Most effective vocabulary learning technique revealed

UCL and language learning app Memrise have announced the winner of the first 'Memprize', a competition to find the world's most efficient and effective vocabulary learning technique. A team from Radboud University in the Netherlands won the prize after over a year of in-depth real-life empirical experiments involving more than 10,000 Memrise users as volunteers. Memprize was launched in 2014 to objectively compare the effectiveness of different ways of learning, and was led by Dr Rosalind Potts (UCL Psychology and Language Sciences). The Memprize challenged brain scientists to create the best way of learning 80 foreign vocabulary items in an hour, with a test one week later. The winning learning method, which more than doubled memory performance compared to the standard technique of repeated study, was based on a combination of different methods. Volunteers were trained to use the concept of memory palaces to visualise words in certain rooms for a later practice session which adapted to their performance. Participants also rated this method as the most enjoyable way to learn.