Hello,
I used Memrise a lot a couple of years ago, reached level 14 with 12 000 000 points (and those points were harder to get at the time, doing review sessions would give you almost nothing). I was mainly learning Chinese, went through the lists for HSK 1-2-3 and up to somewhere in the middle of HSK 4.
I then stopped suddenly, as the young kids were too demanding.
They are now 5 and 6 (almost 7), and I am back but this time they are the ones learning. I’ve prepared an English course for them, Picture and Audio only, no typing. I find the pictures and the audio online. The course is growing at the same time they are learning, depending on their interest.
My elder son has learned about 650 words this way, and his brother is at about 450, just in a few weeks. This is not a perfect learning : they are able to find the picture corresponding to the word they hear with close to 100% accuracy, but this works only in the context of Memrise. If I ask them the meaning of a word, the rate is much lower. I think they work by category. For example, they might remember that a certain word is an animal. If they see only one animal in the four pictures presented to them, then it is straightforward. A feature definitely missing in Memrise is the ability to review a level with only proposals from this level.
When they start a new learning session, the first sound takes a while to load. They can’t wait and they click on “Next” without having heard the sound. They don’t care since they’ll find the picture anyway. Actually, they could almost do a learning session without listening to the sound, since they only have to select the new picture each time. For this reason I make them perform a lot of review sessions to get more exposure to the words.
When they do a review session (which I set to 25 words), this is the same thing : the first sound takes a while to load. They don’t wait and click randomly on one picture. They have it right more than one fourth of the time as they try to guess which one this should be (the one they have learned more recently for example).
I have the case of the same sound corresponding to different words, and thus being present in different levels. For example, there are several “trunk” in the course. I don’t think they realized it while learning. They have never been in the situation of hearing the word “trunk” and having the pictures of two different trunks amongst the four. I am not sure how they would react, I think they would select the first one they notice.
The issue I am facing now is that they both want to be first in the leaderboard. I used to have them practice at the same time. Actually I even installed once two laptops next to each other, they did not get distracted by the sound of the other computer and this was actually creating some emulation. Now it is more difficult, if one sees that the other is practicing and he can’t get first, he will yell that the other should stop. One solution is that they practice one after the other, and they pass the other one each time…
I am also making the course grow only bit by bit. The elder wants to complete the course each time he practices. If I add 50 words, he would get to a stage where he can’t learn any more but still wants to try, and he will get very frustrated. I limit to about 15 new words a day.
When he reached 600 words, he started to be fed up and said he wanted to stop. This seems to be ok now, I don’t know how far he’ll be able to go. This is linked to the interest he has in some words. I put first the ones I knew he would be more interested in (animals, monsters, …), while the latest words presented less interest to him. I used the cartoons of Mr. Men and Miss Little to learn adjectives (of course I explain them the adjectives when they first meet the word), they love them.
Learning vocabulary is not all in learning a new language, I use also other resources. We use Sam&Mel lessons, although we’re a bit stuck at lesson 6 at the moment, but this another story.
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