You’ve heard the advice from almost every industry professional: work on your languages, study your languages, perfect your languages. Don’t they know you’re busy, not to mention broke? Face it. It is just not feasible for many of us to spend time studying somewhere in Europe, let alone a lengthy stay in each linguistic area. So unless you get a German boyfriend, it’s going to be tough.
That’s where www.LiveMocha.com comes in. Taking advantage of the globalization of the Internet, LiveMocha is more than just another language course. It is a linguistic-themed social networking site, where members help each other practice and study.
Most of LiveMocha’s features are free, and you can take advantage of them by creating a profile on their website. Like other social networking sites, you upload a picture to use as an avatar and fill in information about yourself—birthday, interests, school, work. If you hang out on the Internet much, you’ve done this many times before. Unlike most sites, though, you are also asked what languages you speak, and which you are learning, and at what levels: beginner, intermediate, advanced, fluent, and native. Additionally, you can express interest in becoming a LiveMocha tutor.
The first thing that you will notice after you’ve created your profile is the “Plus” courses that are offered. This is how the website makes money, by selling more feature-laden versions of their language lessons to users. I don’t discourage you from purchasing this—at $19.95 per month-long use of a course including comments on your submissions by a professional, native-speaking tutor, you could do worse for your money. But the courses, “Plus” or otherwise, are only a small part of what LiveMocha is about. The main feature of this website is interactivity.
When you complete a written or spoken exercise, you have the option of submitting it for peer review by native speakers of the language in question who are, like you, using the site to learn or practice another language. (With the Plus package, you can submit to both peers and a tutor.) In return, you will be prompted to review a peer’s submission in English (or your submitted native language), either written or spoken. You’ll feel really good about yourself after helping a high school girl in Brazil pronounce her “th”s correctly!
The peer reviews are optional, but once you’ve submitted your own exercises for review, you’ll pretty much feel guilt-tripped into it. You will also receive requests for peer reviews in your LiveMocha in-box. This can all add up to be a bit time consuming. Like any lesson exchange, it seems like a freebie at first—but once you experience how much time you need to put in on both ends (learning and teaching), you’ll find out fast if you’re serious about your commitment or not.
Interestingly, I didn’t notice a big difference between the tutor reviews and the higher-quality peer reviews I received. I guess I should count myself lucky to have stumbled upon such thoughtful, capable peer reviewers!
The exercises themselves are of mixed quality. The vocabulary words are paired with stock photos that can sometimes form unclear matches. A picture of a small boy, for example, for which you must select either the sentence “Er ist jung” or “Er ist klein,” when clearly, er ist both. The “magnet” exercise, where you choose from a pre-punctuated pile of words to form sentences, as if composing magnetic poetry on your refrigerator, is my favorite. It provides a great middle road between composing your own sentence while still having some help—harder than fill-in-the-blank but easier than writing something from scratch. Flashcard sets should theoretically be helpful but, in practice, having been assembled by peer users, they are of inconsistent accuracy.
Once you’ve built up your confidence with LiveMocha’s courses, it’s time to test out your skills in real time. LiveMocha includes a chat client, with a built-in translator affixed conveniently to the right of the conversation box to facilitate discussion.
Once you find the right conversation partners, this could really be a fabulous tool.
The first time I tried it out, I set my status to “Looking to practice” and let the socialites flock to me. My profile says that I speak English as a native and advanced French, and I am learning intermediate Italian and German. Somehow I ended up with a handful of North Africans just wanting to speak French with me. One was creepy, and one was exceedingly polite with some very good questions about English pronunciation based on some Miley Cyrus songs he was listening to. It wasn’t exactly the adrenaline rush of trying out a language I’m not strong in with strangers, but it was a fun experiment.
You can also talk with strangers worldwide via webcam. I had a few failed attempts at this, partly because of problems with my webcam-enabled computer and partly because I was trying at 9 a.m. in Europe just as everyone was running off to work. Of course, anything involving the term “webcam” sounds more than a little sleazy. Even though a lot of people now use them with Skype to chat with loved ones or have remote voice lessons, many just can’t seem to shake their earlier, pornographic connotations.
So you might have to use LiveMocha’s social networking features for a while before you find someone “normal” to chat with. But I strongly encourage you to go for it. There is nothing like real-time conversation with actual human beings speaking another language to achieve your language goals (which, for most of us, consist mainly of real-time conversation with actual human beings). Learning a foreign language is never the time to be shy, even over the Internet.
If your make-up isn’t in place or your apartment is a mess or you simply don’t have a webcam, it’s also possible to use this feature without the camera, but with just a microphone. I made an attempt at this with one of my French chat partners, but he couldn’t figure out how to get his mic on, so it ended up that I talked and he typed. Keep in mind that if the quality of the microphones and speakers aren’t up to par and you’re communicating in a second language, this could get really messy. With a webcam, at least, you can get additional help from visual cues.
One glitch in all of my foreign language fun was how slowly the site was often running, perhaps because they are receiving more traffic than they can handle. I aborted more than one language-learning session because of my impatience at waiting for the site to respond, and a few of my exercise submissions were lost before they went through, forcing me to do them over.
Another issue was that the difficulty of the written exercises were often disproportionate to the level of the unit. Of course free writing should be harder, but to complete the exercises according to the instructions, I found myself suddenly needing grammar points that were more advanced than those covered in the preceding exercises.
I’m glad that LiveMocha has so many features, but the layout of the website could make it easier to keep track of them all. It takes some fumbling about to figure out how to access your submission feedback, find someone to live chat with, pick up where you left off in your lessons (especially if you are studying more than one course simultaneously), and review friend requests. There are also features that I still don’t understand, even after extensive use of the website, viewing all tutorial videos, and attempting to explore the site exhaustively for this article.
For example, I still don’t understand what “Mochapoints” are for or how my “Teacher Score” is calculated. I don’t understand why I would want to see what lessons my “friends” have completed in my news feed, and I wish it were easier to find someone to chat with (especially via webcam or microphone). However, these are all basically just layout issues—if LiveMocha is like other social networking sites, they will most likely overhaul their home page format from time to time and, with any luck, things will become more logical to navigate.
So next time you find yourself heading back over to Facebook for the fortieth time in the day, swap out one of your normal social Web experiences for an international one. Plug in your headset, turn on your webcam, pull out your dictionary, or put your teaching hat on . . . I mean, put on your teaching hat.
