'Mandarin Survival' by memrise.com

[hbuchtel]

I've only just encountered this site, which was founded in part by 'World Memory Champion' Ed Cooke, but from looking at their Mandarin Demo it looks like they have a unique method for memorizing characters.

It uses a greenhouse analogy - first you 'plant seeds', then after a certain time period you are called back to review them, helping them grow into flowing plants. As far as I can tell it is free to create an account, and they have one person on their staff who is dedicated to creating Chinese language learning content.

Looks promising!

[roddy]

Looks very flash, the animations for the demo characters are clever - wonder how many of those they've got. Does pronunciation come in at any point?

[roddy]

Hang on, how is 冂 glass jar?

[imron]

They have a peculiar selection of characters to learn in the demo, I had 人， 子 and 冂!

I don't think the method is unique. It looks just like a regular SRS wrapped up in some slightly different terminology.

Hang on, how is 冂 glass jar?

And why is it the third character you learn?

[roddy]

I assumed it was going to be a component in stuff later, but . . .Looks like they've got lots of user uploaded wordlists, including the usual textbook suspects.

Say what? There are pronunciation files. Try these.

[hbuchtel]

I've been going through the 'Mandarin Comprehensive' word list (up to 18 seeds now - woo hoo! ), and several of them are radicals that never appear alone.

Here is more about their method: http://www.memrise.com/about/science/

The part I haven't seen before is the emphasis on 'encoding' with images, which is an important part of the Memory Palace method of memorization.

BTW, the Ed Cooke is the same one mentioned in this NYTimes article from a few months ago "Secrets of a Mind-Gamer".

[BWW]

Hi, I'm one of the Memrise team, so I hope you don't mind if I drop in to answer a few of these questions:

- you are completely right that "glass jar" is an odd choice for the first three characters. I am a bit embarrassed about that actually. Totally my fault. It is in fact an artefact of when the demo was five characters long. The idea was to teach 人, 冂 and then 肉, as a combination character which would also be a useful one for people to know when they go to a chinese restaurant, for example. But that logic is now clearly pointless, because you don't get to "meat" in the demo. We are in the process of building up a much more structured course to teach in levels corresponding to the HSK levels. We have been focusing on that and so have not kept the demo up to date. I have now shifted it around a bit - thank you for brining it to my attention and apologies for messing that up!

We have got about 1000 animations on the site at the moment, but more are being added all the time.

I think that Memrise is markedly different to other SRS sites for a couple of reasons: firstly, the use of mnemonics is crucial. Mems give your brain something to grip onto the first time that it learns a new word or character. Having an engaging video or picture of even just an amusing sentence or two makes this process less painful and gives you a much higher chance of remembering the character the second time you see it. Once you have practiced a bit, the men will fade in importance as the memory of the character strengthens.

Secondly, there is a central database to which everyone can contribute. So when you create a wordlist, you can use benefit from audio sample, mnemonics, videos and grammatical information that other users have added. You just make a list of the characters that you want to learn, and all the other information is automatically added. This does of course create a need for great vigilance when vetting the content and making sure that user generated content is up to standard, but the benefit that everyone gets from the pooled content is huge. We are working hard to make the central database of words, definitions etc much larger and fully checked. This should be completed over the coming few weeks. We are also going to add forums to allow users to discuss and, where necessary and where there is consensus, change the primary meaning of a character.

One example of when this may be useful is the example that you quote above - "glass jar", which has been the subject of some controversy. I *think* that it was originally added as the meaning of the Kanji as given by Heisig in "remembering the kanji". This is clearly not the best basis, but the thinking for not changing it before has been that it is not a character that is used on its own, and that a "glass jar" is a good image to use when learning combination characters down the line, so it doesn't really matter if the meaning is quite an obscure or unusual one. But should enough users feel that this should be changed, then we can certainly alter it.

Thirdly, the game-play element. At the moment the garden analogy on the is in its infancy, but the game dynamics are already helping to keep people coming back and learning more and more often on Memrise than on other similar sites. I believe that as we bring in all the improvements that are currently in the pipeline, we will see these benefits grow even more. Switching the motivation for learning from purely your desire to learn the language to something more trivial and seemingly amusing - such as making your flowers grow, has a surprisingly profound effect on people.

Finally, yes, we do teach pronunciation. We first test you on the meanings of characters, and then once you have got the hang of that we start to focus on the pronunciation. This avoids asking you to learn too much at any one moment which can become overwhelming and dis-incentivizing.

Does that all make sense? Please do get in touch with any questions or suggestions. Memrise is a wiki and we do rely on user feedback to keep improving the site. I hugely appreciate the time that you guys have taken to look through it and would welcome further discussion.

Best wishes

Ben

[roddy]

But should enough users feel that this should be changed, then we can certainly alter it.

At the very least it should be 'upside-down glass jar', no?

Thanks for coming along.

[jbradfor]

I haven't looked at the site yet, but I really like the idea. I've always thought it would be very advantageous for CSL students to be taught characters in a more "structured" manner -- what is fine for native learners is not always optimal for SLA! I'm glad to see more sites like this.

[2010laohu]

I have used that site (memrise) and it's not bad. But definitely takes a bit of adjusting to.