámi and Kristang were cited as "inspiring stories" by the UNESCO publication Digital initiatives for indigenous languages.[29]
Apart from resources for language learning, the community has produced courses for other subject matters, including geography, history, mathematics, natural science, some designed for general interests and some for test preparation.[37][38]
In July 2024, Memrise announced in a blog-post that community courses will be removed from their new app experience, moving them to a separate platform.[39]
"Mems"
An example of a "mem" for learners of English: the word "seethe" is remembered as an angry face grinding its teeth, matching its pronunciation to its meaning.An example of a "mem" for the Chinese character 面, which means "noodles".
Memrise used to have a function known as "mems," which are user-generated mnemonic devices or memory aids to help learners remember and retain new information more effectively. Mems are often designed to be humorous or even absurd to be memorable, such as using a picture of Abraham Lincoln listening to a ghetto blaster with the caption "Abe ends work in the evening" for the German word Abend, which means "evening".[40] For learning Chinese characters, mems have been created to help relate their meaning and the concept they represent.[22]
In 2012, Ed Cooke highlighted the network effect associated with learning through mems, explaining that "the more people on the site, the more there are contributing new content for the mems".[41] In 2013, Ben Whately and Ed Cooke discussed their team's approach to take advantage of the Intenet obsession with cats and "the relationship between cuteness and improved cognitive function" to create memorable mems.[42]
However, since September 2022, mems have been completely removed from the site,[43] despite overwhelmingly negative feedback from users as expressed in the official forum.[44]
Official courses
Languages supported by Memrise' official contents.Chatbot on the Memrise app for iPhone.
As of March 2024, Memrise has official materials for 23 languages for English speakers,[45] combined with a GPT-3-powered "AI Language partner" that allows learners to practice human-like conversations,[46] which Memrise believes can help learners to overcome the "confidence gap" in language acquisition.[47] Official courses do not cover the vast majority of languages covered by community courses, nor are there any non-language-related official materials.
Gamification elements
In late September 2012, the leaderboard on the website was temporarily suspended due to "extensive cheating". Specific users had been using bots and non-intensive mechanisms, such as celebrity photo memory courses, to achieve atypical scores that were not reflective of actual learning. In response, the administrators established a new leaderboard after revising the scoring loopholes.[48]
Declining support for community-created content
Over time, Memrise, initially established as a learning platform centered around crowdsourcing and community engagement, has undergone a noticeable transition by gradually phasing out significant features in favor of prioritizing their official content offerings.
The creation of "Decks" to separate community courses in 2019
In late February 2019, Memrise announced that user-created content will be moving to a different web-based platform.[49] It was announced that this new website would not have an app and that users would be unable to access their material offline.[50] On 25 February 2020, as a response to the loud criticism from users, Memrise decided to undo the split (i.e. closing Decks and merging its content back to the Memrise main site.)[51]
Second separation of community courses from the main website in 2024
However, in November 2023, Memrise announced on a forum post that it planned to "sunset" user-created courses.[52] The very forum was closed on 8th December 2023 as the company shifts its focus from supporting community-created content to developing a new "experience" based on official content.[53] In February 2024, Memrise has again separated community courses to a new website, which is not accessible through the updated mobile app, meaning that users can no longer download the courses for offline accessibility. The official notice states that the courses will remain on the new website until "at least the end of 2024".[54] The CEO Steve Toy has made posts announcing and trying to explain the abovementioned change on the Memrise subreddit, under which many users have expressed concerns, frustrations, and even anger regarding the future of community courses.[55][56] Regarding the future of community courses, Toy has clarified that he has no plan to take them down after 2024 or any date, but is "not prepared to put [his] name next to a promise about the site['s] longevity at this moment."[57]
^"5 resources to help you translate, read, and learn to speak Klingon (seriously)". geektime. Singapore. 17 March 2017. Archived from the original on 25 March 2024. Retrieved 25 March 2024. Rival app Memrise, which allows users to create their own courses and thus offers many more classes than Duolingo, has several separate mini courses on things like Klingon vocabulary, the Klingon alphabet, affixes, basic grammar, shapes, days of the week, adverbs, numbers, and even a review course for the Klingon Language Certification Program (KLCP1).
^Bramley, Ellie Violet (8 January 2015). "What happened when I tried to learn Toki Pona in 48 hours using memes". The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on 15 November 2023. Retrieved 25 March 2024. Only around 100 people in the world understand this language. This is Toki Pona, created in 2001 by Sonja Lang, a Toronto-based linguist, and I'm one of a group of 17 who recently took on a challenge to learn it in 48 hours. [...] To attempt it, we gathered in the East London warehouse that is the head office of Memrise, an online platform for language-learning.
^Malheiro, Allan (23 December 2023). "Esperanto: what future in Europe?". The New Federalist. Brussels, Belgium. Archived from the original on 25 March 2024. Retrieved 26 March 2024. It is now possible to learn Esperanto thanks to popular learning apps (where it has millions of learners) such as Duolingo, Drops, Memrise or LingQ [...]
