Welcome! 👨‍💻
I'm Kevin, the solo developer behind MemoCoach. The app was originally based on a technique that my primary school teacher employed to help students memorize poems in record time (in my tiny school in Belgium 🇧🇪).
If you are an actor, comedian, singer, public speaker, content creator or a student, you are in good hands and in good company! đź’Ş
If you end up liking the app, we would be very grateful if you could take a minute to write a positive review. It really helps the app climb the charts and get discovered by more people! Just tap here to open the review page. Thank you!
How to import your texts
Okay, time to learn! You can study your own texts or start testing the app with the poem The road not taken by Robert Frost.
To add your own texts, tap the + Add text button on the Library page. Keep in mind that you can copy & paste texts from anywhere (Safari, Notes, etc.). If you become a Premium user, you can also import PDF, TXT, RTF or HTML files.
How to start memorizing
Once your text is ready, here is how I recommend studying it:
- Tap your text and select the first learning method:
- Read the entire text aloud a few times to get accustomed to it. For your information, many users find that reading aloud maximizes their memorization speed.
- Once you feel ready to start hiding words, tap the “Hide” blue button once. This will hide the last word of each paragraph:
- You can then read the text again, this time trying to remember the hidden words and fill out the blanks from your memory.
- Once you manage to read the text without hesitating when you encounter hidden words, you can increase the difficulty by hiding more words.
- If it gets too hard and you can't remember some words, lower the difficulty by tapping the “Reveal” button on the left, which will unhide one word per paragraph.
Once all words are hidden, the button to hide more words will disappear, and you will know your text by heart! That was quick, wasn't it?
I recommend reading the text a few times whenever you hide more words, until you manage to read it fluently, without having to think or hesitate.
What's next?
Simply pick the next memorizing method and challenge your brain again, but differently. The methods are ordered by difficulty, so you can start at the top and work your way down.
Tips and tricks
- Do you want to test all the memorizing methods before upgrading to Premium? Just restore the sample poem (via the button in
Settings), all methods will be unlocked on that text đź’Ş - If you want to remember a text forever, it is recommended to review the text around 24h after first learning it, then 10 days, 30 days and 60 days later. After this last review, you should know your text by heart, for long-term.
- Nice little trick: if you have difficulties remembering one specific hidden word, you do not need to tap the “Reveal” button several times: just do a long press on the text itself, and all words will momentarily re-appear. Release your finger, and the words will be hidden again.
- With several methods, each time you press the button to hide words, one word from each paragraph is hidden, and paragraphs are delimited by line breaks. So if you have a long text without line breaks, I would actually suggest adding line breaks so that there will be more paragraphs and therefore more words hidden at each tap. You'll learn faster and will need less taps.
- If you want to reset your text, you do not need to tap several times on the un-hide button: just long-press on the “Reveal” button and it will get reset.
- Please regularly backup your data backup to iCloud Drive/Dropbox/etc (it's in the
Settingsmenu). - Even if you are not Premium, your texts are still saved as part of your iCloud/iTunes backups. You can update the app or restore your device from a backup, and your texts will be retrieved (but do not delete the previous version before updating). However, if you delete the app or restore your device without using your iCloud/iTunes backup, you might need to re-enter your texts. I would therefore recommend you to keep a copy of the texts somewhere else, like in the Notes app (or to use the Premium import/export options).
- If you have a long text to learn, it might be useful to split it into a few separate smaller texts, and learn one part at a time. I am working on a simple solution to separate texts into several sections, please email me if you want to beta-test it!
- Regarding languages that use characters (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese,...): since there are no white spaces between characters in those languages, the app cannot find "words". But I've created a feature that hides characters separately! It's not perfect, because it sometimes cuts some meanings in the middle (since you might need several characters to express a meaning), but it's a very good exercise anyway, according to users that had requested that feature. You do not need to do anything to enable that feature: the app will automatically detect that the text uses characters, and will activate the characters setting for those texts. However, do not forget to add a few line breaks into the text to create "paragraphs", otherwise only one character will be hidden at each tap, which means you would need to tap many times to hide enough characters.
All right, you’re ready to go. Keep in mind that you can contact me at any time by tapping Settings on the home page. I am currently implementing features that have been requested by users, so if you have any specific need, just get in touch. Several memorizing methods were actually suggested by users of the app!
Also, I'd love to hear what you learned using the app.
Happy learning!
Kevin