Memrise: Fun language lessons

Review by eFreeware

Memrise is most likely to appeal to anyone who has tried a language app before and come away sounding like a textbook. The pitch here is that you learn from recordings of native speakers in everyday situations rather than synthesized voices, so the language you hear is the language people use. If your goal is to hold a conversation with a partner's family, handle yourself better on a trip, prepare for an exam or simply keep your mind active, the app organizes its courses around that kind of outcome rather than around abstract grammar drills.

What you get is a catalog spanning more than 145 languages, from Spanish, Korean, Japanese and English down to Latin, Welsh, Yoruba and Tibetan. Lessons are built from real-life scenarios, and the app works on vocabulary, listening and speaking together. It has been on Google Play since May 2013 and carries a 4.4 average from over 1.5 million ratings, with more than 50 million installs, which tells you it has stayed in front of a very large audience for a long time.

The developer says 80 million people have used it, and cites coverage from outlets such as the BBC World Service, Condé Nast Traveller and Lonely Planet. Those are marketing lines, but the scale behind them is plausible. My interest is in whether the teaching method holds up for the kind of learner you are, and that is what the rest of this review works through.

Matching the app to your level and reasons for learning

The developer positions Memrise for three broad groups: beginners starting from nothing, intermediate learners trying to build confidence, and advanced learners polishing conversational skills. That is a wide net, and the scenario-based structure is what makes it plausible. A beginner gets short, concrete situations to work through instead of a wall of grammar. Someone further along gets to hear natural speech and practice producing it, which is usually the part that stalls.

The goal-based framing matters more than it might sound. Courses are organized around passing an exam, speaking at work, building relationships or exploring a culture you are drawn to. If you have a specific reason for learning, that reason shapes which lessons are worth your time. If you are learning purely out of curiosity, the same catalog still works, but you will need to decide for yourself which scenarios are relevant.

The language list is unusually broad. Beyond the major European and Asian languages, it includes smaller ones such as Icelandic, Mongolian, Slovenian, Welsh, Māori and Scottish Gaelic, plus Hausa, Igbo, isiXhosa and Zulu. For anyone who has struggled to find material for a less commonly taught language, that breadth is the strongest argument for trying it. The exact course content varies by language pair and by your device's language, so the experience is not identical across the catalog.

How the lessons actually teach

The core of the app is a library of lessons inspired by real-life scenarios. You work through vocabulary and phrases that the developer says locals actually use, rather than a generic word list. Listening practice comes from videos of native speakers in everyday settings, so you are hearing accents and pacing as they occur naturally. Speaking is practiced through sentence-building, grammar and conjugation exercises, which is where the app tries to move you from recognizing words to producing them.

The feature that stands out in the current build is the pair of AI tools: AI Buddies and AI tutors. These are described as personalized language-learning bots you can practice with. The idea is to give you something to talk to when a human partner is not available, as a way to build confidence in speaking. How much you get from them depends on how comfortable you are practicing against a bot rather than a person, which is a fair question for any learner to ask themselves.

Vocabulary, listening and speaking are treated as connected skills rather than separate modules, which is the right instinct for a language app. The developer's framing is that you learn as if you were living in the country. The practical version of that claim is that you spend your time on words and sentences you would encounter in daily life, and that the videos give you a reference point for how those sound when spoken by a native speaker.

What the Pro subscription changes

Memrise is free to download and contains ads. It also offers in-app purchases, and the developer is explicit that a Pro subscription is needed for the full set of learning features. The Pro tier unlocks all vocabulary lessons, all native-speaker videos and unlimited speaking practice, and removes ads. The free plan, by contrast, gives you limited vocabulary lessons, limited videos and conversations, and includes advertising.

What you can access varies depending on your device's language and your language pair, so the line between free and paid is not the same for every user. Subscriptions renew automatically unless you cancel before the end of the current payment period, and they are managed through your Google Play account. If you are considering Pro, that renewal behavior is the detail worth understanding before you commit, because it is the part people most often forget.

My read is that the free plan works as a trial of the method: enough vocabulary and video to tell whether the native-speaker approach clicks for you. If it does, Pro is what turns the app into a full course, since the complete lesson library and unlimited speaking practice sit behind it. If it does not, you have lost nothing but time. The developer's own framing makes clear that the subscription is central to the product rather than an optional extra.

A change worth knowing about if you used it before

The most recent update retired community courses from the app. If you built your own courses or worked through ones other users made, your courses and your progress in them have been moved to a separate Community Courses website rather than staying in the app. The developer points readers to the Memrise blog for the details.

For new users this changes nothing, since the app's own course catalog is what you would be working with anyway. For long-time users it is a meaningful shift: the community-built material that used to live alongside the official lessons now sits outside the app. If that was the part of Memrise you valued most, the experience in this build is different from what you remember.

It is also a reminder that the app's direction is toward its own structured courses and the AI practice tools rather than user-generated content. Whether that suits you depends on why you were using it in the first place.

How it compares with other routes to a language

The obvious alternatives are other subscription language apps, most of which lean on gamified drills and synthesized audio. Memrise's differentiator is the video of real speakers and the scenario framing, which makes it feel closer to eavesdropping on daily life than to completing a worksheet. If you have found that you can pass quiz after quiz but freeze when someone speaks to you, that gap is exactly what this approach is designed to close.

A second alternative is a tutor or a conversation partner. Those give you genuine back-and-forth with a person who can correct you in the moment, and no app replaces that. The AI Buddies and AI tutors here occupy a middle ground: more available than a human tutor, less unpredictable than a real conversation. For building the habit of speaking out loud before you do it with someone whose opinion matters, that middle ground has value.

A third route is a dedicated course or textbook for one specific language. Those tend to go deeper on grammar and structure than a multi-language app can, and they are usually cheaper over the long run. Where Memrise has the edge is breadth and accessibility: more than 145 languages in one place, with listening and speaking built into the same lessons rather than left to you to arrange separately.

A strong fit for learners who want to hear the language spoken

Memrise is worth installing if you want your language practice to sound like the language. The native-speaker videos, the scenario-based lessons and the speaking tools are all pointed at the same goal: getting you comfortable with how people actually talk, not just with how words are written. The breadth of the catalog means you are unlikely to be turned away because your target language is obscure.

The trade-offs are straightforward. There are ads on the free plan, and the developer is clear that full access to lessons, videos and unlimited speaking practice sits behind the Pro subscription. Community courses now live on a separate website rather than in the app. If you want a completely free course, or if the community-built material was what drew you in, those are real considerations.

For everyone else, the case is strong. Beginners get concrete situations to work through, intermediate learners get natural speech to imitate, and advanced learners get practice producing sentences rather than just recognizing them. With more than 50 million installs and a 4.4 rating across over 1.5 million reviews, it is a well-established choice, and the method it is built on is the reason to pick it over a drill-based alternative. I would point anyone learning a language for real-world use toward it, with the expectation that Pro is the version that delivers the full course.

What's new in version 2026.09.28.0

We have retired community courses from the app in this build. All of your community courses and your learning progress in them have been moved to a new Community Courses website. To read more and head to this new site, please search for the Memrise blog.