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What does it take to found a globally important company in these times? We’re interested in what happens before universally-acknowledged success.
Join Brett Kistler as he engages in deep conversations with business leaders from emerging markets, being vulnerable about their experience in the early- to median-stage moments of their founding journey.
Episode 10: Ben Whatley Memrise
Intro: What I have found is I need to distill out of all the details which are the important directional, structural pieces, the kind of principles of what we are trying to build that I really care about.
Brett: All right, everybody. Welcome back to the ClearView podcast. Today I am speaking with Ben Whatley. He is the chief product officer of Memrise. How are you doing today, Ben?
Ben: Very good, thanks. Great to be talking.
Brett: Yeah, you too. So tell me a little bit about Memrise. What are you guys doing over there?
Ben: We are helping people learn languages. We have got about 50 million users. We a couple years back won Google's app of the year, first education app to win it, first European app as well, and we are pretty excited about the mission.
Brett: So one of the bullet points we had to kind of dive into today on our talk was how tech can change the way we learn and live. So language learning, people have been using tech to change the way we learn languages for a long time all the way back from Rosetta Stone, Duolingo. What is it that Memrise is doing differently?
Ben: Actually, if you look at the way we have gone about learning languages just in the history of humanity, the traditional way to learn languages is to live near somebody who speaks a different language and to want to trade with them or talk to them or make love to them. Then, you pretty soon work out how to speak their language, and then there was kind of an unfortunate period in the kind of early modern era where people wrote textbooks for teaching Latin. But the original textbooks for teaching Latin were to teach you to be a really good Latin translator once you already spoke Latin because it was kind of assumed you spoke Latin because you chatted in it if you were an educated person back then. Then they created textbooks in order to help you be a better translator of prose.
Then when Latin died out as a spoken language, we only had these textbooks left, and then people started teaching from textbooks. It is an anathema to the way the human mind actually works. In fact, the only way that you develop an ability in a foreign language is by processing target language input, but just above the level you currently understand. You have to be guessing slightly at what it means. Learning grammar structures, what the rules are, learning the translations of individual words, these things in themselves will never get you to the point of actually speaking a language.
In a way, over that period of transition in the early modern era, there was this shift of this construction of an idea of a language as something external to you that you learn, and by learning the language, then you can do and do stuff in Spain or Berlin. But that's kind of like teaching people the rules of Monopoly but never letting them actually play a game of Monopoly and examining them on whether they know all of the rules of Monopoly. I don´t know if you have ever tried to read, but I never actually now read the rules of board games because I know I am not going to understand them. The only way to do is you just start playing and you gradually work it out as you start playing and get a feel for it. That is how humans learn things. That is how we approach language learning as well.
It is the traditional way of learning languages, but it's not the more recently traditional way of teaching languages in order to help you pass exams. To your point, that's the way the first apps, the first software went about trying to teach languages was based on the way we teach languages in schools. I don’t know what your experience was like of learning languages in schools, but mine was basically an abject failure.
Brett: Mine, too. My experience learning languages in schools was an abject failure, and then I went to Mexico on a trip. I was like wow, I want to move to Mexico, so then suddenly I wanted to learn Spanish even though I had taken it for years in like middle and high school, I hadn´t learned anything. Then once I wanted it, then I started listening to music.
Ben: Then you could do it, and in fact, it's even deeper. In one sense, you want to do it and so you do it, but in fact, the pedagogical approach, you pick up grammatical structures and your ability to use grammatical structures in the order in which they can convey meaning for you. As an example of this, when people learn English, in like lesson one, they are taught in the present tense you put an -s on the third person. I eat. He eats. It is always taught right at the start. English learners don´t do that until they are really sort of upper intermediate. They are pretty damned good at English before they start doing that because it doesn't matter. No one cares. It just doesn't matter at all. If I say the boy he eat the chocolate, no one is confused about what is going on.
So when you actually have meaning to transfer, you care about communicating with someone. That is when you learn, but it is the only time you learn not just because there is sort of a motivational aspect but because actually that's how language learning works. Your brain will only do what it is has to do in order to get its meaning understood, and so yeah, when you want to be in Mexico and you want to understand what the songs are saying, when you want to order yourself a beer, that is when you learn how to order yourself a beer. That segues into. Sorry, I am just talking a lot. I don´t know what the podcast protocol is on this.
