gregdetre

Language learning app for intermediate learners who want to practice reading and listening:

- As you're reading, AI helps you with words it thinks you might not know

- Highlights etymologies & mnemonics

- Shows you words in their natural habitat, e.g. listen to example sentences

https://www.hellozenno.com/

I'm trying to read a kid's version of The Odyssey in Greek and to be able to understand my partner's mum, and these are the features that I wanted.

Also, I wanted to experiment with "what would an app like this look like if we could trust AI to be very cheap/fast/correct?".

- So, for example, it's a fully generative dictionary & search, e.g. the dictionary entries/metadata/example sentences don't exist until the first person searches for them!

- You can upload any kind of content (image, audio, text), and it'll automatically transcribe, translate, annotate, etc.

Hmmm, interesting. That hasn't been my personal experience.

The evidence suggests that brainstorming doesn't work so well - the loudest and earliest views tend to dominate.

Instead, the recommendation seems to be to allow people to generate ideas in silence first. This is my approach, which has worked very effectively in groups of up to a dozen remotely for a variety of questions:

https://www.makingdatamistakes.com/how-to-run-an-idea-stampe...

Cool! Drop me a line at greg at gregdetre dot co dot uk

Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies ch 4-6 are the best introduction to his modeling work. I can't recommend them highly enough.

Building on Hofstadter's models of analogy-making to build pattern recognition algorithms that work in a more human-like way. At least, that's my hope!

My background is in computational neuroscience, but I'm doing this on my own, mostly for fun. If it sounds interesting, I'd love some company! greg at gregdetre dot co dot uk

I've been using 1Password for a few years now. I'm not qualified to comment on the security aspects of it - I'm trusting them and Apple to take care of that.

But I can comment on the superb quality of the user-facing aspects - it's a pleasure to use, has great iPhone and Dropbox support, and I really like the way they communicate as a company.

I'll second that.

Furthermore, Sauce Labs offer servers running lots of different OS/browser combinations that you can run your Selenium tests on.

In other words:

- we write our Selenium tests in Python (assert that when you click, X happens)

- they get run on our continuous integration server every time we push to GitHub

- the Selenium tests fire up IE 8 on Windows on a Sauce Labs server and run themselves

- the output gets piped back to us as part of our unit testing suite, emailing us if any of the tests fail

Well, we almost have it working as well as that :) Either way, we've been really impressed by Sauce Labs so far.

I'd be totally fascinated to hear about this if you ever find it! I'm greg at memrise dot com.

There's lots of evidence to show that mnemonics boost recollection by a factor or three or so across a wide range of domains, abilities and time ranges. See e.g. http://www.unforgettablelanguages.com/studies.html

Re the intermediate mnemonic device, here's the way I picture things. The mnemonic provides training wheels for your brain, helping you get the answer right a few times. Then, after enough correct responses, mediated by this (hippocampal) mnemonic representation, you rely less and less on the training wheels, and your cortex has had a chance to form a longer-lasting and more direct semantic link.

Disclosure: I'm one of the co-founders of Memrise, so it's not too surprising that I think there's merit in this approach :) Drop me a line or reply here, and I can try and follow up in more detail. Maybe I should write a blog post...

If you're in London, drop me a line - greg at memrise dot com.

And even if you're not, take heart - some of the best people I know have been in this situation at one time or another.

Broadly, our scheduling algorithms are based on the same ideas of spaced repetition that inspired Anki, SuperMemo and lots of others, though the devil is often in the details.

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...

However, neither Anki nor SuperMemo enrich and speed up your learning with mems (crowd-sourced mnemonics), which provide a huge and well-documented boost to your learning rate and retention.

Perhaps most of all though, we've worked really hard to make Memrise a really happy learning experience. It's harder to put numbers on that, but hopefully you can feel it when you try it!

Thanks for the positivity. We have an iPhone app coming out in the next 10 days. Definitely let us know what you think of it if you try it.

Sentence building is definitely on our radar, but it's a rich and thorny domain, and we want to take our time coming up with something good.

P.S. Android is going to take a little longer.

We added the garden narrative in Spring 2011. The goal was to wrap our internal model of the state of your memories in a visual metaphor to make it clearer and more vivid for you as a learner.

We've improved the underlying algorithms a lot since then. Do let us know if you still find the garden confusing.

This is a great question.

In our experience, we've found that creating your own mnemonic is usually the best way to really deeply encode a new memory.

But a great mem from someone else works almost as well. And it's a lot easier to breeze along, giggling at other people's imagery, occasionally coming up with something new of your own.

Forgive the plug:

http://www.memrise.com/item/3190/impecunious/

That sounds promising. I'll take a look.

P.S. I'm at greg at memrise dot com if you make further progress and are looking for beta testers.