Native Speaker Tries Memrise (Chinese)

Is this the fastest way to fluency in a language? Or is Memrise just a glorified flashcard tool? Watch a Chinese American review this popular language learning app and offer his perspective on their Chinese courses!
~TIME STAMPS~
0:00 || Intro
0:54 || Chinese 1: Food lesson
3:15 || Chinese 1: Grammar Yes/No lesson
4:59 || Scrolling through the rest of the Chinese 1 course
6:17 || Chinese 2
7:41 || Chinese 3
8:50 || Exploring other features
10:43 || Pros: Who this app is for
13:20 || Cons: Why it's NOT for serious learners
16:50 || Overall Conclusion
TL:DR
In a way, Memrise delivers on their promise, and offers a natural and immersive way to learn a new language. But it is heavily lacking in grammar, and as a result, the entire course focuses more on quickly learning useful phrases as opposed to furthering your understanding of the language. So in other words, you won't learn how to form complex thoughts and ideas, or the intricacies of the Chinese language. This could be a great app for travelers who want to learn a language quickly, or for beginners who are easily discouraged when learning a new language. But if your goal is to eventually be fluent, you better look somewhere else.
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[@bibliophile3918]

I think it's important to start learning the characters early. When I started learning chinese 3 years ago I was very interested in characters when my teacher drew them and I also tried. The characters that I drew looked terrible at the start 😅 but in a year they started looking better in my opinion and now I love drawing characters to every notebook that I have. I think people who start learning chinese should get to know characters as soon as possible. I have now taken a chinese course that is meant for beginners and the students aren't learning any characters. They don't know what they are missing :(

[@Riurelia]

5:20 I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks that (although I also think that learning swear words is important depending on what you intend to do with the language you're learning.)

[@Korneliuszstanforlife]

Not so long ago i started learning turkish on memrise. They taught me loads of grammar already. I think the literal translations helped me understand it even more

[@JuanGarutti]

In my opinion, it is not only import but also necessary to learn the characters early on. Being exposed to the language is crucial, so the earlier that starts, the better! Also, 中午 is Chinese, zhongwu isn't. If someone decides to learn Chinese, they should be exposed to the characters since day 1, or they're not really learning Chinese. The only exception to that is of you're 100% sure you're not gonna need to read/write. Learning the characters is also very helpful when it comes to actually remembering words. It's much easier to remember 中午 then to remember zhongwu, because the characters give you more information, a visual aid. Especially when you start to learn words that sound similar but are written with different characters.

[@chloebodnarick8418]

I majored in Chinese in university! We had to learn characters from the very beginning. There was a bit of a learning curve at first, but honestly I'm happy we had to do it. Afterwards, learning new characters and words became really quick and easy!

[@mayanlogos92]

I wonder how was learning Chinese for strangers before pinyin... was it kinda easier even though not really? - that cs no distractions involved, that's it if you consider pinyin being a distraction.. what about zhuyin or how's it called in English.. bopomono?

[@Reilly13445]

Memrise does actually say it only reach you low intermediate (means that you're just halfway of being able to speak it.) So yeah. At least they weren't lying.

[@ironcode]

It's important to be exposed to characters at the same time as learning to listen/speak. Even if you don't memorize them, at least you can be aware that certain words are different, e.g. that the bù from 不好 is different from the bù in 跑步. To me personally, it's been very useful to be exposed to the characters early so I don't have to memorize them with pinyin.

[@knit-]

I don't study chinese, but I think I want to soon, I feel like (as a japanese learner) that you should be learning characters, especially in a language where a different tone can make such a difference.

[@TheOneAndOnlyNeuromod]

I like the way that they present the material. The repetition is just enough, they give you the pinyin and the characters along with the spoken words AND the literal translation (that helps my brain connect it all back to English). But, the thing that really helped over the flash cards and other apps is seeing *people speaking*. For some reason, it just burns in the words, phrases, and so forth when a person is speaking - must be a limbic thing. The app is excellent! A note: I think Memrise has made updates since this video - they add everything (pinyin, characters, spoken) together when teaching new words/phrases.

[@miyo._.5569]

Memrise was the first language learning app I’ve ever used, I downloaded it in middle school (I’m a 2nd yr college student) when I wanted to learn Japanese, I think it’s good if youre a beginner who’s never rlly been exposed to the language, I used it to start learning Japanese, korean, and Chinese 😅 although I don’t use it anymore cuz I have “formal” learning for Chinese lol

[@wendersonbarros1900]

I was waiting for this video!! Thank you!

