그냥

One thing that I love is learning foreign languages.  Ever since I started learning German on a whim some six or seven years ago, I have been completely enamored with studying languages from other places and people.  Hence I have used a lot of the language learning software and methods that are out there.  A more recent addition to the sphere of language learning is a site called LiveMocha.  I have been using it for a couple months now and will discuss my opinion on the site here.

Name

My god, is the name of this site stupid!  Sorry, I just had to get that off my chest first and foremost.  What kind of dolt came up with the name ‘LiveMocha?’  It’s almost as completely sickening as the word ‘blog.’  First off the name has absolutely nothing to do with the service the site provides.  It’s just a combination of two buzz words that people who think they’re hip like to throw around these days: ‘live’ and ‘mocha.’  If the name of the site was ’steaming pile of turd,’ I would have more respect for them.  Ok, now that that’s clear, let’s move on.

Learning Approach

Their learning approach is taken right out of the Rosetta Stone playbook, but they do improve on it.  They have almost no grammar available to learn, so you basically have to go to another site and learn some grammar and how to read the letters, etc. before you’ll be able to start the beginners lesson at LiveMocha.  Once you have learned the grammar (from somewhere else) then LiveMocha is pretty useful, though.  I would call it Rosetta Stone II, except that it’s made by someone completely different.  The flash cards, reading, listening, and quiz sections employ the exact same methods.  The innovation comes in the writing and speaking sections.  That’s really the part of the site that gets me excited.  The community atmosphere is also a great addition.  I’m going to break down the bits and talk about each one in depth.

Listening

The listening sections are usually fine.  You do get instances not that uncommonly in which the speaker actually says something different than what is written down.  This can be quite confusing for people just starting out learning the language.  Once you get to a more advanced level, you can easily spot when this happens, but it’s still a little annoying.  The speakers generally have a clear speaking voice, although at times they don’t sound very professionally recorded.  The volume can be all over the place.  You might turn up your speakers to hear one slide then get blasted out of your seat by the next one.  Some of the recordings are so low that you can’t hear them very well even if the speakers are turned up full blast.  Then there’s the occasional slide which doesn’t have audio at all for some reason.  These problems are not rare exactly, but they do happen infrequently enough that they are not a show stopper.  All in all, the listening on the site is acceptable.

Reading

The reading sections are mostly good depending on what language you are studying.  If you are studying Korean, English, or German, they seem to be fine and I don’t remember seeing a mistake.  That is unless you call not matching the voice a mistake, but that was already mentioned above.  If you are studying Farsi, on the other hand, it is completely unusable.  What you see is not Farsi text at all but just a jumbled mess of nonsense using Farsi fonts.  Sometimes it’s just written backwards.  Every once in a while it’s correct.  Usually it is scrambled beyond all recognition.  I tried viewing it in various browsers(IE, Firefox, Opera) and various operating systems(Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP) and while they actually looked different on each one, on none of them did it look right.  Here is what I do when I study Farsi.  I skip to the end of the lesson as quickly as possible then add all the words as flashcards.  Then I go learn the words from the flashcards.  In the flashcards, the Farsi is written correctly.

Speaking and Writing

I’m going to discuss speaking and writing together because they work on the the same principle.  This aspect is the reason you should go sign up for LiveMocha.  In the speaking section, you record yourself reading a paragraph (at lower levels) or answering an open-ended question (at higher levels).  In the writing section you compose sentences using the concepts you learned or answer open-ended questions.  Then you submit these answers and they are graded by native speakers who are at the site to learn some other language.  And it works really well!  A lot of the people don’t give you a lot of specifics, but some do.  Most give you at least something you can work on improving.  I have had some really helpful critiques of my exercises by others at the site.  In exchange, of course, you should go grade other people’s submissions.  It’s fun, though.  You get points for doing it and everybody likes points!  The points aren’t useful for anything as far as I can tell, but points are an end in themselves right?  There is only one problem I can think of with these exercises.  They are not even offered for Korean language!  If you only want to study Korean, LiveMocha is not the place for you.  Sorry.

Social Aspect

Another great reason to use LiveMocha is the ability to chat with and interact with native speakers to help each other learn (unless you’re learning Korean in which case the chat application they use doesn’t allow inputting Korean characters so you’re out of luck).  There are various ways you can interact with others on the site.  You can grade other people’s submissions.  You can add people as friends so that you see when the other has submitted something.  This is a better way to get quality reviews of your exercises than depending on random people to happen along and put work into critiquing you.  You can also create and share flashcard sets.  The flashcard sets are a great ways to learn things outside of the lessons on the site.  And flashcards have the added benefit of the text displaying correctly with every language I’ve tried.  I have also taken advantage of the chat option quite often as well.  There is also voice chat if you’re that brave which I haven’t been.  I just tell people I don’t have a microphone if they ask.  But you really should use it because it can help your speaking skills.

Summary

In conclusion, I would say that LiveMocha is worth the effort to give it a shot.  I haven’t tried any of their paid services, but what you can get for free is good enough that I would recommend it.  On the downside, it has a lot of bugs.  I mentioned some of them above.  It needs a lot of work to function the way I expect a professional site to function.  Especially a site that is about learning language needs to try to be a lot more compatible with different technologies as there is no telling what kind of system someone in another culture is using.   I have some hope that it will iron out its kinks and it is already useful enough that you should head over there and start an account.  Unless you want to learn Korean.  In that case, go here.

Tags: livemocha

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Language, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.