Review of LiveMocha: The World’s Largest Language Learning Community

With over 5 million registered users spread across 200 countries, LiveMocha is the world’s largest language learning community. And with sufficient venture capital and corporate partners behind them, the Seattle-based start-up firm has the resources to keep expanding their service offering long into the foreseeable future.

The site has been well received by most, and comes strongly recommended by many language bloggers, school teachers, and individual learners.

Steven J. Sacco, a Language Professor at San Diego State University, has this to say about LiveMocha:

“Livemocha is the best online language program I have seen and used—vastly superior to Rosetta Stone in terms of cost and the variety of language functions it offers.”

So how does this blogger feel about LiveMocha? Here’s a quick look at the good and bad as I see it.

The Good

• LiveMocha utilizes the best aspects of social networks: With so many registered users, LiveMocha provides a massive pool of potential tutors and language partners. The best part of this quid pro quo, reciprocity-based system are the corrections provided by native speakers. It’s win-win: they get some “Mocha Points” (exhangeable for otherwise pay-only features on the site) and you get free corrections. Not a bad deal. And you can of course correct the writing and speaking samples of people learning your native tongue. There will be frequent pop-ups asking you to do just that…
• Numerous languages to choose from: LiveMocha currently offers courses in 35 languages making the site quite the polyglot wonderland. The following languages are offered, though not all of them are equally fleshed out: Arabic, Brazilian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish (Castellano), Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu. Phew, that’s a lot of “languaging”…
• Lots of free content: It is always a good idea to test drive new materials before opening your wallet or purse. LiveMocha offers 3 units for free, with 5 or so lesson per unit, each including a variety of activities. Which leads to the next good point…
• A wide range of listening, speaking, reading and writing activities: In each lesson, you will receive multiple exposures to target vocabulary and structures, with a good mix of listening and reading input. I especially like the “drag & drop” writing activity as it tests your understanding of basic structures and word order without requiring overt output before learners are ready for free writing exercises.
• Language Specific Pop-up Keyboards: Although most browsers allow you to insert special characters, using LiveMocha’s pop-up keyboards (which are specific to whatever language you are studying at the time) saves you a lot of time over looking for the right accent mark, upsidedown exclamation point, or funky squiggle within the sea of shapes in browser symbol directories.
• Correction by native speakers who are not necessarily trained teachers: Many people would consider this a disadvantage, but in my experience, untrained teachers are often better at identifying what doesn’t sound right and providing simple examples of more natural language. Teachers tend to miss the forest for the trees, and provide prescriptive advice on what one should say, not what real native speakers actually do say. Moreover, most teachers try to “teach” you the language, and as I reiterate time and time again, languages cannot be taught.
• Informal language is presented first: Opinions differ on this issue, but I personally recommend (and much prefer) learning informal language before focusing on more formal equivalents. Why? Because in nearly all cultures, we rarely use formal language. When you start out in a language, it is inefficient to spend your precious time learning infrequent, specialized vocabulary and phrases. “Pardon me, but could I trouble you for dab of Gray Poupon?” can come later… Also, informal language tends to be shorter and therefore easier to learn, and often does a better job of demonstrating the basic structures of the language, where as formal structures are often archaic, semantically opaque constructions. Besides, travelers and new foreign residents will almost always be forgiven for being a tad bit too informal.

The Bad

The good news is that all of the following problems can be overcome or side-stepped based on how you use LiveMocha. And in my opinion, the pros of the site still far outweigh these cons…

• Requires speaking and writing output too soon: When to begin producing output is a highly contested issue, and as of late, there have been some heated arguments on the topic between well-known language bloggers (many of you probably know to whom I refer). In my own experience as a language learner and teacher, I stand firmly in the “later but not too late” camp when it comes to output. Speaking and writing too soon is the single greatest cause of “fossilization” (see The Linguistionary for more on fossilized errors) and often leads learners to develop a fear of speaking the foreign language.
• Too much overt focus on grammar: Grammar study is an equally controversial topic among language teachers, linguists, and polyglots (see this debate between LingQ‘s Steve Kaufmann and Vincent of “Street-Smart Language Learning” for more on the topic). In my experience, a little grammar review from time to time can be useful, but should only take up a small percentage of your time with the language. Lots of input (and eventually,  lots of output) is the key to true fluency, not memorizing complex information about the language that you have virtually no chance of utilizing in real time.
• Reliance on (and a prevalence of) translation: Most language learners rely on—and expect their language products to provide—translations of everything they hear or read. While translation does make the learner feel more comfortable (and a little bit here and there can be helpful), knowing the equivalent of each word or phrase in your native language is certainly not necessary to learn a language. Remember: you learned your native language without translating to or from any language. The key is to create such highly contextualized situations that you don’t need to translate. LiveMocha does a fairly good job of this with their use of annotated pictures, but they could do more to contextualize lessons (especially those for absolute beginners) by adding sound effects and video clips.
• Some bad apples: With such a large community, you are bound to run into a few bad apples who abuse the system. The most common problem I encountered were users who just copied what I had written without adding any suggestions or corrections in an effort, I assume, to quickly earn “Mocha Points”. But as LiveMocha’s VP of Marketing and Product, Clint Schmidt, mentions during our interview (see below), the community will quickly vote down such users and they will be removed from the system if appropriate.

So there you have it. Overall, I think LiveMocha is an excellent language learning site and recommend it as a supplementary material to your other learning tools.

For more information, listen to my interview with LiveMocha VP of Marketing & Product, Clint Schmidt, and watch the following presentation by LiveMocha CEO, Shirish Nadkarni.

Foreign Language Mastery Interview

Click the following link to listen to and/or read my Interview with Clint Schmidt, LiveMocha’s VP of Marketing & Product:

Foreign Language Mastery Podcast: Episode 4 – Interview with LiveMocha VP of Marketing & Product, Clint Schmidt

Presentation by LiveMocha CEO Shirish Nadkarni

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