Learn to read a sentence of Chinese in 3 minutes
This is unintentionally an illustration of how LOUSY general (all-languages-included) materials for language-learning are. I am a native speaker of English who acquired Chinese as a second language at adult age during the late 1970s and early 1980s, gaining professional work as second-language teacher (Chinese for English speakers and English for Chinese speakers) and translator and interpreter. I don't like Rosetta Stone materials (as I have seen earlier editions of those) for the same reason that I don't like this Memrise lesson: the lesson is based on frameworks of learning Spanish or French for English speakers, and the lesson doesn't work nearly as well for Chinese, a non-Indo-European language.<p>The astute criticism already given in another comment has full force--the lesson here doesn't do a thing to teach a reader how to pronounce Chinese. Moreover, the lesson totally muffs up Chinese grammar, because "汉字好学" is not a 
"condensed form" of an expression that would include a copula verb in Chinese such as "汉字 [form of verb 'to be'] 好学" but rather the sole grammatical way to convey the idea in Chinese. Chinese grammar prefers stative verbs to combinations of copulas and adjectives. The word and character etymologies are also treated abominably poorly in the Memrise story. I never advocate filling one's mind with junk just to have memory hooks for learning new information.<p>This approach doesn't lay a good foundation for successful learning of Chinese by a native speaker of English. The tried and true textbooks by the late John DeFrancis from Yale University Press and their accompanying audio recordings reflect an older period of standard northern Mandarin, but are much better resources for learning Chinese than Memrise. Especially, DeFrancis's Beginning Chinese Reader is still the royal road for learning to read Chinese, the subject of the article kindly submitted here. DeFrancis made a very careful analysis of reading difficulties second-language learners of Chinese encounter. That is published in condensed form in the front part of Beginning Chinese Reader, and in full form in the classic article "Why Johnny Can't Read Chinese" in the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association.<p>As Confucius said, 學而時習之 不亦說乎, so there is no substitute for practice in language learning. Language learning is overlearning, and learning languages well takes time.<p>AFTER EDIT:<p>Two kind replies below raise questions about what I've written above. I was asked about James Heisig. I have perused his books about Japanese (another language I have studied, not as much as Chinese). Doing some looking-up just now to answer the question, I would say that the James Heisig interview<p><a href="http://www.japanvisitor.com/index.php?cID=419&pID=1979" rel="nofollow">http://www.japanvisitor.com/index.php?cID=419&pID=1979</a><p>gives, in Heisig's own words, cautions about using his texts as a comprehensive approach for learning literacy in Japanese. For memory aids for Chinese characters, I much prefer Grammata Serica Recensa by Bernhard Karlgren, a less popular but much more accurate reference book.<p>On the issue of "royal roads" to language learning, I am aware of the work of the Foreign Service language program and of its frequent failings. United States diplomats sometimes attain amazing success in learning languages--I met one once who was the best non-native speaker of Mandarin I have ever met, and who apologized for his Mandarin while saying that Lao is his stronger foreign language--but many United States diplomats are hobbled in their work by poor command of the relevant languages, which plays little role in the selection process for United States diplomats. I'm very respectful of differences among learners and agree with Israel Gelfand that "Students have no shortcomings, they have only peculiarities. The job of a teacher is to turn these peculiarities into advantages." That said, there is an irreducible body of fact in any new subject that each learner has to learn somehow, one hopes with the guidance of a good teacher. The late John DeFrancis was a very good teacher indeed of Chinese, and by validated test, most of the best readers of Chinese as a second language in my generation came into their reading ability with help from his textbook series. The approach taken by Beginning Chinese Reader is certainly better than that taken by the James Heisig popular books on Japanese, if I may say that to tie together the two kind comments.