These mnemonics techniques have been used since the ancient Greeks and Romans. But does it train your brain in the same way if the images and storylines are being given to you with pre-packaged GIFS?<p>Brining gaming and crowd-sourcing into memory training is interesting, since this kind of learning has traditionally been a very isolated practice.
I used to use memrise, and enjoyed it, especially the gamification and the ability to put your own mnemonics in as well as see what images others used. But when they changed to a garden metaphor I lost track of what their algorithm was doing and went back to more traditional flashcardexchange.com mostly. I'll take another look though.
I really enjoyed memrise when I used it but I wish it had a couple more features for languages, like sentence building with the words youve learned. Also, I would've used it everyday if there was a mobile app. Its been awhile since i have played with it though. Overall, a great tool and I've recommended it to fair number of people :)
> Cooke says that returning to a memory is crucial, and the Memrise has algorithms that learn when a student needs a friendly reminder, via an email say, to recall a certain lesson.<p>Are these algorithms any different than the ones used by Anki et al? I'd be surprised if they were. The novel thing for the isolated case (gamification is interesting but I'm not sure how general that is for helping) seems to be thickly layering on the mnemonic tricks instead of relying on pure flash-card memorization of information, is this correct?
Great ideas, would like to highlight the community generated mems/memes feature!
Could use a canv.as like meme maker on the site, it could shoot up mem/meme generation to the stars.
These guys are badasses and the product works great. Learned ~100 Mandarin characters with very little effort and the product gets iterated on very quickly (their support team really listens to customer feedback). Congrats on the funding!