#languagelearningtools

Learning Japanese is an incredible journey. It opens doors to a rich culture, new opportunities, and deeper connections with the world. But let’s be honest, it can also feel a little overwhelming at first. There are countless books, apps, and videos out there, and choosing where to start is no easy task. As someone who’s been teaching Japanese for over 20 years, I’ve seen many learners struggle…

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Remember the times that we had to buy some books, cds or flashcards to study vocabulary items? Here is a news for you: Those days are long gone! As everything we know such as books, music, movies, games went digital, so are the tools for language learning. Digital tools makes language learning fun, interesting, easier and accessible for almost everyone.

Mobile applications for language learning

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Among the many tools created to help you learn a second language better, mobile applications are what stand out the most. Most of them are free, uses up a tiny bit of your memory, and they are always with you, which gives you the chance to study anywhere or anytime you feel like it. Among the many available mobile applications for language learning, the one I would like to highlight is Memrise.

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Memrise? Is not it Memorize?

Well, yes, it is a little wordplay, but that is not the point. According to Wikipedia, Memrise is a mobile application founded in 2005. It has more than 150 language courses across 25 languages and have over 20 million registered users.

Main advantage of the application is its user-friendly interface, which helps learners to use it easily. As soon as you download and open the application, easy to follow directions, hints and clues are supplied.  It gives you an option to sign in using your Google or Facebook account, which helps creating your own profile containing your information about you and your progress.

It also gives you the opportunity to set daily vocabulary goals and set a time to give you notifications to return to the app and continue studying.

 How to study with it?

On the main page of the application, there is a themed-story, which shows your progress in the shape of a rocket launch. This story-like atmosphere and the use of some elements of humor takes your attention off the language-learning task you are on and gives you a feeling of playing a game, which motivates you further and makes learning much more fun.

Under learn new words tab, you can find the word you are going to learn, listen to its pronunciation, see a picture relevant to its meaning and read the equivalent word for it in your mother language. All these different types of stimulus intensify the learning and makes recalling and retrieving the word easier. After learning the words, you are prompted to do practices consisting of picking out the correct answer from given choices and typing out the spellings of the English counterparts of words given.

There is also a chatbot, with whom you can practice the words and phrases you learned throughout your learning experience. The application also has a paid-Pro version, which offers you more advance-level words and videos of conversations including the words you learned.

How to use it in the classroom?

Since Memrise is a fun application, which helps students to learn and study new vocab, teachers can use it instead of traditional vocabulary lists. It is possible for teachers to set daily vocabulary goals for students to achieve. In addition, teachers can ask their students to set alarm periodically to return to the app and take some tests regularly. Another activity that can be done with the students is after setting goals for certain levels per day or week, all students in the class can take the speed review test- basically racing against time and each other. Then the teacher can follow the progress of each student from the leader board and determine a positive reinforce or some kind of award for the leading students.