Memrise is a British language platform that uses spaced repetition of flashcards to increase the rate of learning,[2] combined with a GPT3-powered "AI Language partner" that allows learners to practice human-like conversations,[3] which Memrise believes can help learners to overcome the "confidence gap" in language acquisition. [4] It is based in London, UK.
Type of site | Privately held company |
---|---|
Available in | Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese |
Founded | 2010 |
Area served | Worldwide |
Founder(s) | Greg Detre Ed Cooke Ben Whately [1] |
CEO | Steve Toy |
URL | memrise.com (community courses) |
Registration | Yes |
Launched | September 2010 |
Current status | Active |
Memrise offers user-generated content on a wide range of other subjects. The Memrise app has courses in 16 languages and its combinations, while the website for "community courses" has a great many more languages available, including minority and ancient languages.[5] As of 2018, the app had 35 million registered users.[6] Memrise has been profitable since late 2016, having a turnover of $4 million monthly.[7]
Memrise was founded by Ed Cooke, a Grand Master of Memory, Ben Whately and Greg Detre, a Princeton neuroscientist specializing in the science of memory and forgetting. The website launched in private beta after winning the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club 2009 TigerLaunch competition.[8]
On 1 October 2012, 100 users were allowed to sign up to test a non-beta version of the website called Memrise 1.0. As of May 2013, a Memrise app has been available for download on both the App Store (iOS)[9] and Google Play.[10]
As of January 2020, the app received $21.8 million of investments in a total of seven seed rounds.[11]
Memrise makes language studying a game, like its competitor Duolingo. Memrise uses spaced repetition to accelerate language acquisition.[2] Spaced repetition is an evidence-based learning technique that incorporates increasing intervals of time between subsequent review of previously learned material to exploit the psychological spacing effect.[12] The use of spaced repetition has been shown to increase the rate of memorization.[13]
In July 2010, Memrise was named as one of the winners of the London Mini-Seedcamp competition.[14] In November 2010, the site was named as one of the finalists for the 2010 TechCrunch Europas Start-up of the Year.[15] In March 2011, it was selected as one of the Techstars Boston startups.[16] In May 2017, Memrise was named as the winner of the "Best App" award at the second edition of the Google Play awards.[17]
Starting in late February 2019, Memrise has been the subject of much criticism[citation needed] due to an announcement that user-created content will be moving to a different web-based platform.[18] It was announced that this new website would not have an app and that users would be unable to access their material offline.[19] In response, the Memrise forums were bombarded with posts criticizing this as a slap in the face to Memrise's users and content-creators.[20] This criticism has followed onto Reddit with many users calling for migration to rival platforms.[21] On 25 February 2020, as a response to the criticisms, Memrise decided to undo the split (i.e. closing Decks and merging its content back to the Memrise main site[22]). However, in November 2023, Memrise announced on a forum post that it planned to "sunset" user-created courses.[23] In February 2024, Memrise has again separated community courses to a new website, and has promised that the courses will remain there until at least the end of 2024.[24]
In late September 2012, the leaderboard on the website was temporarily suspended due to "extensive cheating". Specific users had been using bots and non-intensive mechanisms, such as celebrity photo memory courses, to achieve atypical scores that were not reflective of actual learning. In response, the administrators established a new leaderboard after revising the scoring loopholes.[25]