I've been experimenting with Memrise for several days—long enough to conclude it merits a mention.
Memrise is a vocabulary review system that specializes in languages, of which there are an incredible number, from French to Quechua to Klingon! (Alas, no Swiss German, no doubt hampered by the lack of an official written form.) There are other subjects, as well, but not many yet, and they are not well developed. The Periodic Table course, for example, would do better not reversing the "o" and the "u" in fluorine, and settling on either of the two acceptable spellings of the element Al, instead of compromising with "Alumnium." (Or is that a new element, named after all college graduates?)
I'm loving the Introductory German! My favorite language course is still Pimsleur, which along with Hippo gets the correct sound and feel of the language and its structure into my brain. But I also need a way to build up vocabulary, and Memrise is the best I've found so far. The vehicle is a simple "garden" system: new words are seeds, and through practice you sprout them, help them grow, "harvest" (more like transplant) them to long-term memory, and water them to keep them healthy. E-mail reminders bring you back to your "garden" at varying intervals—short for recently-learned words, longer for ones you know better—so you don't lose what you've learned.
It's easy to use and kind of fun. I find that I'm picking up vocabulary pretty well so far, though I do wonder who decided which words to introduce first. I mean, die Bundesrepublik? "Federal Republic" is not exactly a term I use every day. Or how about der Mülleimer? Dustbin? Dustbin? Dustbins are things people in the English novels I love to read are always "tipping" things into, but I'm sure I've used the term fewer times than Federal Republic. And is blöd (stupid) really an essential vocabulary word? Still, in addition to these oddities there are more useful terms, such as das Haus (house), vielleicht (maybe), and der Name (name). And I've finally caught the difference between der Staat (state) and die Stadt (city).
Unfortunately, I can't make the audio work in Firefox, and so must use IE or Chrome if I want to hear the words pronounced. That's something I find very valuable, not only for understanding and speaking, but because having heard the sound of a noun I'm much more likely to be able to remember whether it's die, der, or das, something I always have trouble with. I'm beginning to think of the article and the word as one entity, which of course will get me into trouble when I have to worry about inflection, but I'll climb that hill when I get to it.
It's also German German, and so uses the Eszett instead of the Swiss double "s." However, it accepts the double "s" when I have to type in an answer, so I'm fine with it. Letters with an umlaut are easy to enter, via either a mouse click or the Windows U.S. International keyboard (which I prefer because it is faster).
Here's hoping I manage to stick with the program, and not lose everything when I go on vacation....
