What is Memrise?
Update to the original article:
As of March 31, 2024 “Community Courses” created by Memrise users, like the one described in this review, are not available in the Memrise app. They can only be accessed through the online interface, at the Memrise Community Courses page. You can still access the course through the updated link in this article.
Beginning language learners are thirsty for comprehensible input and repetition. If this is where you’re at, Memrise is a language learning app and website that can help supplement your learning. What’s more, the Sorani (Central Kurdish) course reviewed here is free! Here are some of Memrise’s features:
- New content is introduced gradually throughout the lesson and questions get harder as the student gains familiarity with a word or concept.
- Multiple choice questions help students gradually learn phrases and vocabulary.
- Items that have been learned are reviewed at strategic intervals and questions that are answered wrong are repeated more often to aid mastery.
Here are some of the kinds of questions you’ll see:
Personally, I’m in a Sorani class at the moment, and I’ve been using the app to supplement my in-class learning. The Memrise is a great way of reinforcing new grammar and helping recall become faster and more automatic.
How to get started learning Sorani on Memrise
The Memrise app is available via a web interface, and Android and iOS apps. It hosts two kinds of courses: official Memrise courses and courses designed by users. Currently only Sorani courses created by users are available and there are about 10-15 such Sorani courses on the platform. User-designed courses, including Sorani courses, can only be found by searching on the Memrise website. After a user logs into their Memrise account and starts a course via the website, the course also becomes visible for that same user on the mobile apps and progress is synced across devices. But you won’t find Sorani courses by searching in the Memrise mobile apps, so don’t be confused! (See the video below for help finding the recommended Sorani course).
Quality and quantity varies greatly among the user-designed courses on Memrise. Not all of the Sorani courses include audio and several only have a few lessons. The remainder of this review is based on the recommended course, Kurdish (Sorani) with Audio, by Miranshaways.
A review of the “Kurdish (Sorani) with Audio” course on Memrise
The reason the “Kurdish (Sorani) with Audio” course on Memrise is so helpful, is that the lessons are comprehensive, covering most critical aspects of Sorani grammar. The course assumes no previous knowledge of the language. Grammar topics are shown with examples only. Topics are not taught or explained in prose, so it would be difficult for most learners to grasp everything without help from other resources. But the lessons are ordered to build on one another sequentially, from basic to more advanced topics. Each lesson includes valuable repetition to reinforce each topic, including audio from a native speaker, and written text with both Latin and Kurdish scripts for each example.
Personally, I’m in a Sorani class at the moment and I’ve been using the app to supplement my in class learning. Each day I find the lesson in the Memrise app that corresponds to what we covered in the class each day. This is a great way of reinforcing new grammar and helping recall become faster and more automatic.
Naturally, the course has its limitations. Memrise is essentially a really fancy flashcard app, so the same few phrases or sentences are repeated over and over. I grew weary of reviewing sentences like, “You are beautiful.” and “I am not ugly.” While the specific example sentences didn’t always feel relevant to me, the repetition still helped me to master the grammatical constructions that I was working on, such as the present tense “to be” verb, which was the topic at hand in the example above.
Give studying Sorani on Memrise a try!
Language learning apps like Memrise have their limitations, but the Kurdish (Sorani) with Audio is a great tool to use alongside other strategies. Go ahead and give it a try, and write us on Facebook to let us know what you think! You can also check out other Sorani language learning apps that we’ve reviewed.
Dr. Miran, author of the Memrise course being reviewed here, has helped with some of the content on this website. He was not consulted on the content of this article.