Very exciting news! We recently found out that Livemocha has been selected as a finalist for the 2012 Red Herring Top 100 Americas Award.  This award evaluates companies on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, including: “financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their respective industries.” Red Herring described the finalists as “the most innovative and promising companies from a pool of hundreds across North America” and we’re thrilled and honored to be joining an illustrious list of past finalists like Facebook, Google, Skype, Salesforce, etc.

Read the official press release here

This distinction tops off a list of major awards we’ve received in the past several years and is a wonderful reminder of our continued success. Take a look at some of our past awards (and please excuse us while we give ourselves a very proud pat on the back)!

• Sterling Award (sponsored by the AARP) Winner in Education and Continued Learning – January 2012.
• Finalist, BETT (British Educational Training and Technology) Award for Tools for Learning and Teaching-  Nov 2011.
• Travel and Leisure’s Best Travel Websites – October 2010
• Time Magazine’s 50 Best Websites – August 2010
• English-Speaking Union’s President’s Award for innovation in the use of new technology in the teaching and learning of English. This award was personally presented by HRH Prince Philip in Buckingham Palace – October 2009

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It is understood that English is the lingua franca for international business. Speaking English is becoming increasingly important for people who intend to do business on a global level (and do it well). There is, however, what may be a costly downside to the focus on learning English in order to get, and stay ahead in business. In the Arab world, for instance, there is growing concern that the migration away from Arabic as the primary language being taught in the region; even being spoken in homes has hit a critical state. In a CNN Fortune & Money article published online on May 4^th, The problem with the Arab world’s love affair with English, Erin Burnett shares just how far the bifurcation of language from Arabic to English has gone and what economic, social, and historic effects the change has made on the region, and potential effects that could come in the future. Full text below.

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It may be the lingua franca of the business world, but at what cost to the Arab world’s mother tongue?

FORTUNE — Marhaba and hello. In March, I visited the Mohammed bin Rashid School of Communications at the American University in Dubai, where I sit on the advisory board with prominent regional business leaders. After some students presented reports to us in fluent English, I was surprised to hear my fellow board members say bluntly that their native language is “in crisis.”

It turns out English is fast becoming the only language of a new generation of educated Arabs.

This isn’t a good thing for the region or the rest of the world. (I’ll get to that in a moment.) The journalism school at the AUD is the only modern program in the Middle East that allows students to study in Arabic. Still, many students arrive poorly versed in written Arabic and the formal spoken language and require refresher Arabic language courses.

Literacy in the Gulf States is 98%, according to Unesco. But that literacy is increasingly in English, not Arabic.

This English bias starts early, with children in private “model” schools in the United Arab Emirates studying their full curriculum, including math and science, in English. But state schools are pushing a pro-English agenda too. Professor Patricia Abu Wardeh, who has lived in the UAE for 16 years and in the region for more than three decades, laments that the UAE’s government-sponsored Zayed University offers no major in Arabic.

More: Inside Egypt’s bustling start-up scene

The trend appears to be taking hold regionwide. In Saudi Arabia, many upper-middle-class families speak English at home — not just at work — because, as one knowledgeable source told me, parents fear Arabic isn’t sophisticated.

One Emirati CEO told me his own children do not speak Arabic fluently. He said he put them in English schools to help ensure they’d have great career prospects. But now he says he regrets that his children don’t feel comfortable speaking the language of their forefathers.

Why the anxiety among these elites? It isn’t just sentimental. The bifurcation of wealth, a key part of Arab Spring uprisings elsewhere in the region, is mirrored in the bifurcation of language. I am continually told that what I’ve experienced anecdotally is true: The wealthier the family, the less likely its members speak Arabic at home. If people in the same country don’t speak the same language, how can they work across class lines to solve the problems of high unemployment that plague even oil-rich Saudi Arabia? (SM Advisory Group says 20% is an extremely conservative estimate for Saudi joblessness.)

For executives trying to build local businesses, the English bias is a challenge. The dean of the AUD’s school of journalism, Ali Al Jaber, told me, “If you can’t address your own people, then you can’t be successful.” Pierre el Daher, the CEO of broadcaster MBC, says hiring journalists is a challenge because fluency in both English and Arabic “is a rare quality.”

More: The real revolution in the Middle East: Women in business

Sure, English is the world’s business language. More Chinese are learning English right now than there are Americans in the U.S. But China has struck a bilingual balance. Its research universities teach some of the world’s brightest minds in Chinese. Professor Wardeh finds much for Arab nations to admire in this model: “If you’ve got your head screwed on right,” she tells me, “you’ll do it like the Chinese.”

