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Memrise
A mnemonic device shows the transition between a picture depicting strength and the Mandarin character for strength. Such devices help us remember words, according to the founders of Memrise, a website that teaches you words of a foreign language.
For adults, learning a new language is often a long, frustrating process that inevitably ends up in failure. A memory expert and a neuroscientist hope to change that with a new online software package designed to make learning the vocabulary of a foreign language fast, fun and rewarding.
"Really good successful learning needs to be vivid, imaginative and creative. It needs to be active. And if you can make it a bit social, that's great," Greg Detre, a neuroscientist and co-founder of Memrise, the online destination to learn foreign words quickly, told me today.
The website is built on the metaphor that our minds are gardens where memories are either flourishing or wilting. When users learn a new word, they get a seed that they tend and grow into a healthy plant by correctly passing well-timed tests that force the users to recall the word.
To help users learn the word, the site offers up mnemonic devices. When learning the word man in Mandarin, for example, Memrise transforms the character for man into a cartoon of a man. Users are also encouraged to come up with their own devices. These devices, the founders say, make the words stick in your mind and enriches the recall experience.
To help plant and tend the memory, the site uses an algorithm that tests you on the word when the memory of it is most likely fading your mind.
"It is trying to teach you how your memories work," Detre explained. "If you don't nurture them on a scientific schedule, they die just like flowers. But we are also at the same time trying to make your learning visible and social and useful."
The fun part hinges on choreography behind the scenes that props the tests at the time and a level of difficulty where you have to work a bit to get the answer, but that you will likely get it right. In other words, the tests make you feel like a genius, which feels good, so you keep on learning. If the tests were too hard or too easy, you might quit, Detre noted.
The site also lets you play along with friends and strangers. Comparing your garden with others fires up the competitive spirit, for example. Users can also share mnemonic devices and encourage each other to learn new words, fostering a sense of community.
Memrise bills itself as teacher of words in a foreign language. "That's only a small part of learning a language," Luis Von Alm, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and co-creator of another online learning website, Duolingo, told Technology Review.
Detre agrees that Memrise alone will not teach you a new language, but, in his opinion, is the "best way to learn the words of a new language." And learning vocabulary, he added, is "the right way for the brain to kick itself into learning a new language."
More on language and learning:
- A baby's babble leads to language
- English won't dominate as world language
- Robots invent their own spoken language
- What language do we use with E.T.?
Tip o' the Log to Technology Review's Kristina Bjoran
John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).
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Worth noting: Not every person can learn this way, not every person has a visual imagination. I have a strong imagination, an excellent memory, and a job that relies heavily on my creativity but I am nearly unable to picture even the simplest thing in my mind. My brain works on words and sounds so these kinds of visual devices simply don't work for me. Of course, there's lots of people on the other end of the spectrum who are very visual and it will work wonderfully for them, just saying that you can't try to drop everyone into one basket and teach them all the same way.
You are correct Mozee. I, myself, have a reading disability that makes reading and comprehending words very difficult. As a child I went through two summers of remedial reading and comprehension courses but they helped very little. Learning in the traditional way does not work for me. I am a visual/auditory learner. Show me, tell me, I've got it. I'm very intuitive which is how I get by in the world. But hand me an instruction manual and I'm screwed.
This new method of learning would work very well for me I think.
Have a good day
There is also a difference between learning words and properly forming a sentence/ conjugation/ grammar. Learning words in another language is the easiest part when learning a language.
I've used mnemonic tricks like that to pick up words in literally a dozen languages. There are so many similarities based on the building blocks of language. Many times, if you know a word in one language, it's easier to remember words in others: "mao" is cat in Mandarin AND Egyptian; "ma" is a question particle in Chinese, and means "what?" in Hebrew; there are thousands of similarities like that -- enough that I've been learning that way constantly for decades. That all said, you have to have the propensity to learn language to really take advantage of it -- it kinda converts the art of language into the science of math.
That pictogram transition image makes absolutely no sense.
Bert,
Wow, really? I got it immediately and I'll bet I remember it for the rest of my life. Just like the pictogram for the word "marriage" in Chinese is the symbol for "happiness" doubled, side by side so for me the literal translation of marriage (via the Chinese symbol) is "double happy".
Like I said above, this system could help someone like me learn a very difficult written language like Chinese or Japanese.
Have a great day.
Bert, yes it does. I don't speak anything but English but that image related instantly - I've seen the Chinese symbol and it made sense. Very interesting.
No there are already too many voices in there.
First of all, learning to speak, read and write the chinese language is almost near imposible for any Americans. The only way to learn it, is by being very young and living in Asia. Learning the chinese laguage will be the hardest thing to accomplished. English, French, Spanish and Italian all are very easy to to lean because it all starts with the alphebets. We were train to learn each sound of the alphebet and put words together then in a sentence. It's alot easier for the chinese to learn English than for us to learn chinese. Words of advice.....don't do it, learn Spanish.
sorry folks...newsvine screw up posting my comments three straight time.
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Having studied Mandarin for some years, I can think of several pitfalls with this method (to wolfpack2000: it is absolutely false that learning to read and write Chinese is "nearly impossible" for any "Americans;" I can't imagine what made you draw such a conclusion).
First, this method has actually been around for a very long time, and is not new. It works to a limited extent, but, the sheer number of characters needed in order to approach basic literacy, combined with the complexity and repeated components of many of them, significantly limits its usefulness. It can be used for simpler characters, such as radicals (although many of them do not carry the same meaning as components of more complex characters as they do when and if they can also stand alone), and simple logographs.
Second, nearly every character has multiple meanings in context, so using this method to visualize one meaning can cause all sorts of problems.
Third, everyone who uses this method for some characters (and that means just about all of us who have learned Mandarin as a second or third language) rapidly finds that recognizing a meaning of a character does not mean you have learned a "word." You also have to attach the pronunciation to it, and learn the pinyin as all native Chinese speakers do; otherwise, the character is useless.
Fourth, as Memrise itself points out, this method will help you memorize some meanings of some characters in isolation, but as anyone who has studied other languages learns, literal definitions of words in isolation almost always do not result in comprehension, but rather gibberish, when applied to actual phrases. This is why literal computer translation programs generate (occasionally hilarious) nonsense. Take any statement in your native language, and pick it apart word-by-word with all the various meanings each word can carry, and you will see. Words are heavily context-dependent, and phrases carry meanings that are not the sums of the component words.