Livemocha Chinese Online Web 2.0 blah blah

[roddy]

Was going to post this under the recent social networking / learning Chinese topic we had, but figured it was worth a post of its own. So, as you might have guessed, livemocha.com is a . . . social networking learning Chinese site!

This one is looking a bit more promising than the average fare though. It has significant VC funding, for a start, which indicates a bit more substance than the usual efforts. It also covers, currently, six languages (Mandarin, Chinese, Hindi, English and a couple of European dialects).

For Chinese there are four levels, 101, 102, 201, 202, totaling 160 hours of study at their reckoning. Working through the first unit of 202, they give you forty image + phrase pairs to work through in a 'learning' phase, Then there's a reading phase where you get a pinyin phrase to match to pictures (pinyin only for this, although the earlier learning phase gave you a choice of pinyin / simplified). This phase is particularly challenging for this unit at least, as it requires me to read an analog clock face. Some design things I might take issue with here, as they give you phrases like "tā men yì diǎn shí wǔ fēn de shí hou zài qì chē shànɡ。" and then give you four pictures of different places and different times. In terms of lesson design, I'm not sure you should be testing two different things at the same time. But hey, it's not like this is final exams or anything. Random click through to get this over with . . . .

At this point it becomes clear that some preloading would be useful - the images aren't quite keeping up with me.

Next phase is listening - similar idea, you hear a phrase, click the relevant picture.

Next bit, 'magnet' is quite fun - you get an image, a bunch of pinyin fridge magnets and you have to rearrange the magnets to make a sentence matching the image. Random clicking won't work on this one, and there's no way I'm doing 40 of them, so onto the next . . . .

Oh. "Exercise error" and I'm dumped back to the 'choose a language' page. Not sure if that's because I didn't finish the last one or what.

Ok, I'm going to leave it at that then

Basically, this is looking fairly promising. Appears to have a substantial amount of well-designed and progressive content, for free, covering all major skill groups.

The social networking aspect of it I haven't explored, but this also looks well-implemented. You get lists of people who are learning the same language, or native speakers you can ask for help. You may, I assume, also get requests for help for your stated native language. I was able, for example, to find written exercises in Chinese that someone had submitted and I could have commented / corrected. Not sure how well this aspect will work - I can see here one guy who's got native speakers of Chinese who are either saying '很好‘ for a piece which has a significant number of errors, and others who are just rewriting it with no comments or explanations. I don't see this being a substitute for proper teacher feedback. I'm not sure if livemocha are spending any of their VC cash on actual tutors to be online and provide feedback on these exercises. You can sign up for online tutoring sessions. The Chinese ones are hosted by . . . wait for it . . Chynna. Classy.

To sum up - I'm not convinced by the social networking side of the site. However, the actual learning part is looking pretty good. It's slanted, naturally enough, to the lower end of the scale - 202 starts off with relatively complex time-telling - and I'd guess the whole thing will take you through to lower-intermediate or thereabouts. Worth a look if the level suits and you want an online course, or if you are just keen to know what's new in the online Chinese learning space. . .

[self-taught-mba]

"tā men yì diǎn shí wǔ fēn de shí hou zài qì chē shànɡ。"

Well I'm staying well clear until they can group pinyin. youch! (unless it was a converting thing that just happened as you cut and pasted from a machine conversion for board members' benefit)

[roddy]

That hadn't even registered with me - guess it might have if I'd been going through it a bit more rigorously, but I was basically just clicking through at will.

Anyone else had a look, either for Chinese or any of the other languages?

[rherschbach]

I registered for it a few weeks ago. On the whole I've found it a pretty welcome addition to the resources available online, though some things could be improved.

Things I've found useful:

--The "learn" section allows you to switch between characters and pinyin.

--The material is reinforced several times across each lesson, so by the end of each unit most of it should stick

--The "magnet" section brings an active learning component into the lessons. It's challenging and useful.

--You can submit writing samples each week and get feedback. Some people take the trouble to provide detailed comments.

-- The social networking features are useful for students who, like me, are outside China and have limited opportunities to practice Chinese.

Things that could be better:

-- The reading section is pinyin-only, which to my mind makes no sense at all. Reading in Chinese means learning to read characters. In essence, this is really just another vocabulary reinforcement section.

-- A more challenging listening section should be added -- for example, something where you listen to a passage, try to understand what it means, and answer questions about it, Again, the section they have now is mostly just vocabulary reinforcement. It doesn't really test listening comprehension.

-- The magnet section is also pinyin-only. Characters should be added.

All in all, I like it, I use it together with Chinesepod and Imandarinpod -- they're good complements to each other. Alas, at some point down the road LiveMocha will start charging $$$, so we'll have to see what the impact of that will be.

[HeDiWen何迪文]

So I've become a little frustrated with Livemocha lately. I've been apart of the site since fall of 2007, and I've only found it useful for meeting native Chinese speakers and practicing my Chinese with them and learning about the culture. Otherwise, I find the learning and teaching strategies of the lessons a little weak. It's great for learning new vocab, but not so much on listening comprehension and grammar.

Even the vocab can be frustrating though. On every lesson they introduce some new list of vocab but then when it comes to reviewing like the writing and listening, they throw a slew of things you may or may not have ever seen before. for example, on the speaking they ask you to recite a paragraph, but, as i recently discovered, the paragraph has words and grammar previous lessons haven't taught.

I know livemocha is trying to improve it's teaching methods. One thing I'm thankful that they got rid of is magnets which were a HUGE waste of time to me.(for anyone who never used livemocha, magnets required you to take a list of pinyin words and put them in order to make a sentence, which was ridiculous sometimes. For instance, there was one lesson that used 他 and 它 both in pinyin, so it was impossible to tell which ta1 you were supposed to use.)

Well, just venting a little frustration I have experienced. How does anyone else feel about it?

[jiangl]

I like it, but I gave up long ago on learning from the website itself, and now I just use it to meet language-exchange friends to talk to on Skype/MSN. Sometimes I'll upload a recorded dialogue or a written piece to have it peer-reviewed though, that's pretty handy, although most people are either overly nice about it, or too hypercritical. Not that I'm not the same way sometimes.

[roddy]

Merging two livemocha topics

[jiangl]

Also, if anybody on Chinese-forums wants to share (through PM or whatever) account names, I'd love to see you guys on livemocha, too.

[HeDiWen何迪文]

jiangl: I'm the exact same way. I don't really like using it for going through the lessons. I usually post written and spoken dialogues to get critiques. As for that, Livemocha is very handy.

p.s. if you want to find me on livemocha just search for my Chinese name: 何迪文 （he2di2wen2)