The Japanese deck, on the other hand, was a genuinely unpleasant experience. But it was fun, and I liked the card formats, and I could see that this would probably help improve my non-existent output skills. It wasn't as much fun as doing a stack of subs2srs reviews (because I find those seriously addictive). Personally, I enjoyed the Spanish deck, where I already had decent passive knowledge. As with any other technique at the A1 and A2 levels, it's probably a matter of taste.If you like courses with "passive" and "active" waves, you may find Memrise's insistence on early active output frustrating, especially if you're working with a completely unfamiliar language.But most important, Memrise handles the early learning stages very differently from Anki, giving you more opportunities to recall the information you're learning in different ways. Memrise has some pretty nice card formats, and it comes with pre-made mnemonics, if you're into that sort of thing. If you like L1L2 translation cards with individual words and short phrases, you might prefer Memrise over Anki.And I'm pretty sure that even if I do manage to answer these questions tomorrow, they're going to turn into leeches, because I can't produce such long Japanese words so early in the process.Īfter having tried two languages, here are my thoughts: Of course, not everybody likes or wants a silent period, and so not everybody will necessarily object to producing longer output on day 1.Īnyway, here's the carnage of my first day of Japanese:Īs you can see, I didn't get very many cards to a basic maturity level. But this is why I enjoy Assimil's "Passive Wave" so much: by the time Assimil asked me to produce French, French was already starting to seem straightforward and logical. And once that's done, I'm happy to work on producing those phrases on command. I'd prefer to solidify my "passive" skills until I can just look at things and automatically understand them. I really enjoy having a month-long silent period, if at all possible. There's probably a delete button somewhere. If I can't delete cards, I can't remove leeches, and I can't prioritize my learning goals. And what's worse, I don't see any button that allows me to say, "I hate this card, it's badly designed, and I never wish to see it again." You'll pry my Delete card button out of my cold dead fingers, Memrise. I have no desire to try to type this card from memory this early in the game. Here's a sample of phrases from the first lesson. Since I'm learning Spanish, I tried Memrise's A1 Spanish deck. But I can't tell you how any Memrise-specific features will work out in practice.Īll Memrise decks were taken from the top of the recommended courses list. So my "first day" impressions are going to be pretty limited-I can only point out shiny new things, and try to draw connections to systems I know better. Take these with a grain of salt: A lot of SRS memory effects don't show up until about 20 or 30 days in, and you need to let a deck age a good six months before you're got a handle on how many terminally obnoxious "leech" cards you're going to fail endlessly without learning. I just tried Memrise for the first time during lunch today. I have a pet hypothesis that audio cards are more powerful you might think. So that will give you a good idea of the lens through which I'm interpreting Memrise.Īdditionally, at a more abstract level, I prefer aggressive deletion, painlessly easy cards, custom decks, and native content. Among other things, I've written about how to use Anki to learn Middle Egyptian, attempted to duplicate Sprachprofi's impressive results with subs2srs (conclusion: she's better at learning languages than I am!), and built tools to generate cards. I've used it for sentence cards, for cloze cards, for audio cards, and for hieroglyph cards. As I've mentioned before, I have something like 35,000+ Anki reps across three languages. First, let me justify the bit about being a "long-time Anki user", so you know where I'm coming from.
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