One of the big issues we have as an app is if you are in your bar in Tijuana and you want a beer, you have to work out how to order a beer. Then your reward is you get a beer, whereas if you are on a mobile app and we are trying to get you to get good at ordering beer, we can get you to say una cerveza, por favor. But all we can give you is a green tick, which is just a whole lot less rewarding than a beer. This is part of the crux of the problem for a mobile app as a way of learning languages is that we need to find totally different motivational triggers. We need to understand what the motivations are when you are in that perfect language acquisition environment, which is living in a country where the language is spoken and trying to live your life and trying to get stuff done. That is the perfect environment. What are the motivations there? What can we reproduce on your phone? What can we not?
By understanding those levers, we can actually create. It is incredibly rich what we can do on a mobile phone in terms of video now, in terms of actually connecting you live with people. We have got a huge range of options, but we have got to understand what it is that is going to motivate you to engage in those conversations, to try and understand those videos and so on. That's kind of the art of what we are.
Brett: That makes a lot of sense. What you are pointing is the traditional learning of languages, even the way they have been built into apps, is largely intellectual, and language isn't just an intellectual thing. We actually do it with our body. We develop a muscle memory for the speech patterns we are using, and then we pick up body language responses and backchanneling from the people we are speaking with to constantly gauge how well they are understanding what we are saying or what we think they are understanding of what we are saying.
Ben: An analogy I use for this is like I am playing the jazz piano where there are a few points in there that first of all you said it is an intellectualized activity. That is absolutely right. The way that we tend to think of it is a very kind of left-brain activity if we think of language like a puzzle. I was taught Latin in school, and it literally was like a puzzle. I had never heard it spoken out loud. It was just a puzzle I had to work out the order of the words and then I had to go and look up the declension of masculine nouns and find the right ending for that case and all that. It was just done like a puzzle, and that´s one part of the way that language works.
But then there´s the other side, and when you look at the hemi-spacial specialization in language processing, there is one part that is like the direct literal meaning of words and word order that is very much left hemisphere processed. But then you have got the right hemisphere processes, which is a lot more about contextual meaning, a lot more about emotional salience, about the kind of feel of the language. You can't really understand the language without having both of these things together, but we teach the kind of left-brain side of it. Then we leave the right brain side of it to when you go out and actually exist in the world and try and tie that intellectual ability back to your real life.
It´s a great analogy. I was explaining this to a jazz pianist. He explained to me in jazz piano. I am terrible at piano. I am just relating what he said to me because it was a great analogy. He said the right hand, which is governed by the left brain plays the melody, and that's the notes in the right order and it is getting the right notes. That's what people think of as the tune of what´s playing. But if you just play that, that's not music. You need to add the left hand to make it music, and that's where the emotional is, that's the context for it. That's all of those parts.
I think there's a really strong analogy in the way that we produce and process music and the way that we produce and process language. To distill it down, I think the recent traditional school and other courses for teaching languages teach you the right hand. They teach you the melody, but they don't teach the left hand and to give it the context. We need to bring both of those things together.
Brett: That´s a fascinating metaphor. I had never heard that before. The right hand plays the melody and is connected to the left brain. Language, Broca's area is sort of considered to be a language area of your brain, and it is in the left hemisphere, but a lot of your associative mapping, like your semantic web of how the world fits together, and when you are walking through a bar and your brain is processing people and objects and beers and labels and flavors, it's doing that by connecting to all of the different parts of your brain and your body that are processing those sensory experiences. They are all a part of what you are ultimately going to want, and then what you are going to say.
Ben: Right, absolutely. When you think of just the experience of creating a sentence. As I was saying, the way I learned Latin and the way a lot of people try to teach languages by translating sentence by sentence saying how do you say this in the language, and that kind of practice is muscle of having a whole concept or set of ideas that you want to convey and then trying to convey them at once. But actually the experience of speaking is that you just don't know how the sentence is going to end. You start speaking, and it is a much more procedural memory of these are chunks that could come next given what you have said already. You have got that feeling of what you want to express, and so you are going to lay those rails in front of you. Sometimes you talk yourself into a dead-end. You are like hold on, that sentence isn't going to work. I´ve got to slightly back up and go down a different path.
