Memrise is a fun way to learn languages and vocabulary.
It’s a website as well as a mobile app for iOS and Android.
You can create or use existing flashcards that represent words, phrases, sentences or grammar concepts.
You can add additional information to each flashcard like grammar attributes.
Each flashcard can have one or more audio files attached. You’ll hear audio everytime you see a word.
To make it easier to memorize a word for the first time, you can create or use other people’s mnemonics. For example, the Latvian word iet which means to walk is pronounced something like “eat”. So I’ve created a mem with a picture of a man walking and eating at the same time. It is much easier to remember funny pictures than random letters, so whenever I’d hear iet I’d think hmm that sounds like eat and recall the picture in which a man is walking and would remember that iet means to walk.
But it gets better. Memrise uses spaced repetition to make sure you don’t forget the words you learn. They use the metaphor of planting a seed. When you plant a seed, you periodically need to water it or you’ll forget the word. But you don’t need to water it every single day. Memrise will intelligently guess when you are about to forget a word and ask you to recall it.
Related flashcards are grouped into courses. You can take existing courses or create your own. When you add words to your own course, you can use other people created flashcards which may already have tranaslations, audio, mems and grammar attributes!
You can use various games to learn new words and recall the words you’ve already learned.
Latvian Courses on Memrise
100+ Most Popular Latvian Words
I have created my first Latvian course on Memrise.
You can use it to learn the top 100+ most common nouns, adjectives and verbs in Latvian. And I will be adding more.
Each word has an English translation, part-of-speech as well as gender for nouns. All words have audio with my voice (male) and also a female voice.
The words in the course are ordered by how often they are used in movies and represents conversational language. I analyzed more than 1000 movie subtitles in Latvian to make this course.
I decided to skip pronouns, conjuctions, adverbs and other words because you can learn them in other courses.
English Idioms in Latvian
This list of currently 77 English idioms, proverbs and other useful phrases was contributed by Maximilian Matthews.
I have loaded them into the course and added audio.
Mine is not the only Latvian vocabulary building course on Memrise. There are several more.
