How I learnt (almost effortlessly) all the capital cities of Asia ! (Part 2)

In the previous article, I showed you that learning by heart is an essential part of the process of learning. Basically, it is impossible to gain knowledge of any subject without learning some prerequisites by heart first. If you'd like to read more details about it (or simply refresh your memory), I invite you to read the first part of this article.

Learning, powered by imagination.

I promised you that I'd introduce you with an amazing online website that'll make your life easier when it comes to learning long lists of items by heart.

This magical tool, it is called Memrise and it is accessible online for free. All you need to do is create an account (you'll only need a valid e-mail address), and then you're up and running for some awesome sessions of online learning.

The concept 

 

“We use a light gardening metaphor to help you understand the ways your learning grows and withers in the brain depending on how you look after them. So, when you learn on Memrise, A “flower” must first be planted in the mind, and then you water (review) these memories that have been planted to ensure that they do not eventually wilt and disappear from your long-term memory.”

 This quote was taken from Memrise website's FAQ, and explains clearly what the website is about. Without further ado, I'll show you how it works through an example. Since I've already learnt everything about Asia (as the title of this article suggests), let's try together something new and learn the capital cities of all the countries of Africa by heart! That's probably not going to be easy, since there are no less than 54 capital cities to learn!

To work!

 

Memrise lets you choose any lesson you like among a huge catalogue of lessons, created by experts or by the community. Let's choose the capital cities of the world lesson and start learning!

Starting a new planting session

When you first start the lesson, Memrise gives you two or three countries associated with their capitals and asks you to associate them several times (you plant the seed).

Some questions give you several choices...

Once this first step is done, Memrise will let you water (review) this knowledge frequently (the more fresh the knowledge the more often you'll have to review what you've learnt so far).

...whereas others are trickier!

One cool thing with Memrise is that when you can't remember a specific item (you give the wrong answer repeatedly for example), you can ask the system for a Mem. A mem is simply a mnemonic (almost always a picture with a short caption), a way to remember something by triggering off your imagination.

Here are two mems that I came across with during my learning process.

Mems are proposed by the community and are often very creative!

 

ROFL! From now on I'll never forget that Buddha-pest is the capital of Hung-a-ry!

Results

 

It turns out that it is amazingly fun to learn with Memrise. I already pointed out to you (who said "boasted" ?) that using this tool I learnt all the capital cities of Asia with almost no efforts, in two or three days (a few minutes per day).

I don't believe you! You might as well be bluffing! (an anonymous and imaginary reader)

Challenge... accepted! Next time we meet I'd be glad to show you how deep these capital cities are anchored in my long-term memory! You'll just have to name any country in Asia and I'll give you its capital instantly! (of course we can also do that in the comments section of this article but I guess that wouldn't be very fair, would it?)

What's next

 

In the next (and last) part of this long article, we'll analyse together what are the characteristics, what are the features of Memrise that make it work so well, and we'll try to deduce from this example a few of the concepts of online learning that make it so different from classical education.