If all you practice is translating a sentence into another language, you are not practicing that experience of feeling that you want to express something and trying to lay the track in front of you. That is actually the necessary and sufficient skill that you need to have. There are just so many areas in language teaching where we traditionally get lost in this loop where we want to know whether the student is able to do something, so we set them a test. We teach them to be able to pass that test, but all of it misses this slightly ephemeral, slightly hard to grasp concept that what people actually want to do is be able to feel that they want to express something and then pour out words that they don´t know quite where those words are going to go but they go roughly in the right direction and then they end up in the right place.
Those are just very different skills and working out to train people just to do that skill and not to do all the things that help them pass a grammar test, not to help them translate individual sentences and so on. That's what we are kind of focused on and just making that process as efficient as possible.
Brett: And the more emotionally engaged you are in the moment, the more those words have to kind of flow from that place, which is why even in your own language, you can be stupefied if you are in the presence of a romantic interest, and you are just.
Ben: I am going to riff off that. It is a kind of truism that the best way to learn a language is by having a monoglot lover. I was just riffing off the fact that you were saying that you may be tongue-tied in your own language in the presence of a love interest, but maybe part of the quality of the monoglot lover is that you are kind of forging your abilities in the fire of a difficult situation of talking to somebody you really care about. I don´t know whether there is much mileage in that thought.
Brett: I have had that experience, and it is a fascinating one. It has impacts on both the language learning and on the relationship that are just very unique as a dynamic.
Ben: What was your experience there? It sounds like there is a story.
Brett: Just a couple of experiences. When I first moved to Mexico, I was like 19 or 20 or something. I met girls there that spoke only Spanish, and I spoke brand new Spanish. Trying to get to know them, that was a process. Similar in Turkey, I had a couple of experiences there using Google Translate and trying to speak very, very basic Turkish. I studied for a little while. Yeah, I have a little bit of experience with it, but I have never dated a long-term partner that was monoglot in another language. I know some people who have, and it is fascinating.
Ben: I had an experience from when I was living in China. One of my daughters spoke Chinese before English, and the other one gradually picked up Chinese pretty quickly. I had the very strange experience. My Chinese was pretty fluent at the time. It is getting a bit rusty now, but I still didn't have any of the language for talking to children and like playing with children. It was such a weird thing to find this experience where I just couldn't play children's games with my child. I thought I was pretty fluent in Chinese, but that area was just like nothing. I had nothing. That made it really hard to develop that relationship with my child because I had to keep switching back to English, but then the younger child didn't speak English. It was just very peculiar, just bumping up against the edges of where you think you are competent in a language. It was like do I actually. I didn't even know a polite childish way to say to do a wee, so when she was asking me [speaking Chinese]. I was like what is she talking about. It took me a while. Actually she went to the loo eventually, and I was like okay, now I am getting it. But there are these very basic things.
Language learning is so context specific as well. When you set that in the context of a specific relationship, that becomes the language that you know. You are kind of unaware because you don't keep moving outside that context of how limited your ability in the world is.
Brett: I mean this is a whole other rabbit hole, but I am curious what it is like to grow up with a father that doesn't speak your language at the level of speaking to a child as you.
Ben: Right, and both me and my wife, we are both English. None of us were speaking the language as well as they were, which was really fascinating. I was really aware of the cultural barrier, and I was aware that I just didn't know how I felt about it. I was also aware that I had not empathized with that enough. People of Chinese ethnicity I knew in England whose parents had moved to England or whatever, I just hadn't really understood that separation for the parents of children being brought up generally in another culture who just don´t have that residue of it. I just felt that happening to myself. It was a very strange experience.
Brett: I can understand now your personal connection to this project.
Ben: Right. Memrise, from my perspective, grew out of I had a very similar experience to you of learning languages at school. I just wasn't very good at it, but also I studied psychology at Oxford where I met my co-founder. One of the things I noticed or just troubled me when I was studying how the human brain learns was it is almost a defining feature of humans that we learn languages. If you are not very good at something that's a defining feature of your species, it is sort of hurtful to the ego.
