"The Memrise Prize is an applied science challenge to create the most powerful methodology for memorising new information, using any and all effects discovered in the history of psychological research or even some undiscovered ones. […]
The ultimate aim, in a nutshell, is this: real world learners will be given one hour to memorise translations of foreign language words such as house = talo (this is in Finnish), with the quality of their memorisation tested one week later. The competition will compare different ways of using that hour of learning: what’s the best way to spend that hour to maximise retention after one week?"
It isn’t a good match for the SSi methodology, unfortunately, for two reasons - one, their word list is exclusively nouns (which I’d argue aren’t the right words to be starting with! and which certainly aren’t how we accelerate initial acquisition), and two, their testing is from target language prompt -> English (on a written basis, as far as I can see). We work on recognition skills via the listening exercises (ie at a later stage than initial acquisition), so this test wouldn’t be a very good marker of how well a student has started to produce the target language.
It’s an interesting idea, but there are quite a few (unexamined?) premises in there which lean it in the direction of a tool similar to Memrise, rather than anything dramatically different…
It also wouldn’t be a good fit for the Gold List system, since the premise of the latter is that you can’t even think about testing whether it’s in your long-term memory until at least 2 weeks.
