We learn faster when learning is fun. Memrise excels here. The app has just the right feedback sounds (which are pleasant, not annoying) and variety of short activities. A few days' trial convinced me to sign up for a year subscription, quite reasonable at $40. Even after I discovered that Memrise was not successfully locking anything into my memory, I still found that when I started "playing" Memrise, it was hard to stop!
Memrise is easy to use - and it's easy to fit into your life, with learning segments that take just a couple minutes. The app is snappy and reliable in both iOS and Android versions. Why then does Memrise fail as a Mandarin learning tool?
Three main reasons.
First, the sequence in which they introduce words and phrases takes you quickly into relatively obscure phrases, before you've mastered the basic building blocks. You wind up just trying to "parrot" and "cram" the phrases into your memory.
Second, it is not a true SRS (spaced repetition system) flashcard tool, although it uses some SRS methodology. Rather than remembering words from scratch, most of the time you simply pick the correct word from one of 4 or 6 choices. Often you can easily pick out the correct answer because the other options aren't even close. But this causes Memrise's algorithms to think you "know" the word, when in fact you don't.
Third, with Memrise, you never have to say anything aloud from memory (which is a key aspect of language learning). The closest is in their pronunciation drills: you hear the word (as many times as needed), and then Memrise listens to your pronunciation and gives you a pass/fail for the word. This is simply parroting, not remembering. And, Memrise is annoyingly picky about pronunciation. Many times, no matter how hard I tried, I could not get it to accept my pronunciation.
Thus, despite Memrise's fancy app, I cannot recommend it for any student. Want to know what tools I do recommend?
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