Arabic is a beautiful language to hear, and Osman Sultan, the CEO of wireless giant Du, told me he’s seen elites learning new Arabic words, post-Arab Spring, because they want to connect with an emerging regional identity. Tom Speechley of UAE-based Abraaj Capital says Arabic language content is the fastest growing segment of the Internet, thanks to surging mobile use among the masses. Here’s hoping that surge helps convince government leaders and the upwardly mobile that Arabic is part of their economic future, not a cultural relic of the past.

by: Erin Burnett, contributor and anchor of CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront.

This story is from the May 21, 2012 issue of Fortune.

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Hi everyone!

We are busily working on a new, fun, and updated blog page that we will be launching in the coming week or so. We’re excited to say that it will have a lot of entertaining and informational features that we hope will be helpful to you and become a resource for you.

One of the ongoing features that we will be incorporating into the blog will be a series of journals from language learners and teachers.

We all know that there are both struggles and successes in the language learning and teaching processes, and that sometimes the journey can be frustrating and lonely. We want the learners and teachers in our community to know that they are not alone!!

We want your stories!

Who’s going to be writing these Diary Entries? YOU! If you would like to start a Diary with us and share your successes, frustrations, and tips, we want to hear from you. We are looking for regular contributors to the Livemocha blog. Ideally we want to procure 4-5 language learners and 4-5 teachers who will contribute an entry once a month over the next six months.

Who do we want to hear from?

We’re looking for students, business people, travelers, anyone who is learning or teaching a language, regardless of age or target language. Your story matters and we want to hear it.

Diary stories will spur conversation

We expect the Diary feature to become a great forum for people to comment and chat about their own experiences. It will also be a fun place for other learners and teachers to follow the stories of people who are bending their brains around a new language, just like they are.

Get ‘em in!!

Please submit a letter of interest and a writing sample to blog@livemocha.com by next Wednesday, May 9^th, 2012. (I’m not kidding, we’re launching the new blog tout de suite!)

Here are some specific topic ideas to get you started

-       What success(es) did you have in your language learning experience this month?

-       What failures?

-       Did you commit an embarrassing or funny foible?

-       Was there a trick you learned that helped you overcome a barrier?

-       Did you have a breakthrough?

-       What books, movies, other blogs, or resources are you finding helpful?

We’re so looking forward to seeing what you have to share!

Ready… GO!

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Have you ever seen your favorite movie dubbed into Shona*? Or heard a version of a familiar song translated into Juba Arabic? Well imagine witnessing the quintessentially English plays of William Shakespeare performed in not one, or even in a few different languages, but in 37 different languages. It’s happening now at The Globe to Globe Festival in London.

“… the six-week Globe to Globe festival, launched yesterday, (features) 37 international companies (who will) present one of Shakespeare’s 37 plays in their own language including Arabic, British Sign Language, Gujarati, Hebrew, Korean, Japanese, Swahili and Urdu, and Othello is being performed in hip-hop. Adding its voice to the global chorus, and making history, is Maori. When they step out on stage, the members of Ngakau Toa will become the first New Zealand theatre company invited to perform at The Globe.”

Written by  Dionne Christian, 4/23/2012, STUFF.co.nz

There’s a great story about the New Zealand theater group who will be performing “… a unique rendition of Troilus and Cressida, a tale from the Trojan wars, interpreted for an Elizabethan audience by Shakespeare and now translated – with judicious editing of the original text – by Te Haumihiata Mason into te reo.” here.

If you plan to be in London during the festival, which runs April 21st through June 9th, check out their website (and their really cool slot machine-like search tool that will help you search by play, language, and date) to buy your tickets.

Enjoy!!

*Native language to the Shona people of Zimbabwe and southern Zambia.

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We are always looking for tools to help language learners in their quest for proficiency in their target language. In July of 2010, The New York Times blog posted these ten tips on how to use their publication to support English language learners.

I propose we take this exercise a bit further.

1) If English isn’t your target language, apply some of the tips and ideas that are given here to a news publication that is in your target language. That publication may not have all of the bells and whistles that The New York Times has, but the exercises within are still valuable and will support your language learning process.

2) Search for stories about a country in which your target language is spoken and discuss the topics that you find with fellow students and friends on Livemocha or in your learning community.

3) Use stories that you’ve found to ask questions of native speakers about a topic that interests you to better understand their culture and learn vocabulary.