[@angelagilbert]

Absolutely it is important to learn the characters Unless you just want a brief overview to take a short vacation If you really want to learn the language you need to read it Yeah I really hated memrise Lingodeer and duolingo are much better At least for learning This is okay for review and reinforcement

[@ABChinese]

Yeah I definitely agree with you!

[@jes2294]

Characters are important. You should start seeing them as soon as possible even if you are not writing them yet

[@BusasGaming]

I have been learning Chinese for about 6 months now. I started with speaking only. In my opinion that is the best way to start. Now that I am getting into pinyin and characters I can understand them ALOT better since I already know what the words mean and how to say them properly. I use Memrise almost every day to reinforce the things I learn on my own. I treat it more as a game than learning app.

[@alanjay479]

So I've been using HelloChinese, your video on it was a large reason I started with that, and even though the course has its own way of introducing you to characters I still practice every word it introduces me to after it and add all of the characters into my Pleco flashcards as well as writing them down multiple times and trying example sentences. Is it making learning much slower? Absolutely for now, but by the time I get to HSK3 I'd have to learn them anyway, so it isn't really slower looking at the bigger picture. Plus I installed a Chinese keyboard and can practice writing sentences. 你好。我是艾伦。我是苏格兰人。我学中文和汉字。我喜欢吃饼干。😅 Could never have done like if I didn't learn characters, and I only started properly learning on January 2nd. Keep up the good work, buddy! 再见。👋

[@ABChinese]

That's a good way of looking at it, and I think example sentences really help too because it forces you to apply what you learned!

[@ironcode]

I love HelloChinese, but the very first thing I did after installing it was to switch the display to "characters only". It's so much easier. Having had some experience with Duolingo, I already knew some characters, so seeing pinyin be the primary thing in HelloChinese was just confusing. I love how with characters only, it still shows the pinyin in the response card, but not in the lesson itself.

[@darylpetty]

Memrise is excellent, it has user created decks going up to the highest levels, I've been using it for HSK5 + HSK6 and it has C2 decks for European languages. User-created content has it's errors, but every textbook including the official ones has a few translations that don't always convey the whole meaning of a word. The official memrise decks are excellent for getting started in any language they provide, they have the highest quality sound clips of all the other apps I've seen. I love memrise for what it does, I don't want it to try to replace or behave as a textbook, I'd rather just use a grammar textbook for that and sit down and read it for a few hours instead of switching between activities. The official courses for memrise are the best for listening practice, which eventually translates into speaking - compare that to duolingo's robot voice, but duolingo can be good for learning grammar.

[@fluffypickle8218]

It's the app I use the most and recently finished HSK5 and now progressing through HSK6 vocab. Other apps simply don't have this, they stop at around HSK3/4. Unfortunately it only teaches characters in isolation and despite a lot of memorisation I can't read anything other than very simple Chinese.

[@kirstenmuller4536]

You can use pretty much all the features on a computer (or even on the browser of your phone) instead of on the app. You just can't do certain grammar lessons without paying. There are loads of free features.

[@sae2705]

In my opinion: with characters I think it depends on the alphabet, though I've never tried learning Chinese, I did try learning Japanese once and I think having the Romanised Japanese helped just so I could get a good flow in my lessons. In fact, the textbooks I had were all in Romaji/Romanized Japanese and I bought separate books for Hiragana/Katakana and Kanji. I feel like because the writing system is so big, it would slow me down. I think with the Chinese writing system, I'd do the same if I even decide to learn Chinese. But for Korean, I'd probably learn the alphabet first. But I am now learning Mongolian and giving the Cyrillic alphabet is a lot shorter, I think it helps learning it in the Cyrillic alphabet. I also wish to learn Mongolian Bichig, which will come later. However, I can see an argument for doing it early because you associate the word with the correct characters, without learning the words first and then coming back and learning the association and may be less efficient, but I guess I figure, if you feel like you're struggling too much at the start or have too many hurdles, I think it can make things a little less approachable and maybe overwhelming.

[@katorheyyou283]

Super Chinese Chinese Skill Memorise ✅ Busuu China Easy 1 down 4 more to go. I’m bit old school you need both to understand any language.

[@QuizmasterLaw]

YES YOU NEED TO LEARN THE CHARACTERS PINYIN IS A CRUTCH. pinyin + hanzi is correct teaching method.

