LiveMocha

Resource Summary

LiveMocha is a social language-learning website that offers basic training in many different languages, as well as an active language exchange community. Users can specify their native language(s) and the languages that they are learning. Then they have the ability to correct the exercises that other users submit in the process of learning their native language (audio recordings, practice writing exercises, etc). For every critique you give of another person’s work, you earn tokens, which you can in turn use to buy premium language-learning content (or you can just buy it with real money, but why do that when you can get it for free?).

Review

So far, LiveMocha is my favorite social language learning website. It has a massive amount of users who speak every possible language, and you can search for users for particular characteristics (Women / from Greece / speaking German). Then, like Facebook or any other social networking site, you can find a profile for them, message them, add them as a friend, and things like that. Once they are on your friend’s list, you can send review requests to them every time you do exercises (if they speak the language you’re learning as a native language).

The great thing about LiveMocha is that it easily facilitates language exchange. That means that instead of just finding someone to review your work, you can easily find a friend who speaks the language you want to learn and is learning your native language (in our case, most likely English). This helps motivate both of you to help each other. Alongside this, you will be independently completing your own language lessons through LiveMocha.

Unfortunately, not all language lessons are created equal on LiveMocha. Some languages have extremely basic content, although it is still impressive how many languages have any content at all on LiveMocha, and the basic content might still be helpful to some. However, the major languages, such as English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian have fairly extensive content that could be useful for  learners of any level. Even though the lessons do not go to a very advanced level, the writing and speaking exercises are always helpful, as well as chatting or writing messages to other users on the website.

Another downside of LiveMocha is that since all of the basic content lessons are the same in every language, it can be ineffective for teaching certain languages that should be taught differently. For instance, languages such as Mandarin Chinese, which require a huge amount of extra explanation for English-language speaking learners than, say, Spanish does, are not given this extra explanation but are simply thrown into the lessons without understanding tones (pronunciation), pinyin (phonetic spelling of Chinese words), or Chinese characters.

Rating: 4.5/5

Duolingo

Resource: Duolingo is an innovative new language-learning website that was created to simultaneously teach people a second language, while having them translate parts of the web for free. They currently offer lessons for German and Spanish, but will be working on French next.

Check out the video below to understand the concept:

Review: Duolingo is a fantastic new website that uses the grammar-translation method of language teaching to instruct students in a new language. Although this is not enough to really learn a language, it can be a very effective supplement to language learning. It incorporates audio as well. Best of all, it is offered in a game-like format where users can get “achievements” and points as they go on.

Rating: 4/5

Memrise

Resource: Memrise is a flash-card like system that can be used for memorizing anything, but works especially well for language vocabulary. They currently have content for a massive variety of languages (see categories below). And this will certainly continue to grow, so if they don’t yet have the language you’re looking for, keep checking back — or submit a wordlist of your own to use through Memrise!

Description: Memrise uses adorable graphics, a point system, and a game-like interface to motivate users to continue learning. They currently offer a very wide range of languages, but since content can be user-submitted, the numbers are always growing. The most unique feature of the site are the mems — user-submitted phrases, pictures, or videos that are presented to the user when they first encounter a word, and are meant to create a memorable context for the word. Although it can be helpful for learning a new language, its strength lies in vocabulary-building as opposed to teaching grammar.

Review: I find the sections of the site that are well-fleshed out and have had a lot of time put into them are very effective and useful. I think at the moment, the strongest part of the site is their Mandarin Chinese section. Through their wonderful graphics and explanations, I have been able to learn quite a few Mandarin characters already. Memrise is one of my favorite new language learning tools. While it still has a lot of things to work out (there is a lot of inaccurate user-submitted material, sometimes the site can lag, etc), I believe that as the site grows, it will continue to improve.

Rating: 4.5/5