As I work with your service (a great service, by the way), I’ve noticed that everything is text-associative. I’m given an English word and I click the button with the foreign word, etc. This is similar to traditional associative flashcards with the word in language #1 on one side and again in language #2 on the other.
I would like to request abstracted flashcards. I want a box colored red to appear with the expectation that I type or click the foreign word as an answer. The English word “red” appears nowhere on the screen. Or the picture of a car, with the same expectation. Or the picture of a yellow car with the anticipation of a phrase. (This would mean either one of two phrases may be acceptable, “yellow car” or “the car is yellow.” Honestly, you could reduce it to the one answer you want by providing a related fill-in-the-blank reference in the foreign language, e.g., when looking for “the car is yellow” you could show “_____ lea _____” as the “clue” {Northern Sami})
This should work easily for nouns and adjectives. Perhaps not so well for verbs, but I’d take the former. Colors, at the very least, should be trivial to implement (I say “trivial” knowing that modifying software is rarely so) as they need no artistry. As for the others, I should think as large as your community is, a request to provide line-drawn “fan art” would be well received. And it is line art you want, so that creating (e.g.) yellow cars and red cars requires but one piece of art.
The abstracted flashcards would help me (and I hope others) to disassociate the reference language (in my case, English) and better associate the foreign language directly with ideas. In short, I’d like to think “fiskat” and not translate it first to “yellow” and then think “fiskat.”
You can do all of this yourself by making mems that contain pictures!
This was indeed one of the main original selling points of memrise, that people would be able to use not only text to help them remember a word, but also an image of their own choosing.
When memrise first started (I have not been using memrise since its inception, but since about May 2014, I believe), the whole service was all about the mems! Pictures were even offered to learners to choose from, but were later removed because they sadly resulted in multiple duplicate mems containing the same pictures. Now learners have to upload pictures themselves, but it is pretty easy to do.
Here’s a mem somebody made to help them remember the concept of “early”:
It would be no problem to upload a similar picture and just not add any text and hope that the image of a sunrise provokes you into remembering the idea of “early”.
You have requested that memrise produce the mems, but the whole idea of mems - and it still is on the community-created courses - is that they should be created by us, the learners, using images that create strong associations. The idea is not to have some authority on high do this for us.
Finding suitable pictures (wikimedia commons is a good source) is fun and really helps you remember things, so why don’t you just get started!!!
Oh, and one last question: what course(s) are you using and what language are you learning?
Ah! I appreciate the input. I have not yet reviewed the process of creating a course on Memrise and, therefore, didn’t know that the feature existed and simply needed to be used.
Currently I am taking the basic Northern Sami I course. It has neither audio examples nor pictures. Only textural flashcards in all their varieties.
nor pictures. Only textural flashcards in all their varieties.