Hello! Today I want to talk about two popular SRS (spaced repetition software) apps. Over several years, people like me studying new languages or simply memorising many topics are looking for more than traditional flash cards. You can find many services promising you to remember everything in no time, but you know, marketing and reality are two different things. At last, after testing many (web) apps, Memrise and Anki are still standing out in my opinion.
Why Memrise?
Flash cards are boring, you review them, and that's it. Every time I think of flash cards, I think of hard work: Forcing myself to remember what I've written.
"This word is impossible to remember!"
"Why did I make such an effort to remember this?!"
You definitely had these in mind while studying vocabularies after writing down the whole deck. Even if flash cards are effective, not every traditional way is meant to give you a faster success. This is where Memrise might help you. The UI (User Interface) is simple, colourful and it is really easy to use. Now I will count some pros and cons for you.
Pros
- Web, Android, iOS app available
- Very easy to use
- High-rated beautiful app (Best App in the 2017 Google Play Awards)
- Big community and community-driven deck creation
- Friend/Follower ranking system
- High score/Leaderboard and level system
- Daily goal for motivation per course (optional) [5/15/45 min per day]
- Combination of memory techniques and entertainment content
- Create "Mems" to memorise easier (mnemonic, picture, meme)
- Type in the correct word(s)
- Quiz (Choose correct word)
- Audio available
- Many sections for input
- Offline mode (Android, iOS)
Cons
- You can't change design, if you don't like it
- Since it's community-driven, you can't change any decks (but you can ask the creator in the deck/course forum)
- Time limit (while reviewing)
- Only good for studying vocabularies and short sentences
Why Anki?
Anki is like the digital flash card app. Since it's open-source and highly customizable, you have almost unlimited freedom for your deck creation. So many powerful features and yet, it is very complex to use and it might scare off people when using it for the first time.
Pros
- Open-source
- Highly customizable
- Very helpful and effective add-ons available
- Input LaTeX, Videos, Text-to-speech (TTS), Audio, Pictures etc.
- Statistics
- Powerful deck editor
- Deck sync
- Download and use other decks
- You can easily create cards with long sentences, definitions
- You can hide parts of images (perfect for studying anatomy, maps, etc.)
Cons
- Very complex, not easy to use
- You can cheat in rating yourself while reviewing
- iOS app is not free
- You might get bored of doing and seeing the same all the time (like traditional flash cards and depending on how you created your cards)
Comparison needed?
This is just a short summary of both apps, you can find a much detailed comparison somewhere in the WWW. The real question though is: Does it really matter which one is the best? To be honest, I prefer using both. Every time I try to use just one of them, I use the other app again, and instead of choosing just one for every purpose in memorising, why not take both? While Memrise has its strength in studying alphabets, vocabularies and short sentences, Anki is perfect for everything Memrise can't do (easily). Since I am someone who likes to study lots of languages, knowing the strengths and weaknesses in both apps is crucial for motivation and confidence. If you have a clear plan and routine, how you study your language, then you will think less about the difficulties, but finally studying the beauty of the language you are interested in.
How to use Memrise AND Anki at the same time
As I said, the strength of Memrise is studying vocabularies and short sentences. There are some possible choices you can make:
- If you already have a language book/website to work/study with, there might be already a course available which is focused on that book/website. Choose that course and work with it. If you need to study sentences and definitions, use Anki.
- If you are a real beginner and you want to start with the basics (and you can't afford a language book or you are too lazy to find a good language website), choose one of the beginner courses by Memrise. They are newly added and very helpful and can be trusted not to contain any mistakes. Also I recommend you to use Duolingo as a beginner.
- If you are in a language course, I would recommend you to use Memrise to create your deck with just vocabularies. For very difficult vocabularies, long sentences and stories, you should create a specialized deck in Anki.
- If you are lazy typing difficult characters (like Chinese, Japanese, Russian, etc.) in long sentences, use Anki, since it works like flash cards. [Not recommended, laziness is bad]
You can easily import/export your deck from Memrise to Anki and from Anki to Memrise! For Memrise to Anki, use the Anki add-on called "Memrise Importer" (https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1340350102). To export Anki decks to Memrise, just export as .txt and paste the content into Memrise. If you want to delete not needed attributes, paste your content in a spreadsheet app like Excel, Numbers, LibreOffice, OpenOffice etc. and paste the selected content into Memrise.
I hope I could help you out and good luck memorising and studying new languages! If you have any questions, feel free to comment!
Thanks @h3i for this great comparison of Anki and Memrise. I couldn't agree more on your conclusion.
Like you I prefer taking he best out of both worlds ;-). Memrise and Anki, both apps have their strengths and I make use of both of them accordingly to optimize my studies.
Way2go,
Kind regards
Brainessa
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@h3i - one more note:
The link to the Memrise Importer in your article is not working anymore as it was intended to. It leads to a page on Ankiweb telling "This shared item is no longer available."
I guess this may be related either to the fact that the importer is working on Anki v 2.0x only - and has not yet been updated to work with the current version of Anki (v 2.1.8)- or to the fact that Memrise has changed its API some time ago. . Both aspects may be a reason that the version of the importer you were linking to has been withdrawn (at least from that particular page). However, I am just guessing.
Just my 2 cents.
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