Livemocha

Reason #1:

Livemocha has hundreds of hours of online courses available for free in over 30 languages. You only pay when you are convinced that it’s awesome.

Rosetta Stone has CD-ROMs that cost hundreds of dollars each, a princely sum that you must pay before you ever open the box.

Livemocha

Reason #2:

Livemocha lessons include speaking and writing exercises that get reviewed by native speakers of the language you are learning. Only immersion in a foreign country provides the same kind of hands-on helpful instruction from real native speakers.

Rosetta Stone gives you CD-ROMs. Remember those? From the 1980s?

Livemocha

Reason #3:

Livemocha has a huge international community of over 4 million members from over 200 countries with whom you can connect, practice, socialize, and get a deeper understanding about the language and the culture.

If you pay Rosetta Stone $999 (yes, that’s one dollar short of 1,000), you can get into one of those clunky group tutoring sessions. Ahem.

Livemocha

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Pull the red card on those pricey yellow boxes!

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Learn how to use Livemocha!

Demo video in English: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOzXI7FYp-8

En Espanol: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rM3eGdUpFI

Portuguese: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XQdIrHkMag

French: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzpHqoEop8I

many more languages, mas lenguas: http://www.youtube.com/user/LivemochaTube#p/u

Send these links to your friends who are learning languages!

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This Saturday night Jan 29, Livemocha will be offline for scheduled maintenance. We should not be offline for more than 1 hour. Thanks.

Mt. Shuksan, WA

Did you know: Livemocha is the world’s largest language learning site in the world?

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This week, the winter sunshine gracing our Seattle skies was strengthened by none other than the discovery of… POETRY! While delving through site feedback, I came across a touching composition authored by a Livemocha member. It’s now displayed with pride on our company billboard, and I’d like to wrap up this startlingly sunny and poetic week by sharing it here as well. Below you will find a brief preface written by the author, followed by the poem itself. Thanks, Nephtali!

-Livemocha Community Manager

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With a Pen in my hand…

(How a “Livemocha”  Poem came to be – on a napkin)

I was looking out a window of a small restaurant, thinking of my Livemocha friends. I wanted to celebrate them all, because they reach out to the world to exchange the best they have, their language, the ultimate achievement of their culture. Language is thought, and thought is action.  This word-action keeps the beauty of tradition distinct as a precious note in the harmony of a world needing to come together.  Its crescendo is the symphony of communal survival. This makes language a universal quest for excellence. Livemocha is the stage for this exchange of world communion at its best!  So I wrote this simple poem, “Live Mocha”, on a napkin, to celebrate the complexity of language and the abundance of good will rooted in human kindness!  – To all my Livemocha friends!

Nephtali  De Leon, — Chicano Poet/Painter
Site-in-Progress, –  http://nephtali.net

Live Mocha

© by  Nephtalí

Live Mocha
free language mall
it’s open to all

cool international place
where words
do not come alone
they come intense
passion in the tongue

fresh wind blows
through the windows
of your mind

Live Mocha
dancehall jitters
language words glitter

world sisterhood
brotherhood is here
who said
we couldn’t get along?

visit Live Mocha
you’ll be so turned on
you’ll wanna sing a song!

Tags: Community, Livemocha, Members, social learning, Thanks

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Soooo today was the big day!! Here’s how it went:

Buckingham Palace and the English-Speaking Union’s awards ceremony was just fabulously cool — we walked into the palace through a famous courtyard and into a beautiful, ornate hall with giant portraits, gorgeous, intricate gold molding, and endless red carpet, literally as far as you could see.  We were ushered directly into a small banquet room (no palatial exploring allowed…), where there were chairs for about 40 people.  We were seated right up front (I got to sit in the front row! About 3 feet from the Prince! eek!), and were told to stand as HRH Prince Philip walked into the room.

The ceremony was just lovely, with very nice speeches introducing the winners.  There were two major prizes — one given for excellence in books designed to teach English and the President’s award, given to the product that set the bar of excellence using innovative technology to teach English.  While there was an overall winner and 5 commendations in the book category, we were only winner of the President’s Award.

They gave Livemocha’s Active English a really wonderful introduction, talking about how impressed they were with the course,  how  Livemocha is a platform for world-wide, communal language learning, and how amazing it is to have a website that creates scalable, personal language learning interactions — they called us innovative and groundbreaking. It was a unanimous decision between the 5 judges to award us the prize, and, in talking to many of them after the ceremony, it was evident how excited they were about Active English and Livemocha as a whole. We each shook Phillip’s hand and were given certificates and a very cool large medal plaque.

After the ceremony, we had the chance to chat with the judges and the other winners, and Prince Philip just sort of wandered up to me and started asking about me and about Livemocha!!!! How cool to get to share Livemocha with royalty!!!
It was a wonderful, exciting day, with much celebration, lovely speeches, and lots and lots of excitement about Active English.  What an honor!!

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Livemocha has grown incredibly over the last year. Its fun making our site continue to perform well at this scale for users from over 200 countries.

We have a fantastically dedicated team here. Among the million other things we need to do every milestone, people are always working on making our site load faster for our users.  In recent weeks we made improvements such as using different CDNs, making a lot of changes on the back end to improve database and caching performance. We have also made many optimizations to our pages itself so they load quickly on the client side. We continue to work hard at this and you should see more improvements over the next months.

As always please let us know how are doing. Thanks for your feedback in helping us improve. 

-Krishnan

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Well we just touched down at London’s Heathrow airport, the first step in our exciting trip to receive the English-Speaking Union’s award for Active English.  Interestingly enough, the weather is almost exactly like it was home in Seattle, so the transition (8-hour time difference aside) is quite seamless! The plane was full of people making their way from Seattle to London and onward — I heard people speaking Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, French, Polish, and other languages that I couldn’t quite identify in my overnight-flight-haze. Listening to all of these languages, I was so proud to work for Livemocha — a company, website, and community that has managed to bring together people who speak all of these languages and more, and give them a forum to learn, bond, and share their culture without leaving their own home  (or internet cafe!).   Of course, I’m not knocking international travel (actually, I’m pretty much obsessed with it) but it’s amazing to know you can go online and explore the world at basically any given time! Okay okay, enough Livemocha love for now (though really, is there ever enough??)– stay tuned for more tomorrow from the awards ceremony at Buckingham Palace!!

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Aprender Idioma nueva con Livemocha.

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Thanks to an exciting CNN article, Livemocha just got hit by a lot of web traffic. We’re working to speed things up, so the site will be working at normal speed very soon. In the meantime, check out our Facebook fan page!

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This is pretty cool… Livemocha on CNN!

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Free online learning

With the boom in social media, it makes sense that learning a language online would take on a Facebook-like component. My general impression is that these are great ways to exchange languages with people all over the world…

With Livemocha, you get to learn the language of your choice while helping others who want to speak your native tongue. Once you complete a structured lesson, you submit your own writing and audio recordings to other users for feedback. Reading a sentence aloud and then sending my recording off was pretty intimidating, but I got a response within 10 minutes from a girl in Russia who gave it five stars and a “Good!!” — although she was surely too kind.

I also got to review English submissions from other users, which felt especially gratifying because I had just been in their uncomfortable situation of sending off my words to strangers.

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