[@sumi9323]

Hello! I’m sorry for disturbing you D: but I’m learning mandarin but I don’t know what pinyin is.. I tried to google it but it dosent make sense D: if it dosent brother you can you just kind of explain for me if not it’s fine have a great day!

[@Mot-dh5sx]

@@sumi9323 it’s the written pronunciation of the characters. Like 吗is the character, “mā” is the pinyin.

[@whohan779]

@@sumi9323 The name translates somewhat literally to "spell sounds" or as single noun "sound-speller", so it's just a tool for input on electric(='电') devices (such as 'brains'(='脑') or less literal regular computers) and learning the pronunciation. It has no relevancy for manual reading or writing w/o devices (such as sophisticated typewriters or modern electronics). It's also very useful for natives to look up a character they forgot how to write (happens more often than one might think). Technically Pinyin is completely unnecessary even for input as there are shaped-based alternatives, but it really is among the easiest and most useful aids. The crotch of Pinyin is that it cannot cover every dialect or even sub-language of Chinese (such as Wu or Cantonese), therefore the pronunciation might be slightly or (very rarely) drastically off. So you're usually learning Pinyin for the standardized form of Mandarin. And like in other languages a word can be written and even spoken differently or be exclusive depending on region.

[@nanarchiste78]

Hi, thanks for your videos. From my perspective (as a total beginner), I don't really know wether chinese characters should be learnt immediately or not, but I know I have had a very hard time learning anything from textbooks requiring me to learn 30 characters before I could even read the dialog in lesson 1. Then, I decided to change my method, and took a book which focus on teaching Zhuyin (I'm learning traditionnal). It made me realize that I was totally misguided by pinyin due to the fact I didn't take the time to learn them. For example, I was pronouncing 歲 (sui) like I would pronounce it in the word "switch", or 是 like an English "she". I think too few people insist on the importance of pinyin (or zhuyin, or whatever phonetic system you use), and learning chinese characters before a correct practice of any phonetic system is a bad idea. Zhuyin helped me a lot since it doesn't look like something I could read straight away and forces me to focus on the differences between English and Chinese sounds, although I believe such a training must be possible with pinyin (which is probably more suitable for most of chinese learners out there)

[@Mia-bl9nk]

As someone whos learning Japanese i think some basic characters are important to learn early, however for me personally i like to get some basic vocabulary and listening comprehension in first or it becomes too overwhelming and i end up not knowing either one.

[@GunAddictAllDay]

So Memrise has 100s of courses(even many in Chinese) so just reviewing one is like going to a restaurant and just trying one dish and then reviewing the whole restaurant.

[@acwright]

I found that Duolingo and HelloChinese (with the pinyin OFF) helped me read Chinese characters.

[@flipevent]

After actively learning Korean for almost a year, I'm switching to Chinese in about two months here, while putting my Korean in maintenance mode. So, I'm shopping around how exactly to (re)start my Mandarin Chinese, as I expect it to be much harder this time around. Giving myself 1.5-2 years of both speaking and reading the characters. :) Thanks for the review of this. It helped a lot--I was hard thinking about Memrise, but I think this persuaded me ultimately not to.

[@ekoi1995]

the number of words is actually the number of items in the course XD, yeah they also get repeated even in the other courses. So the amount of words learned in your profile is also the total amount of words including duplicates.

[@blueberrysky7599]

CHINESE CHARACTERS ARE SO BEAUTIFUL! I WANNA LEARN MORE! THAT'S IT

[@ashtonrooks7899]

I've used memrise a lot while studying japanese, but not the official courses. I find there are some things it does well and others it does not. The spaced repetition function for memrise is great for learning sounds/meanings of characters. When I was starting out learning Japanese it was very helpful for learning the katakana, hiragana, and later for vocabulary drills and kanji. I always found it functionally weak for grammar though

[@_caniche_2405]

I think maybe they could have an introductory course teaching Pinyin and Mandarin sounds? But when teaching vocabulary it's better to just introduce characters early on. Chinese words have three components: character, sound (includes tone) and meaning. Memorising them separately just gives rise to confusion later on IMHO.

[@liweiwang573]

I would say if you learn charactors in sets you can learn it faster and charactors is also important

[@CatherineIves]

I think the problem is the tones. When they get you to write the pinyin when you haven't learnt all the tones. I think pronunciation is difficult too. How do you even go about learning characters: do you start with kangxi radicals?

