Memrise

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Language learning platform

title: "Memrise" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["british-educational-websites", "spaced-repetition-software", "mnemonics", "crowdsourcing", "internet-properties-established-in-2010", "language-education-in-the-united-kingdom", "language-learning-websites", "proprietary-language-learning-software", "android-(operating-system)-software", "social-networking-language-learning-websites", "language-learning-software", "companies-based-in-london", "ios-software", "multilingual-websites", "proprietary-multilingual-software", "education-companies-established-in-2010", "language-revival", "native-american-language-revitalization", "esperanto-education", "educational-apps"] description: "Language learning platform" topic_path: "geography/united-kingdom" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memrise" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Language learning platform ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox website"]

Field	Value
name	Memrise
logo	Memrise-new-logo.png
logo_size	250px
type	Privately held company
foundation	2010
founder	Greg Detre
Ed Cooke
Ben Whately
CEO	Ben Whately
area_served	Worldwide
language	Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese
registration	Yes
launch_date	September 2010
url	memrise.com (community courses)
current_status	Active
::

Memrise is a British language platform that uses spaced repetition of flashcards to increase the rate of learning. It is based in London, UK.

Memrise offers user-generated content on a wide range of other subjects. The Memrise app has courses in 35 languages and its combinations, while the website for "community courses" has a great many more languages available, including minority and ancient languages. As of 2018, the app had 35 million registered users. Memrise has been profitable since late 2016, having a turnover of $4 million monthly.

History

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.

In July 2010, Memrise was named as one of the winners of the London Mini-Seedcamp competition. In November 2010, the site was named as one of the finalists for the 2010 TechCrunch Europas Start-up of the Year. In March 2011, it was selected as one of the Techstars Boston startups. In May 2017, Memrise was named as the winner of the "Best App" award at the second edition of the Google Play awards.

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) and Google Play.

As of January 2020, the app received $21.8 million of investments in a total of seven seed rounds.

Features

Spaced repetition

Main article: Spaced repetition

Memrise makes language studying a game, like its competitor Duolingo. Memrise uses spaced repetition to accelerate language acquisition. The use of spaced repetition has been shown to increase the rate of memorization.

Community courses

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Memrise_language_catalogue.jpg" caption="Marshallese]]."] ::

Users of the platform have the ability to create personalized "courses," which consist of curated lists of words and phrases that can be accompanied by audio and pictures. These courses can be used for individual learning purposes or shared with the community by making them publicly available in the course catalogue. This feature has led to the accumulation of a diverse range of "community courses" over time, which has proven useful for studying languages with limited resources or those of niche interest, in addition to the more popular languages.

In 2012, less than two years after its launch, Memrise had already crowdsourced materials for about 100 languages, "from Catalan to Haitian Creole." Courses have been created by enthusiasts to teach Klingon, Toki Pona, and Esperanto, among other artificial languages. Classical languages, such as Latin and Ancient Greek, have been covered as well.

In Taiwan, the Department of Education of Keelung City Government has taken initiatives to foster the education of indigenous and local languages by publishing Memrise-based learning materials for the Amis, Taroko, Taiwanese Hakka, and Taiwanese Hokkien languages. Journalist Joshua Foer, in an attempt to communicate with the Pygmy peoples in the Congo Basin, was able to pick up Lingala, a language with scarce learning materials, by utilizing community courses.

Speech communities of endangered languages have made use of the platform to aid in their revitalization endeavors, as seen in the case of Ume Sámi, a language spoken by fewer than 50 people in Sweden. In the United States, indigenous nations have published courses on Memrise to support efforts to revitalize their heritage languages, including Cherokee, Seneca, Comanche, Potawatomi, and Choctaw. The success of this project "inspired the start of similar projects among speakers of other Indigenous languages," like Unangam Qilinĝingin to teach the Aleut language spoken in Alaska. Courses of many other endangered languages can be found, including the other Sámi languages, Hawaiian, Yiddish, Cornish, Greenlandic, Navajo, Irish, and Welsh.

The Institute on Collaborative Language Research, founded at the University of California, organized a workshop in 2018 to teach participants to use Memrise for teaching and learning endangered languages with the aim of revitalization, considering that Memrise is "an ideal tool for language revitalization because it’s flexible, community-oriented, easy-to-use, fun, and free" and "a great way for fluent elders and more tech-savvy young people to collaborate on a revitalization project". A research conducted by NEȾOLṈEW̱, a Canadian partnership working on indigenous language revitalization, praises the motivational effect of Memrise' leaderboard for learners, but raises concerns about the issue of data sovereignty. In 2023, the successes of the Memrise projects for Ume Sámi and Kristang were cited as "inspiring stories" by the UNESCO publication Digital initiatives for indigenous languages.

Apart from resources for language learning, the community has produced courses for other subject matters, including geography, history, mathematics, natural science, some designed for general interests and some for test preparation.

In July 2024, Memrise announced in a blog-post that community courses will be removed from their new app experience, moving them to a separate platform.