^López, Dania (3 April 2023). "Las mejores apps para aprender y repasar latín y griego". aprendemas.com (in Spanish). Archived from the original on 26 March 2024. Retrieved 26 March 2023. Memrise cuenta con distintos cursos de latín, desde cursos de introducción al latín, pronombres demostrativos, declinaciones, gramática, entre otros. [Memrise has different Latin courses, from courses of introduction to Latin, to demonstrative pronouns, declensions, grammar, among others.]
^"基隆市本土教育網" (in Traditional Chinese). 3 April 2023. Archived from the original on 26 March 2024. Retrieved 26 March 2024.
^Young, Holly (22 December 2014). "Reindeer herders, an app and the fight to save a language". The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on 24 October 2022. Retrieved 25 March 2024. The Memrise learning app is a platform that allows users to input words or phrases and create their own language course. The Ume Sami community began to use the app without the company's knowledge and are now experimenting with using video clips to capture correct pronunciation and inject character into the online documentation of the language.
^Sellers, Caroline (8 June 2023). "Cherokee language lessons now available on two apps". Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Kfor.com. Archived from the original on 23 September 2023. Retrieved 25 March 2024. The Cherokee Nation says it partnered with an app is called "Memrise" to add 20 language lessons that can be downloaded to both iOS and Android devices.
^"Faithkeepers School - SNI". Archived from the original on 6 January 2024. Retrieved 27 March 2024. The Faithkeeper's School uses Memrise, a web and mobile app to publish language learning tools and courses broken out by topic.
^Comanche Nation Language Department (13 February 2019). "New Language Department Has Launched" (Press release). Lawton, Oklahoma. Archived from the original on 4 January 2024. Retrieved 29 March 2024. The Comanche language course has launched on the Memrise website and app and continues to be updated with new levels.
^Neely (16 December 2023). "Language update: February 2023" (Press release). Shawnee, Oklahoma. Archived from the original on 24 September 2023. Retrieved 29 March 2024. We also have two courses at memrise.com. One called "A Day in the Life" and the other "Conversational Potawatomi." They can be found after signing up on Memrise then searching for Potawatomi.
^Flyn, Cal (7 September 2018). "Apps Are Helping Keep Indigenous Languages Alive Online". How We Get To Next. Storything Ltd. Archived from the original on 4 February 2024. Retrieved 27 March 2024. Campaigners there have piggybacked on the infrastructure of the well-known Memrise app, which now offers courses in Lule, Northern, Southern, and Ume dialects.
^Katinskaia, Anisia; Yangarber, Roman. "Digital cultural heritage and revitalization of endangered Finno-Ugric languages"(PDF). Proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 3rd Conference. Archived(PDF) from the original on 26 November 2023. Retrieved 29 March 2024. Memrise is a learning platform for courses created by users, and it includes several courses in Irish and Welsh.
^Tennell, Courtney (2022). "Notable Features". In Chew, Kari A. B. (ed.). Learning in Relation: A Guide to Creating Online Indigenous Language Courses that Center Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Being(PDF). p. 37. Archived(PDF) from the original on 27 January 2024. Retrieved 29 March 2024. Memrise uses a leaderboard where users accumulate points for time spent learning and questions answered. Users with the most points appear at the top of their leaderboard and rankings are displayed. These scores can help motivate users who are competitive and users who are learning with a group or class and want to compare their score against friends.
^Melvin Calls Him Jr.; Chew, Kari A. B. (2022). "Populara Online Course Technology Providers". In Chew, Kari A. B. (ed.). Learning in Relation: A Guide to Creating Online Indigenous Language Courses that Center Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Being(PDF). pp. 5–6. Archived(PDF) from the original on 27 January 2024. Retrieved 29 March 2024. Memrise's Terms of Use raises concerns pertaining to data sovereignty, as posting content means the user grants Memrise license to the content. Further, there are no protocols in place to ensure that individual users have permission from Indigenous Nations to share language content.
^Chew, Kari A. B. (2022). "Choosing a Platform". In Chew, Kari A. B. (ed.). Learning in Relation: A Guide to Creating Online Indigenous Language Courses that Center Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Being(PDF). pp. 9–10. Archived(PDF) from the original on 27 January 2024. Retrieved 29 March 2024. Technology providers also have an interest in protecting their own proprietary technologies. Indigenous Nations and organizations should be cautious of platforms like Memrise that do not negotiate these terms and claim rights to Indigenous language content in courses.
^Piccione, A. (13 February 2015). "Memrise: una nuova frontiera dell'apprendimento delle lingue?". blastingnews.com (in Italian). Archived from the original on 21 January 2018. Retrieved 26 March 2024. Memrise propone tantissimi corsi, perlopiù sulle lingua straniere, ma anche su geografia, storia e cultura générale. [Memrise offers many courses, mostly on foreign languages, but also on geography, history and general knowledge.]
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