After I left Oxford, I said I am going to go and see if I can learn a language if no one is trying to teach me, if I just go do this in a traditional way, live in China and see if I can make myself understand. Can I make any progress? I moved to China. I moved to a place called Chichi Har, which is in the far northeast corner, on the Siberian border, and then just saw if I could, with minimal teaching, actually find a way to speak the language. What I discovered was yes, by employing memory techniques and just trying to make myself understand, I could actually learn it remarkably quickly to a remarkably good level.
That then led a little time later into thinking we have got to spread this understanding, and we have got to reverse this extraordinary situation where people spend years studying languages without ever actually using them. It is like having a school class study the rules of chess, but no one actually plays it.
Brett: Absolutely, so you mentioned using memory techniques, and the company is called Memrise. Is there a connection to that? It's interesting to me that the name of a language company doesn't seem to evoke language in the name or the concept of language, but it is more about memory.
Ben: It is kind of about how you use your mind more effectively. Ed and I both studied memory, Ed, my co-founder and who is the CEO. He was also a memory grandmaster and got very into competitive memorization. He trained a journalist called Josh Foer to be US Memory Champion in a year, who wrote a great book called Moonwalking with Einstein about the experience. We come from that background, but also had a bit of our chip on our shoulder about the way people think about memory. People tend to have this opinion of memory as being.
Through human history, we tend to use analogies for the mind that are linked to the cutting edge of our technology at the time. It used to be clockwork. We used to think of the mind as a sort of clockwork thing. Now we think of it as a computer. We have this model of how human memory works, like files you save on the company and then you can go and open them up, which is just not how human memory works.
Brett: It is more about ecosystem.
Ben: If I ask you to imagine a cow smoking a cigar, you don't just invent that as a piece of creativity out of nothing. The cow that you are imagining is a cow that is based on a cow that you have seen. It is a memory that is stored somewhere, and the cigar likewise. You are just piecing together memories that you have got. In a sense, memory gives us the building blocks that define what we can build with our imagination. But in the sort of popular discourse, we tend to have this dichotomy of memory or creativity, which side do you come down on. We have this viewpoint that creativity and memory are inseparable, and in fact, memory itself and memorizing things is an act of creativity. The Memory World Championships are kind of the imagination world championships. It is how you connect meaningless stuff to give it meaning, and, therefore, make it memorable.
We were talking a lot about this at the point of founding. Particularly in the light of learning Chinese characters, memory techniques are hugely powerful, but also for the vocab learning aspect of learning a language, which is still useful and a helpful part of it. Memory techniques are hugely important in understanding what's going to strengthen a memory effectively. These are all kinds of useful things. That was our kind of first step as a product. We probably named the product slightly too much to do with the first part rather than the next horizon, which was already very much in our plans, but we could have made it in our name too.
Brett: I understand. I want to get back to something that we were touching on earlier, which is what Memrise does that that incorporates this full, holistic picture of memory learning into an app and into the technology so that people aren't just getting a dopamine hit of a green checkmark when they get something right, but they are getting something that kind of hits their whole system.
Ben: So the motivation has to be actually making progress. That is the only true motivation in learning a language, and green ticks only go so far without that. As I mentioned earlier, literally the only way you can acquire an ability in a foreign language is by having target language input just above your current level. On one level, if you just distill down the tasks that we are going after, it is to get learners to just engage in and try and understand content that is just above their current level for a couple of hundred hours and just really focus that. That's one level of what we are trying to do.
But then, you say what things govern what language is just above your current level. The first thing is if you don't know any words or phrases, there is going to be very little content, and the task of trying to interest you in that content is going to be pretty hard. We can help ourselves hugely by teaching you words and phrases very quickly. That's where the memory techniques come in, and that is where we can build up your vocab at a much faster rate. Just some rough numbers, learning in classes, people learn long term about three to four words per hour of study time, new words. If you compare that to the vocab explosion stage of early childhood, children learn 10 to 12 words a day. On Memrise, learners over the long term learn about 15 words per hour, so it is way, way faster even than children at their fastest rate of language acquisition. That's because we are using these memory techniques and applying them effectively.