"Mems"

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/An_example_of_a_"mem"_on_the_language-learning_platform_Memrise.jpg" caption="seethe]]" is remembered as an angry face grinding its teeth, matching its pronunciation to its meaning."] ::

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/An_example_of_a_"mem"on_the_language-learning_platform_Memrise(for_a_Chinese_character).jpg" caption="面]], which means "noodles""] ::

Memrise used to have a function known as "mems," which are user-generated mnemonic devices or memory aids to help learners remember and retain new information more effectively. Mems are often designed to be humorous or even absurd to be memorable, such as using a picture of Abraham Lincoln listening to a ghetto blaster with the caption "Abe ends work in the evening" for the German word Abend, which means "evening". For learning Chinese characters, mems have been created to help relate their meaning and the concept they represent.

In 2012, Ed Cooke highlighted the network effect associated with learning through mems, explaining that "the more people on the site, the more there are contributing new content for the mems". In 2013, Ben Whately and Ed Cooke discussed their team's approach to take advantage of the Internet obsession with cats and "the relationship between cuteness and improved cognitive function" to create memorable mems.

However, since September 2022, mems have been completely removed from the site, despite overwhelmingly negative feedback from users as expressed in the official forum.

Official courses

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Memerise_Main_Page.jpg" caption="Languages supported by Memrise' official contents"] ::

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Memrise_iOS_app_chat.png" caption="[[Chatbot]] on the Memrise app for [[iPhone"] ::

As of February 2025, Memrise has official materials for 35 languages for English speakers.These languages are: Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Icelandic, Igbo, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Mongolian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (European and Brazilian varieties), Russian, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish (Castilian and Mexican varieties), Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Welsh, Xhosa, and Yoruba. Materials have also been developed for speakers of Arabic,Available languages: English (British and American varieties), French, German, Korean, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish. Chinese,Available languages: English (British and American varieties), French, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish. Dutch,Available languages: English (British variety), French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish. French,Available languages: English (British and American varieties), Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish. German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

Starting from 2023, the official courses are combined with a GPT-3-powered "AI Language partner" that allows learners to practice human-like conversations, which Memrise believes can help learners to overcome the "confidence gap" in language acquisition. Official courses do not cover the vast majority of languages included in community courses, nor are there any non-language-related official materials.

Gamification elements

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.

Declining support for community-created content

Over time, Memrise, initially established as a learning platform centered around crowdsourcing and community engagement, has undergone a noticeable transition by gradually phasing out significant features in favor of prioritizing their official content offerings.

The creation of "Decks" to separate community courses in 2019

In late February 2019, Memrise announced that user-created content will be moving to a different web-based platform. It was announced that this new website would not have an app and that users would be unable to access their material offline. On 25 February 2020, as a response to the loud criticism from users, Memrise decided to undo the split (i.e. closing Decks and merging its content back to the Memrise main site.)

Second separation of community courses from the main website in 2024

However, in November 2023, Memrise announced on a forum post that it planned to "sunset" user-created courses. The very forum was closed on 8 December 2023 as the company shifts its focus from supporting community-created content to developing a new "experience" based on official content. In February 2024, Memrise has again separated community courses to a new website, which is not accessible through the updated mobile app, meaning that users can no longer download the courses for offline accessibility. The official notice states that the courses will remain on the new website until "at least the end of 2024". The CEO Steve Toy has made posts announcing and trying to explain the abovementioned change on the Memrise subreddit, under which many users have expressed concerns, frustrations, and even anger regarding the future of community courses. Regarding the future of community courses, Toy has clarified that he has no plan to take them down after 2024 or any date, but is "not prepared to put [his] name next to a promise about the site['s] longevity at this moment." As of October 2025, community courses are still available on the website. In the fifth of November 2025, Memrise has sent an e-mail to all Memrise users regarding about the co-founder of Memrise, Ben, taking over as CEO. In the email, Ben has stated that user-created wordlists are coming back in the near future.

Notes

References

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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]]."Human Memory: Theory and Practice", Alan D. Baddeley, 1997
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(2022). "Learning in Relation: A Guide to Creating Online Indigenous Language Courses that Center Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Being".
Chew, Kari A. B.. (2022). "Learning in Relation: A Guide to Creating Online Indigenous Language Courses that Center Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Being".
Llanes-Ortiz, Genner. (2023). "Digital initiatives for indigenous languages".
P., Chris. (11 April 2014). "Memrise review: learn a new language, take a math refresh course, or reinvigorate your vocabulary through addictive mems".
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Rice, Carolyn. (27 November 2013). "Cute cats could be key to learning new languages".
. (1 September 2022). ["Mems removal is scheduled for Monday 5 September"](https://memrise.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/8805604634513-Mems-removal-is-scheduled-for-Monday-5-September). *Memrise*.
Memrise Support. (26 November 2021). "Rollout of the new dashboard and learning sessions experiences to all our customers".
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(10 January 2023). "How new technology can bridge the "confidence gap" in language education". Medium.
"The irrationality of cheating at gamified learning".
(2019-02-19). "Important Update: Upcoming changes to Memrise community-created courses".
(2019-02-21). "The Creation of Decks and the Future of Memrise.".
(2020-02-12). "Important announcement about Decks".
(13 November 2023). "Forum absence, outlook".
(8 December 2023). "Closure of the Memrise Community Forum".
(20 February 2024). "Changes to the Memrise app".
(23 February 2024). "Why this is happening from the Memrise CEO".
(23 February 2024). "Memrise CEO trying again".
Toy, Steve. (29 March 2024). "A reply to "Why this is happening from the Memrise CEO"".

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