Memrise - Water the garden of your memory

Yeah, we know: learning is a life-learning process...but...does it have to be done in the same old way as we did when we were in school? Fortunately, new technologies (I would say amazing web designers and IT engineers) help us learn, discover something new and improve ourselves by creating amazing websites and apps.
Today, I want to talk about Memrise. The motto on its home page says it all: Learning, powered by imagination.

Learning can become fun and become a nice filler in our spare time during the day. We spend hours in front on our laptop or fiddling with our smart phone - why not learn something? Memrise offers you the chance to learn something in a gradual way - bit after bit. You read a word, you learn it, you learn a new one and then you are tested with different exercises and you collect your score! Next level: new words or concepts, other tests and the old words will be refreshed to your memory again at some point. And so on and so forth...you could spend hours learning, listening, repeating and playing, gradually growing the garden of your memory!

The main site is in English and if you want to learn a new language, I think that Memrise could be a good starting point for getting familiar with a language in a soft way (click here to access the language courses) - you need to integrate Memrise with other language learning strategies though. If you need to refresh your memory on a specific topic or want to get to grips with new concepts, Memrise offers a host of courses on several topics. Here you go: Arts & Literatures, Maths & Science, the Natural World, History & Geography, Professional & Careers, Entertainement, Trivia.      
I will have just pointed out the English ones. If your native tongue is other than English have a browse on the menu on the left column, last line, and pick your language. Then you will see what courses are offered in your own language.

You can save the words/concepts which are hard to remember, so that you can focus on them more later on. And also you can follow other users' profile if you like what they created. Yes! If you feel creative and resourceful, you can try your hand and create your own course - useful to you and to others! The site offers a clear guide to follow to set up your own learning game.


Why I love it? As interpreters, we are bound to keep on improving not only our language skills but also our general knowledge. Sometimes thinking you never know enough about the world is overwhelming and makes you feel you will never be ready but...being able to input new knowledge in small chucks makes it all more digestible and manageable.

Did you know this site and tried it? Let me know what you think.
I have started out a few courses ...we'll see how much I'll learn.

Glottovolante

P.S. Memrise has also a downloadable version for Android and iOS.