Hello everyone, my name is Kate, and I'm an online English teacher. In this short video I'm going to talk about a great online tool to increase your English vocabulary - Memrise. I will cover three main topics. First of all, what is memrise and how to use it. Number two, why use memrise? And number three, five tips to make the most out of Memrise. So, the first point, what is Memrise and how does it work? Well, Memrise is a website and an app designed to help you memorise just about anything. fr
om languages and literature to natural sciences to arts and even trivia. And you probably have guessed that learning languages, especially English, is one of the most popular activities on Memrise. The idea behind Memrise is quite simple really. You sign up. Well, I've already signed up, so I'm just going to log in with Facebook. And then you go to the courses tab. let's choose English You can see for English there are a lot of courses For each course you can see the title, you can see who creat
ed the course and the number of subscribers and approximately how many hours it's going to take you to do the course I'll go to some of my courses I'm doing at the moment, for example 5,000 most common French words
So if I click "learn", I'm going to show you some of the activities that you normally do.
First you hear and see the definitions for the words. You also need to choose
the correct options. Notice you have a time limit here. Every time you answer
correctly you're growing a plant and wh
en the plant is big enough then maybe
your word has been learned. Sometimes you have to type in the answer that's the idea for
learning. So when your plant is big enough I said that the word has been
learned but that's not it. So you see for example for this course I have five
hundred and ninety seven words that need to be reviewed. So Memrise will actually
track the words that you haven't revised in a while and will ask you to review
them regularly. So in a review it's similar activity, it's ju
st the words
that you have already learned. You can also do a speed review option, which
basically means you need to give answers now you can see also that in the courses
tab you can choose the language that you speak. For beginners or lower level
students I'd recommend choosing your native language. You see there are
quite a lot, but you have to understand also that there are more courses for
more popular languages, for example there are more English courses for Spanish
learners than there are
English courses for say Macedonian
learners. If you are intermediate or above, I would recommend choosing English here because this would give you access to more English-English courses. So why use Memrise? Well there are three reasons you should consider using Memrise. First of all, it's a convenient and fun online tool, which can motivate you to incorporate vocabulary learning into your everyday routine. Secondly, Memrise is actually based on Memory research, so their memorization and revision
techniques really work. And number three is, of course, mems. The reason why Memrise is called Memrise is because users can create mems to help them remember words. A mem is any piece of information, such as a picture, a phrase, anything that can help you remember a word. For example, a phrase "remind of". You see, there's an example. There is a picture from Harry Potter that you might have watched, so it can make it easier to remember. And you can see sometimes it's a translation into a langua
ge that you may not know. So you have to remember that these mems are created by different users. So not every mem may be useful to you, but you can choose which one you want. So I really like, I'm going to click on it and this is going to be my mem for this word. Now let me give you five tips to make the most out of Memrise. Tip number: one adjust your settings. To go to settings you need to click on your pictre here, choose "Settings" and then click on "Learning". For example, when I just star
ted learning French on Memrise, I thought that five words for a learning session was not enough for me, so I changed it to ten. Here you can also choose if you want to have tapping tests, which means you just click on the words rather than type them. and whether you want to have audio tests. Tip number two: creat your own mems. You'll notice that for some words on Memrise there are no mems at all or the mems are not good enough. For example, for this French word for "feeling" it says "Mempty", t
here are no mems But you can create a mem You can upload a picture or you can actually just type in the text. For example, I think "I feel sentimental" will help me remember "sentiment" in French. Click and save it. Here we go. There's a new mem that I've just created. Creating your own mems will actually give a huge boost to your ability to remember the words. So even though you can't probably do that for every word, at least try it for the most difficult ones. Tip number three: set goals and c
ompete with your friends. With Memrise you can set goals for your courses. For example, you see for this course I have five minutes a day. That's the minimum But I can edit that to 15 minutes a day and even forty-five minutes a day, which is quite a lot. It's even better if you can invite some friends to Memrise, and then you can compete with them. Tip number four: benefit from all the hidden functions. So let me show you a few functions that may not be as obvious. For example, if you go to a co
urse and choose the level that you're currently working on, You may see that some words you already know from somewhere else, and you can use the ignore button to tick the words off the list. You can see that I have already ticked some of the words that I think I know. Click "save" and you will not see those words in your learning sessions. Also when you finish a learning session, you can see that some words have been marked with a thunderbolt, which means it's a difficult word, so I've been mak
ing mistakes repeatedly. If you have a free version, you can just use this information to be aware of your difficult words. But if you go premium, you can actually have some extra activities just with your difficult words. Tip number five: choose courses carefully. Remember that courses on Memrise have been created by members just like you, and the quality of each course depends completely on the creator's abilities, knowledge and resources. It's your responsibilty as a user to evaluate a course
before starting it. Do not just rely on the popularity of the courses. So the final question: how do you know which courses are good and which ones aren't? In my next video, which is coming out in about a week, I'm going to talk about five criteria for choosing Memrise courses. Make sure to subscribe to my channel if you don't want to miss out on any new videos And check out my blog if you are looking for online English learning tools. If you have any questions or comments, please use the comme
nt box below, and I'll make sure to get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you or watching and good luck with your English.
Comments