Would like to have seen an experience report for a non-picture based, alphabetic language like Spanish.
"For my first word, Memrise took the pictogram that signifies the word "woman" and overlaid it with a nice Flash motion graphic of a woman with her arms outstretched, which fit perfectly into the footprint of the pictogram."
It's not that hard to take basic characters from a picture-based language like Chinese and overlay pictures on that. The graphic overlay will ultimately remind you of the actual character's characteristics. It would have been much more interesting to see how well (or merely how) that idea works on a text-based language.
I clicked around a bit and found some "word lists" for Spanish. They seem to be doing a standard description of a visual, with pics to come later I suppose.
Ie. Buen Tiempo (good weather)
The instructions say to imagine eiher:
When the weather is good you can go out and have a "good time".
or
When the weather is good a jazz bad will have "good tempo".
I've seen this stuff for years...hints like imagine an arrow in a bowl of rice to remember that "Arroz" is Spanish for rice.
I think this works for simple words and phrases (just like the Rosetta stone). But if you really want to go deep into the language and become fluent, it will become difficult to create pictures for everything. This feels very gimmicky to me.
"For my first word, Memrise took the pictogram that signifies the word "woman" and overlaid it with a nice Flash motion graphic of a woman with her arms outstretched, which fit perfectly into the footprint of the pictogram."
It's not that hard to take basic characters from a picture-based language like Chinese and overlay pictures on that. The graphic overlay will ultimately remind you of the actual character's characteristics. It would have been much more interesting to see how well (or merely how) that idea works on a text-based language.