[@ashchen4422]

Memorise is a bit more entertaining than other apps. I went quite far in Japanese and found the videos and tik tok style mode which you didn't cover is really engaging. Using Lingodeer for characters and Memorise for fun keeps it fresh.. The only thing is the progression of topics seems random..

[@josephriley3270]

Should have watched this before paying for the lifetime membership lol :I, Am actually trying to do handwritten character drills based on my memrise phrases for character recognition (since they give you characters when you learn a phrase and I'm already okay with 汉字 radicals since I've been learning Japanese for yonks now). I like having the building blocks to start a conversation. With duolingo and lingodeer I kind of feel like I have the building blocks for extremely short sentences, but not much else. Mixed with other resources for a particular purpose memrise is alright but not really worth the price.

[@josephriley3270]

Also， as a japanese learner, **** romaji for anyone who wants to get anything done

[@KatiePrescott]

You can actually use your phone's handwriting input tool with Memrise to practice writing too 🥰

[@PaulaCoots]

Characters, please. And Grammar. I'd love to know your opinion of Super Chinese. I'm using that, and I'm doing ok. I like how it grades my pronunciation. But what if it's still lame?? Thanks! I love your funny "edit" moments. Well done.

[@KatiePrescott]

I LOVE SuperChinese, definitely my favourite Chinese app :) Memrise is definitely more for revising vocabulary, not intended to teach you Chinese from scratch, whereas SuperChinese is much more comprehensive (including grammar)

[@GarrettOHara]

If learning Chinese is anything like Japanese, the characters are really important imho.

[@knives1705]

Memrise is alright, but not having the literal translation on everything really annoyed me. And after some activities such as listening or pinyin, it doesn’t always show you the English meaning - so sometimes I’d get the pinyin right or select the right sound, but I couldn’t remember the meaning, and memrise wouldn’t show me it, it’d just say I was right in my selection - which is just a wasted opportunity to help me, and annoying as I have to try and remember it to look it up later or open up a separate translation app to look it up then. I switched to Hello Chinese and it seems much better so far. Memrise is basically just flash cards by comparison.

[@dipankarroy871]

Speak - Read - Write

[@OfficialAgathaSS]

Hey in the French course the teach the word shit in one of the first lesson

[@crow9283]

"Putain" is an important word in French.

[@noizusagi6901]

Quick question, your method, first speak, then read, then write. How do I learn to speak FIRST, if I can't read it? :

[@ABChinese]

Learn to read pinyin, which sounds out a character's pronunciation. That will guide your speaking before you can read characters!

[@marlonsubuyu2012]

In my opinion, Memrise is not quite good in teaching Chinese, because it doesn't show the characters, it feels as if I'm not learning it, I think one of the main reasons most of us start learning Chinese, is because we're interested in what the characters mean

[@viderzen3390]

I really need help

[@JohnDCrafton]

Wait when did Memrise put up a paywall? It used to be completely free.

[@glennrobards585]

The non-premium content is still completely free if you know how to click around a few obstacles.

[@QuizmasterLaw]

I used memrise when i started learning Chinese. Back then a lot more free content was still available. The course unfortuntely did not focus on kangxi radicals nor explain the six methods. So, while the repetition is ok, it lacked context to be useful. Still, even unstructured, i found it effective and better much better than that shitty little dirt bird with his make me learn stupid stuff i already know before i can move on to what i actually want to learn.

[@sonkatrojakova8113]

Does in Chine like Kórea when u born u have 2 year how Can i call ,,oppa,hyung,nuuna and unnie?

[@ABChinese]

Yes, Chinese use both. 虚岁 is the one where you are 1 years old at birth and changes every new year, not your actual birth date. 哥哥 = older brother, 姐姐 = older sister, and unlike Korean, it doesn't matter if you are male or female, its the same term for both. Hope that answers your question!

[@derekeano]

Why could a native speaker learn from a language app? If you already know the language it may be difficult to evaluate learning it again

[@luizychoe5018]

im studying characters at the same time

[@habib3527]

I know im late, but learning characters should be the last thing while learning chinese 😁 in tje begining it would be depressing and kinda too much so definetly after.

[@microcolonel]

Chinese is written with characters, and there's no good reason to avoid them. If you want a phonetic experience of chinese, do some listening. Listen, read, write, speak.

[@bmariann7783]

"because... I like food." - oh, are you a chinese? :D Characters are the most important. Pinyin is important to chat on weibo :D