Cute Cat Photos Are Data-Driven Science Behind Cunning New Language Learning App

Posted by Unknown on Wednesday November 20, 2013 @06:21AM from the no-wonder-i'm-a-genius dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Cats are cute, and cute is good for cognition. Which is why Memrise, a language learning startup, settled on using lolcat-style cat photos as mnemonic aids for a new series of apps aimed at people who normally wouldn't bother learning another language. The first CatAcademy app is 'Cat Spanish' From the article: 'What we found, however we sliced it, was that pictures of cats — cute pictures specifically, of which over 50% were cats — just kept on coming out as the most effective mnemonics... I have to admit we were slightly skeptical to begin with. We're a scientific group, and data driven — but the data did drive us towards cats.'" Now, just to add cat pictures to Mnemosyne.

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Memrise works well by Camembert · 2013-11-20 07:50 · Score: 1, Offtopic

I have been using Memrise since a while to learn Mandarin vocabulary including both characters and pronunciation and I have to say that its playful approach works very well indeed. It does not teach you the finesses of grammar but it works well for vocabulary. Really a cool app.