Learn Aramaic Online Free

Link to the Aramaic course

This article by a best-selling memory researcher I found several months ago is the most beneficial I've ever read on language study, and less than two months after applying it my Hebrew vocabulary has increased by over 1,000 words.  (You can watch a video of my progress speaking modern Hebrew here.)

Joshua Foer, the author of Moonwalking with Einstein, found he would be spending the summer in the Congo with a tribe of pygmies and endeavored to learn their native language in a couple of months before his trip.  To accomplish this he consulted the world memory Grandmaster Ed Cooke.  Cooke, who himself has an MA in cognitive science from Paris Descartes University, shared with Foer his new free online learning company called Memrise that he co-founded with a Princeton neuroscientist.

Using the app for two and a half months Foer locked 1,100 African words into his long term memory. On average, he only spent four minutes at a time on the app during down time at his job. The total combined time it took him to memorize his 1,100 word dictionary was 22 hours. I’ve experienced very similar results with Hebrew.

Users create memory courses in any subject, especially languages.  Everything on the website undergoes aggressive empirical testing to optimize memory.  Small variables on the site are changed and honed regularly to discover what variations contribute to learning.  For example, Foer mentions that it was discovered people learn 0.5% better when flash cards are in one font as opposed to another and that Memrise’s servers discovered averages for how well people tend to learn given the hour of the day.

The website also takes advantage of well-known studies on spaced repetition.  When you want to memorize something, there are well-documented optimal time intervals for reviewing it just before the memory slips from your mind.  Memrise's algorithms keep track of how well you are doing on each word and informs you of the optimal time for reinforcing each memory.

The most valuable feature of the site is its community database of memory devices.  When you take a course you can flip through a pile of memory tricks that other users have created for each word.  The memory devices that get the most votes ascend to the top of the pile.  The ones I've created for this course are informed by the mnemonic methods advocated by leading memory experts in international competitions and by the majority of polyglots.

I’m currently studying Aramaic with Mike Heiser’s online institute (can't more highly recommend it, by the way) so I rummaged around in Memrises' Aramaic courses and found none of them satisfying. (Apparently, Aramaic isn’t hot with the kids.)  I created this course over several months for my personal benefit and in the hopes that it may help some educators and students.

The primary aim of the course is to give you the vocabulary fundamentals to access 90% of the texts in the Aramaic portions of the Hebrew Bible.  Every word has a pronunciation audio and phrase translations are utilized to help get you reading. You can log into Memrise immediately if you already have a facebook.  The course is titled "Aramaic Frequent Vocab w/Audio and Mems (Van Pelt)."

There's also a free Memrise smartphone app that I tend to do most of my studying on.  The app is great because it will give you non-invasive notifications whenever it is the optimal time to refresh your memories.  It also has replaced my meaningless impulse to constantly waste time on social media.  Below is a screen shot of what the app environment looks like.  The course covers 17 chapters.

Happy studying!