What we do then is we teach you the words and phrases, but then we have what we call situation tasks. You learn the words and phrases, but then you have to go and make sure you can understand them in the real world. There are comprehension tasks. We call them response tasks where you have got a video asking you a question, and you speak back to it, just things that keep pushing you slightly outside your comfort zone. In that example of the responses task, rather than saying how do you say one beer, please in Spanish, and you have to answer it, that's just a test. Instead, the video says que quieres, and then that happens in the video, and then you have to think up an answer to it. We might give you a prompt in English saying you are thirsty, maybe you feel like a beer, and then you have to think oh shit, I have got to say that, how do I say it.
It is finding these kinds of experiences that take that knowledge you have got, what we were talking about earlier, that kind of left-brain knowledge about the language that you have got, how to translate the individual words, and create situations where you need to engage the more right brain feeling of the context of what's going on. How do I change that into a desire to express something? That's the kind of training we are building, and the experience. We are doing that in a way. Also, built on top of that system is the fact that language, when it is taught as a thing you need to learn, is taught as a syllabus. It is like you learn these things in this order, and the teacher, the all-knowing teacher lays out the order in which you should learn it.
Like your experience in Mexico, that's not the order that you will pick things up. The order you will pick things up is the order that they are interesting to you, and actually, there isn't very much difference in difficulty between the subjunctive than the present tense. They are both just chunks of language that you didn't know and now you know. The way that we have structured our whole content system is that you can learn this in any order, and you can pick up the language that is useful to what you want to do. Whatever it is that you have learned, you will get served with situations tasks based on everything that you have learned. If you learn a particular phrase and get tested on it and get a situation task for that phrase, the situation task you get will be different from the situation task I get because you will have learned other phrases that make it possible to give you a different situation task.
Brett: That makes a lot of sense now.
Ben: Radio is the right medium for explaining something that definitely needs a diagram, but essentially we have created this context structure where it allows us to lay the rails in front of the learner based on their interest. It is entirely a learner centric journey of what you are interested in and what you want to learn, and then we can give you what you need. Whatever it is that you need, we can spin up these situation tasks that give you that experience of just stretching beyond the knowledge of the language and give you that experience of applying it.
Brett: Your interest basically navigates the search space of content rather than a set syllabus, which is much better.
Ben: Yes. I think this is a huge problem for EdTech in general, by the way. It is a problem, and it is a missed opportunity, this kind of paternalistic sense of syllabus creation. You need to learn this. It's only relevant to a very, very few spheres of life. If I am going to see a doctor, I probably want to know that they have covered the basic syllabus and they know those things. But in most other situations, what you want is the ability to learn rather than having learned it. When we are looking to employ people, we are not looking for someone who has done a computer science degree in C because they are really good at programming C. We want to know they were good at learning that because then they are going to be able to learn whatever else we need them to learn as they are working it out. I think it applies to languages, and it applies to all realms of education. I think it is something that EdTech has a particular opportunity to change that I think it can change faster than it is.
Brett: I think it really does apply to everything. A doctor, yes, I want a doctor to have learned the syllabus of things that they are supposed to learn so that they don´t miss a common thing they could miss if they just learned it through intuition. But also, I want them to have a lot of hands-on experience and have a lot of intuition, so that if I am bleeding out on the table, they also know to be checking for the other thing. The same is even true in language. If I want somebody to write a press release, I want them to have studied and know the grammatical rules of the business version of the language that they are doing this in, but also they need to have the creativity and everything else to make it engaging.
Ben: Absolutely. It is an interesting thing that I kind of related to that about, to what you were saying about the context specificness of language as well. You find things in talking to polyglots. One polyglot I know, for example, has an Italian girlfriend, and speaks Italian fluently but cannot read in Italian. He actually hasn’t spoken French since he was at school and finds it very difficult to socialize in French but can read books in French because he did all of the exams and the grammar in French. Therefore, he just has a much tighter understanding of the structure of the language.
This is the point. It is not wrong to learn grammar. It is not unhelpful, but it is not your shortest route to being able to chat with people and to be able to make friends. Just as my children can speak perfectly in English now, but they can't write a press release very well. They have got a way to go. They need to learn a little bit more about the structure of language to make them bullet proof in that. They don´t know grammar rules. It is a question of what you need to learn in order to be able to get to the goal that most of our users have, which is socializing in the language. When that is your target, the way you lay out the experience is very different to if your target is passing an exam, or your target is writing a novel in the language. They all require different ways of going about it.
