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.
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.
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.
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.
As I said, the strength of Memrise is studying vocabularies and short sentences. There are some possible choices you can make:
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!
