Memrise Review: A Helpful Tool For Beginners
Chad Emery
Published on December 27, 2022
Great for beginners!
Memrise is a popular language learning app that uses flashcards to help you learn new words and phrases quickly. It uses a lot of unique features to enhance the flashcards and improve your speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills. Most of its content is free, including a good portion of the official Memrise courses. It’s a great tool for beginners, but may not be very helpful for intermediate and advanced language learners.
PROS
- A lot of free content
- Courses available for most languages
- You can practice with friends
CONS
- Features are different on the web, iOS, and Android version
- Monthly subscription price is higher than others
- Some features aren't available for all courses
Languages Available on Memrise:
Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Japanese (no script), Korean, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Mexico), Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Yoruba
Memrise Overview
Memrise is a flashcard app that uses spaced repetition to help you remember words and phrases more effectively. But, unlike other flashcard apps, Memrise uses videos to expose you to different accents and pronunciations. Memrise has also introduced new features with its last update, including a Membot (an AI chatbot) you can talk or write to practice interacting in different scenarios.
Overall, it’s effective if you’re just starting to learn a new language but may not be helpful for advanced learners. While Memrise is good for learning vocabulary, it doesn’t teach much else. It’s a good idea to use a more comprehensive app in addition to Memrise.
Memrise is one of the most popular language learning apps. It’s mainly a flashcard app, and it stands out from its competitors because of the science behind it. The creators of Memrise are a Princeton-educated neuroscientist and an Oxford-educated Grand Master of Memory. I think it’s safe to say they know how the brain works.
While the focus of Memrise is vocabulary, you can also learn basic grammar in some of the content. These lessons aren’t very extensive though. They’re a decent place to start learning about difficult topics in your target language, but they won’t get you very far. For this reason, it’s possible to learn languages with Memrise, but only at a beginner level.