Brett: Right, ultimately we live in a social reality the way that our mammalian brains and nervous systems are constructed.
Ben: Yeah, indeed.
Brett: We are getting close to the end of our time here, so I want to ask just one more question, which is: What is something that you have learned about yourself through this startup journey that has most impacted the business?
Ben: Wow. Referring back to what I said before, I am going to start talking and see what I say. Definitely, the extent of self-learning is enormous, and it is incredibly frustrating to realize how little attention I paid to things that I kind of knew back when we founded the company. I kind of knew that I was like that, but I didn't realize the extent to which I was like that and the extent to which that was going to impact the direction of the company. I think the particular things, so my experience of being a founder, which is entirely personal, was that when the company was formed in the beginning stages, I was super intense, worked all hours and all weekends, expected everyone else to do the same. When things were obviously going badly and we should have given up, it literally never occurred to me. It was just completely relentless, and we just pushed, pushed, and pushed until the damn thing worked.
As we then started to grow the team, I guess two things happened. One, I knew that I needed to change the way that I was behaving with the team, but I didn't know quite how to do that. I wasn't able to give people the space that they needed to do the work at the same time as giving them clear direction on where the work should go. What I mean by that is I found it hard when I had been working right in the details and I have all the details in my mind and I understand the problem from all sides and I have got total control of it, as you step back and allow somebody else to start dealing with it, what I found is I need to distill out all of the details which are the important directional, structural pieces, the kind of principles of what we are trying to build that I really care about and communicate those, and let people fill in the other parts for them, for themselves and work out the other parts. I found that I didn't consciously distinguish between the really big, important principle pieces and the details, and so I would just splurge everything at people and expect them to understand everything I was saying.
I thought also because they didn´t question me that they had understood it. The two things that were happening, one, I hadn't understood the extent to which I was holding a detailed, complex map in my mind and expecting everyone else to understand it. I hadn't myself done the work to understand what the principles and the details are, and making that separation out. The other thing was that I just wasn't noticing that when we were a tiny team, we were all totally equal and pitching in. If people thought I was talking shit, they told me I was talking shit, but at some point, people weren't working with me as closely, didn´t know me as well and they stopped telling me. Then, I would give them a download of detail and they would nod, and then they would go away and be like I don't know what he was talking about. I don´t know what they said, but whatever, they would go away and do something that wasn´t in line. We hadn't noticed that we weren't there.
I guess back to your question of what I learned about myself. I think just learning the extent to which I am not clear in explaining myself naturally, and that that comes from understanding things through understanding the whole gamut of the detail and just understanding the whole project in detail is the way that I get comfortable with what´s going on. In order to actually explain that to somebody else, I need to distill that down to some basic principles that are the most important parts and then allow the other bits to be made for them. I think it took me a long time to understand that people weren´t understanding me.
Brett: That´s a beautiful reflection. I think it even relates to language learning, too. A lot of people´s experience in learning a language is that so much is thrown at them, and they are overwhelmed, and that could be the experience of an employee in a company when they have a founder who has just got this whole vision in their head. They are trying to download it all the time. As you said, as the company grows beyond those people that are close enough to be a part of that vision, then it grows beyond that and there's people who don't have as much direct access to you. But the times that they do have access to you, they just overwhelmed. They could take that to mean that they are incompetent and not able to understand, and then they might not ask questions because they might feel stupid. Then things go in a different direction than intended.
Ben: Also, then the feedback that I give, if I am not careful, and if I don´t know which are the important principles that I want to communicate and which are detailed ideas that I don't feel very strongly about, those get taken as the same thing. If someone has contact with the founder who just says I don't think that bit, why is that bit like that, that´s taken with the same gravity as when I talk about something that is absolutely core strategy because I haven't told them that they are different. I think that has been something that I feel like I am still learning.
Brett: I am still learning that, too. I have a lot more to learn in that particular area.
Ben: There is always another order of magnitude of improvement there, I think, in clarity.
Brett: It is asymptotic. Ben, thank you very much. This has been a really, really riveting conversation.
Ben: Very good to chat. I've enjoyed it.
Brett: I really appreciate it. Take care.
References
Foer, Joshua. (2012) Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/301277/moonwalking-with-einstein-by-joshua-foer/9780143120537