Boost Language Learning with Memrise Video Content

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a Memrise video might be worth a million.

The language learning industry has come a long way in the past decade. The resources available have changed considerably since the days of rote recitation and that week your mom’s high school French class spent a week in Paris in the 70s, and these changes have definitely been for the better. Today it’s all about real communication, technology and finding new and improved ways to connect people through digital media.

One of the ways that we’ve done this is through the enhanced incorporation of visual content.

I’ve been a bit of a Memrise evangelist for several years and in that time I have used it to study Russian, French, Spanish, German, Kyrgyz, Esperanto, and recently a bit of Japanese.

One of Memrise’s core methods has always been the program’s use of “mems,” many of which come in the form of images that can be associated with words or phrases.

But Memrise has taken that one step further.

Making something stick in a learner’s mind requires a strong adhesive and if pictures are duct tape, Memrise’s video mems, which appear in their official courses for Japanese, Korean and Russian (for now), are superglue.

Japanese is hard, and I needed every advantage I could get with this one. Because the words and characters are so unfamiliar to my Eurocentric language experiences, I had very little to go on.

Any time you tackle a language that uses a writing system drastically unlike your own – as all three of these languages are with to my native English – the learning curve is steeper. This is often the point at which learners – especially learners of Japanese with its three different writing systems – throw their hands up in the air and ragequit.

 

( ؕؔʘ̥̥̥̥ ه ؔؕʘ̥̥̥̥ )?

 

So, part of the trick is to prevent this from happening, and these Memrise video mems helped me considerably.

 

Quirky Japanese superglue

Memrise’s video content appears in the form of short videos, perhaps a second or two long, featuring native speakers of Japanese holding up big cards, making funny faces, invading each others’ videos, and generally having a good time. This “quirky” behavior can be seen whenever a new word or phrase is introduced and serves as an effective way to make sure your newfound vocab doesn’t fly in one ear just to leak out the other.

Video content has been a part of other official Memrise courses for a while now, but these represent a new, more engaging style and they now appear on all words.

As the course progressed, I found that I was looking forward to the next video. Will it be that one woman with the flash card? Will it be the man with the bizarrely wide smile? Who knows! It could be anything!

The shorts include high quality sound as well, which, unlike some videos, sounds a bit more natural.

 

But let’s not get carried away just yet

Video content such as this did clearly help me retain words and phrases, as it should, and I think that it will help most learners.

However, in the era of fake news, we need to be cautious about where exactly we’re getting our figures and percentages before making sweeping claims about different forms of learning.

A lot of the hard evidence for video’s impact on memory isn’t, well, hard.

Dale’s Cone is that famous pyramidal poster you’ve no doubt seen online somewhere that says things like “users retain 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they seem 90% of what they teach”, etc, etc. It was conjured up by a man named named Edgar Dale way back in 1946. Dale also wrote a doctoral thesis entitled “Factual Basis for Curriculum Revision in Arithmetic with Special Reference to Children’s Understanding of Business Terms.”

Sounds exciting.

However, this cone thing is essentially entirely wrong. If you run a Google search for Dale’s Cone, way more than half of what you’ll find will be partially or completely misleading, as this lengthy article debunking it (with legit research) will actually explain.

And not all studies cast so much doubt. This one states that while there is some mythology surrounding video’s ability to affect memory, it does still provide some serious benefits.

But back to the point – Memrise video content did certainly help me to be more engaged and more likely to come back, which is definitely the most important thing.

 

Conclusion

For many, many years, language products have often relied on classic word/picture matching. You see the word airplane and connect it to its corresponding image. Simple.

I’ve always kinda hated this method, most of the time.

Making those pictures move was the obvious next step. It’s much more eye-catching, it’s more entertaining, and it makes the whole process just feel a little bit more real and a little bit less repetitive.

Once again, these videos are available on several of Memrise’s official courses, such as Japanese, Korean and Russian. These can be accessed both on the mobile app as well as the desktop versions, and if you’re studying one of these languages they are well worth taking a look!