日本語 - Using Memrise for Japanese

Memrise is a website and app that uses Spaced Repetition to teach you stuff. Primarily it is for learning vocabulary in a language but has several other subjects too. If you are learning Japanese this is a good place to go to pick up lots of vocabulary. I have used Memrise for years to learn various things. This is my thoughts on the website and learning Japanese with Memrise.

INDEX

How does Memrise Work?

Memrise is based off of Spaced Repetition. That means it tests if you know the meaning of a Japanese word and will test you at increasing longer intervals. At first the same word will show up every few seconds but if you continue to answer correctly it will show up less and less. As you review the words you learned, Memrise will introduce more new words into the mix.

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The website has different courses that users have created that you can take. The courses can be broken up into different sections so that you can learn a few words at a time. Then, there is also a review option to review words you already know.

What I love about Memrise

There are several different things I like about Memrise. Here are some of them.

Create your Own Content

The biggest thing I love about Memrise is that you can create your own content. You can create your own courses for yourself and add the vocabulary you want to learn. This makes it very nice in order to have more control over what you learn as you progress in Japanese.

You can Add Audio

The second thing I really like about Memrise is the ability to add audio to your flashcards. This helps in language learning so you can learn to listen at the same time as read.

Images for Mnemonics

For all of the flashcards you create, you can choose or add your own images. This helps to give a visual aspect to the words you learn. That helps to give your brain an extra push in remembering things.

What I don’t like about Memrise

There are two big things that I don’t like about Memrise

Reviewing Words

There is no end. After completely a course you still have to review words.

Well, you don’t have to if you select individual words and choose not to learn them any more. But this can get tedious if you need to do it for thousands of words. The same words will often pop up more than I would like them to. I will tend then to get bogged down with reviewing which kills my motivation to want to continue.

As you learn more words progressively you have more words to review which gets extremely exhausting. Reviewing then starts to feel like a daily chore.

Course Creation Interface

The course creation feature is great, but the interface to create words is a bit of a pain. I have had buggy issues adding words, and loosing them. Also you can add groups of words at a time but depending on how you separate the words through the columns it can be annoying.

Suggestions for Learning Japanese with Memrise

So, overall the positives outweigh the negatives for me. If you want to learn on Memrise here are two suggestions

Pace yourself as you Learn

Pick a list of 100 to 1,000 words at most to learn at a time. Pick a time frame to learn these words, such as a few weeks to a month. Then plan to finish the course in about half the time you allocated for yourself. Learn a few sets of new words every day and after you finish with new words review your old words but don’t feel obligated to finish everything. You can let your reviewed words pile up a bit when it becomes too overwhelming and then when you get to the halfway point where you finish the course you can spend the other half focusing only on reviewing.

Memrise works specifically for what it is made for

Use Memrise primarily for learning frequent words and grammar structures or special categories of words. Memrise is a hard-core, repetitive process. There are things that don’t work for Memrise and things that don’t. It works as a way to help you memorize specific pieces of information. It does not help to give you in depth knowledge of a language. That should be done through things such as reading native content, or courses, books, and so on. For example, I reviewed a dictionary of grammar series which I personally use myself in order to look up specifics on grammar subjects.

Anyway, Memrise should be used for things such as the most frequent 5,000 to 9,000 Japanese words, verb or adjective conjugation, Japanese particles, or other core features of Japanese that pop up often. It can also be used for things like learning intonation, learning how to read specific Kanji, and so on. Basically, anything that you could write down as a list.

Course I Created

I have created several course on Memrise myself about Japanese compound verbs. You can check out the companion articles below. If you go to the bottom of the pages you can jump over to the Memrise courses where you can learn the vocabulary.

Or of course you can go directly to Memrise to search for any course in Japanese you like. がんばって

日本語 – Using Memrise for Japanese