Get on the Membus Tour: The video dictionary revolution
The most boring aspect of learning a language is to merely study from books. Don’t get me wrong, I love books and I still use them to study languages autonomously, however, modern technologies supply us with so many other ways to study languages that is impossible to resist them. What appeals to me the most is online resources such as radio broadcasting, YouTube videos and music videos with the lyrics. To learn is fun and in order to keep on going learning something quite hard, such as the Russian language, I personally need to constantly make use of interactive tools which enable me to learn easily and keep my interest at its peak.
The online learning tool Memrise is one of sites I use to learn Russian. It’s most useful at the very beginning of the learning process, when basic notions of grammar are quite boring. The reason why videos help so much when learning a language is because they usually include context, dialect, expression and culture. Also learning through videos is way more interactive and therefore it is easier to memorise concepts and words. Interactive learning tools are always the easier way to keep learning a language, and they also make consistency way more enjoyable, when at times it seems quite hard to dedicate time daily to study, for example, hard grammar contents.
Memrise is currently piling out the world’s first video dictionary for English language learners, which sounds absolutely amazing to me. The team, had initially realised a 3,000 popular/useful words and phrases dictionary that has consequently been incorporated into the Memrise language courses, offered by the site. However, that was only the first step the Memrise team has taken. In fact, next year the Memrise team is planning to travel around Europe in a double decker bus called ‘The Membus’. Thus, name which recalls the word ‘member’ to me, like being a member of something so cool! However I am sure that the intention of the Memrise team was to mix the two words: ‘Memrise’ and ‘bus’.
The team will travel with the aim of collecting videos of different European languages in order to make the learning process easier to other language learners. The learners can now enjoy even more the use of the Memrise tool by looking up for words in a video dictionary. As part of this outstanding project, they have launched a kickstarter to fund the trip they are planning for next year.
If you are interested in the project and would love to support it, click this link.
Luckily they have already hit the target and therefore they have been looking to stretch their goals to make the trip even longer and the experience even more sensational. In fact, on the 17th of December they had 1, 300 backers and they successfully raised about £72, 408 to finally create 10 videos in about 10 languages, among which appears Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Dutch.
I must say that I would love to be on that bus and I would also love to have those video dictionaries to improve languages in a more interactive and fun way. Schools, for example, could suggest pupils to use those dictionaries when doing homework at home in order to have them always engaged in the cause of learning languages.
Languages are, without a doubt, nowadays the best way of opening not a door but many doors to have access to a better future. Can’t wait to see what the Memrise team holds next for us languages learners!
