Thanks for the Memrise

A friend of mine recently pointed me at Memrise, an online learning system. Hey, if Jonathan Safran Foer, who is extremely cool, likes it, who couldn't? Memrise is part of the burgeoning trend of "gamification," which in general I think is pretty awesome. Imagine a Zynga game that left you with tangible benefits instead of virtual rutabagas. Memrise offers communities, each organized around a domain of knowledge: French, the monarchs of Britain, Pokémon, etc. Community members make up and share mnemonics, preferably cornball ones, for learning nuggets from their domain. Then the system drills users on the mnemonics and gives out rewards for mastering them. The rewards are the social kind: you know, like getting to be Mayor of your local Applebee's. You know, the kind of reward that actually works. The cost-efficiency of social rewards is terrifying, and it's about time somebody tried to harness it for good rather than evil.

The article to which I linked above focuses on Memrise's use for picking up individual vocabulary words. This approach might be super for Lingala, which Foer wanted to learn so that he could hang out with Mbendjele pygmies, and it seems to have worked for him. But it would be terrible as someone's sole approach to French. French, I've discovered, is simply not a language of individual words. It is a language of phrases. For example, suppose you wanted to ask someone where he or she was from. You could, with Memrise's assistance, memorize the French word for "where," then the word for "are," then "you," then "from." So far, so good, right? But you could string those words together in any order you like, and you'd never in a million years get what French people actually say in this circumstance, which is D'où est-ce que vous êtes? 

On the printed page, that looks like a mouthful. But in fact it's only five syllables: "doo esskuuh voo-zett." Furthermore, you have to say it that way. If you said each individual word with a stop and a breath between each, as Foer probably did with his Lingala words when he arrived in the Congo, no French person would understand it.

I now think of spoken French as a language of phrases, not words. I learn a few stock utterances every day, in the market or at my son's school, and use them to string together thoughts. Je crois que... "I think that..." Peut-être... "Maybe..." Ça marche! "That works!"

Anyhow: I spent a little time exploring Memrise's primary French offering (implemented by a staffer), and, to its credit, its information design reflects French's orientation towards phrases. But I'm reluctant to jump in. Suppose I use their wacky mnemonics to memorize a few hundred more nuggets of French. I can see my brain now: those nuggets would be in there, but so would those mnemonics, rattling around like a bunch of loose BBs tossed into a gas tank. Would they actually help me with my main problem (understanding a rapid stream of French when it is spoken to me)? Or would they just be a bunch of virtual rutabagas? Right now I think it'd be the latter. But Memrise is plainly worth watching: their hearts are in the right place.