All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Down tools, people. You can now be taught Spanish by cats.
Memrise, a learning platform co-founded in the UK by memory expert Ed Cooke, is today launching CatAcademy -- a 99p
iOS app that uses photographs of felines to teach the linguistically curious new languages.
The first language is Spanish, with Italian, French, Portuguese and German in the pipeline. A total of 1,000 phrases can be learned with the tool, which the creators say will result in 2,000-3,000 words being added to your brain.
"We looked at what would the best visual mnemonics we could take to put in this language-learning app, and overwhelmingly that was cute pictures, and specifically cats," Ben Whately, COO of Memrise, told Wired.co.uk.
Speaking of the app, Whatley says "it's 100 percent entertainment", but he highlighted the learning aid working in the background behind the fun. "We've arranged a course based on the best principles of how to arrange a language learning course based on phrases, utility and frequency lists, and the technology of how to know when to test you at the right time," he says.
There are 1,000 cat photos in the initial release, some of which were licensed from cat meme website I Can Has Cheezburger.
Other photos were created by a community at Memrise's request. The company set up a Tumblr and asked cat owners to take photographs of their cats in scenarios, positions or environments that they felt best reflected a particular word of phrase. Users that repeatedly had photos accepted for the programme were paid for their effort. "Cats are super funny," Whatley says. "They're flexible in terms of what they can express. Whereas a cute picture of a dog might fit a couple of situations, it doesn't have the flexibility that cats do. They have incredibly expressive faces. When people are looking for something that makes them laugh and associate with a particular phrase or word the answer is more often cat than dog."
The six-person team working on CatAcademy at Memrise over the last seven months designed the app to be used in short bursts, so "challenges" in the software can be completed in about three minutes. Whatley said that in a previous beta test of the software, which was highly limited in functionality compared to the final release, users were very sticky. "We did a test version on short release in May/June, one in the UK and one in Canada. Just 80 phrases," Whatley said. "It turns out the attention figures we had there were 75 percent on day one, 50 percent after one week, 35 percent after one month. People were just coming back a lot, comparable to the best social games; when compared to a learning tool it was stratospherically high. That encouraged us to think this was worth throwing everything into."
The app is released today on the Apple App Store, for iPhone.
The software runs on an iPad as well and an Android release is "in the pipeline", along with other languages.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
