

Memory grand master Ed Cooke gets $1M to teach his tricks at new startup - gregdetre
http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/16/memory-grand-master-ed-cooke-gets-1m-to-teach-his-tricks-at-new-startup-memrise/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

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bproper
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?

Brining gaming and crowd-sourcing into memory training is interesting, since
this kind of learning has traditionally been a very isolated practice.

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gregdetre
This is a great question.

In our experience, we've found that creating your own mnemonic is usually the
best way to really deeply encode a new memory.

But a great mem from someone else works almost as well. And it's a lot easier
to breeze along, giggling at other people's imagery, occasionally coming up
with something new of your own.

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da5e
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.

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bproper
When did they switch to a new style?

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gregdetre
We added the garden narrative in Spring 2011. The goal was to wrap our
internal model of the state of your memories in a visual metaphor to make it
clearer and more vivid for you as a learner.

We've improved the underlying algorithms a lot since then. Do let us know if
you still find the garden confusing.

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zander1229
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 :)

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gregdetre
Thanks for the positivity. We have an iPhone app coming out in the next 10
days. Definitely let us know what you think of it if you try it.

Sentence building is definitely on our radar, but it's a rich and thorny
domain, and we want to take our time coming up with something good.

P.S. Android is going to take a little longer.

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Jach
> 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.

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?

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gregdetre
Broadly, our scheduling algorithms are based on the same ideas of spaced
repetition that inspired Anki, SuperMemo and lots of others, though the devil
is often in the details.

[http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...](http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all)

However, neither Anki nor SuperMemo enrich and speed up your learning with
mems (crowd-sourced mnemonics), which provide a huge and well-documented boost
to your learning rate and retention.

Perhaps most of all though, we've worked really hard to make Memrise a really
happy learning experience. It's harder to put numbers on that, but hopefully
you can feel it when you try it!

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daralthus
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.

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adamalix
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!

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syaz1
Heh I thought it's about computer memory.

