Dubai has always been a melting pot of cultures, languages and ethnicities. Having been raised in Dubai, I was subjected to a vast plethora of different people from all walks of life as well as the languages they spoke in. For me, growing up in Dubai resulted in being bombarded with different accents. It also meant that though I could never fluently speak in the different languages spoken by the masses here, that I could understand enough to get me to a nearby restroom. Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Sinhala, Malayalam, Tagalog, Afrikaans, French, German and of course English.
Being a scrub, I’m monolingual, that is to say I can only continue a conversation for more than ten seconds if it’s in English. Sure I know enough Hindi to order some food at Gazebo’s and my passable Urdu does get me my butter naan at Karachi Darbar. I’m ashamed that despite being in Dubai my whole life, the only Arabic sentence I can retain in the confines of my head is الأبواب تغلق (Al abwab Toghlaq). The doors are closing. Knowing that one sentence has saved me from many a decapitation and dismemberment.
And so enters the app of the week: Memrise, an app where you can learn languages for free or as it calls itself: The ultimate memorisation tool for learning languages.
Memrise works by the use of memory-enhancing techniques confirmed by extensive scientific research. In collaboration with University College London, Memrise runs The Memrise Prize – an annual $10k cognitive science competition to discover the most efficient methodology for learning vocabulary. The most effective methodologies from the competition are fed back into learning games on Memrise.
The end result is a beautiful little app with over 300,000 different courses. You can even learn Dothraki, Klingon and Na’vi if the urge to roam across Essos on a horse, the stars with Captain Kirk or if swinging through the trees yelling “Jake Suuuuuuly” ever hits you.
Using it requires you to create a new account or to sign in using your Facebook or Google Plus account. After creating an account and selecting English as my native language, I decided to brush up on my non existent Arabic language skills by choosing the “Essential Arabic (all you need to get by)” course. Six minutes into the course and I was delighted to find out that I had “planted three memories”, I had in essence, memorised the Arabic words for “yes”, “no” and “the”. While perhaps not being a great milestone to the achieved linguist, those three planted memories garnered me a hundred points apiece, putting me on track for my daily goal of 1,500 points. Feeling rather proud of myself, I decided to up the ante and raise my daily goal to 3,000 points. The next hour was a blur as I tantalisingly grew memory after memory of Arabic words, slowly polishing my weathered linguistic skills. Once Memrise detects you’ve firmly implanted a word into your memory, it moves onto the next word in the course and the cycle repeats. Every now and then it will test you on words you’ve already memorised, to ensure that there are no lapses in your memory and to sharpen your language skills even more.
Though Memrise promotes itself as an app for learning languages, it’s not limited to that. No, it in fact has over 300,000 courses to choose from, ranging from geography to history to pop culture making it an essential app to anyone who has thirst for knowledge that can never seem to be sated. Though I started using this app by first joining the “Essential Arabic (all you need to get by)” course, I was soon subscribed to courses in topics such as “The Natural World” and “History & Geography”. There’s even an “Intro to Java (Language Basics)” course with nearly 6000 learners subscribed to it.
The premium version of Memrise let’s you use courses offline, ensuring you have a fun way to kill time when stuck with no internet.
Barely an hour into my two hour delving of the app leaves me with no doubt that this is an app you would want on your smartphone to sharpen your memory and general knowledge, not to mention the fact that it does a better job of teaching me Arabic than four teachers in school did.
You can download Memrise from the Google Playstore here and from the Apple Appstore here.
Do you have Memrise? What do you think of it’s teaching effectiveness? Do you know of more apps like Memrise? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