Enjoy, and let us know what you think in the comments.
10 Ways to Support English Language Learning With The New York Times

Many people don’t realize that The New York Times can be quite accessible for English Language Learners. Due to its focus on current events and news, using The Times to learn vocabulary and practice reading can be much more inviting and rewarding than a textbook. And NYTimes.com has some extra tools and features that are particularly useful for language learning.

Here are 10 ideas for using The Times to teach and learn the English language.

1. Look It Up — An easy way to get ELL’s started with The Times: Use the “look up” function, which allows users to instantly access the definition of any word in an article on NYTimes.com. Read the first four paragraphs of the entry Big Fancy Words in the After Deadline blog to learn about this function. As the blog explains, simply double click on any word in a full Times article (it doesn’t work on article summaries, headlines or blog posts) and then click on the question mark icon that appears. You’ll be linked to not only a dictionary definition (which includes an audio pronunciation of the word), but also to other related reference work entries.

Explore a new word from an NYTimes.com or New York Times Global Edition article every day, and track the words you learn using our Vocabulary Log–you can use the “look up” feature to fill in the dictionary definition section. Challenge yourself, too, to use every new word in conversation and/or writing each day.

More advanced readers of English may want to try the Learning Network’s Word of the Day feature and our ideas for developing vocabulary and construing meaning.

2. Ifs, Ands and Buts — The little words are sometimes the hardest! Start reading a NYTimes.com news article and you won’t get far before you see articles and prepositions like “a,” “the,” “in,” “on” and “at.” They are easy to read and understand in context, but when it comes time to write, these little words can create big problems for non-native speakers. The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) is a useful resource for English language learning and writing skills–its ESL Instructors and Students section is especially useful for ELL’s. Take a look at How to Use Articles and Prepositions for Time and Place. Then test your understanding: Have a partner take out all of the articles and prepositions from several Times articles, and see whether you can fill them in correctly.

Parts of speech in general can be confusing to many English language learners. For a fun overview of the challenges of the language, see Ben Yagoda’s guest entry for the Times Magazine’s On Language column.

3. Start Short — A lengthy feature article, a fact-packed news piece or a nuanced opinion piece might be daunting for an ELL to just dive into. Our short activities (some of which have been recommended elsewhere on this page) can give readers a “way in” to The Times. You might try these:

• Use our Connecting The New York Times to Your World sheet or The One-Pager for doing some personal writing about an article
• Fill in our Fact/Question/Response Chart or K/W/L Chart to help you process the content of an article
• Create a class version of the Around the World with Different Currencies chart, based on students’ home country currencies
• Work on verb tenses with the Identifying Cause and Effect graphic organizer
• Play a game, like The New York Times Scavenger Hunt or Page 1 Bingo
• Write Postcards based on Times photographs.

4. Picture It — There is a saying in English that “a picture is worth 1,000 words.” NYTimes.com photographs give you the opportunity to put this saying to the test. View one of the photo collections below (or another one of your choice, from the Multimedia/Photos archive or the Lens blog), then select a photo that you find especially interesting and make up a story about it. Our Telling a Times Story sheet provides a storyboard format for developing a story based on a Times article. (Or, use our Saying What’s Unsaid sheet to create speech and thought bubbles for Times photos.)

• The galleries of reader photos in A Moment in Time and Documenting the Decade.
• Haitian childrens’ own photographs of the devastation in their country in the wake of the earthquake there.
• Urban Camouflage features Japanese clothing that looks like vending machines and fire extinguishers.
• Stubborn Slow and Braying to Fans in Small Gyms is about playing basketball on a donkey.
• U.S. National Parks: A Camping Tour features beautiful photos of nature.

And don’t forget that drawing pictures is a fun and effective way of learning idioms.

5. Armchair Travel — One way to reinforce language skills is to talk about what you know well. Find a slide show of photos from the Travel section of NYTimes.com featuring your home country, and prepare your own commentary to accompany it. Use the “Plan Your Trip” feature near the top of the Travel page to search for articles and slide shows of popular travel destinations, including China, Costa Rica and Kenya. Show the slide show to your class or a group of friends, as you narrate orally. Then, take questions about your home country and explain how your own experiences compare with how The Times depicted it.

As an alternative, search the Dining and Wine section or the Diner’s Journal blog for articles about and recipes for world foods. Good examples include “Dried Limes, a Middle Eastern Secret for Flavoring Soups and Stews,” “A Touch of Asia, Tangy and Hot” and a recipe for green papaya salad (som tum), and “A Chicken Soup With a Peanut Crunch,” which includes a video of the author making the recipe, and the recipe for west African peanut soup with chicken.

Then write your own recipe for something you know how to make. Start with a list of ingredients. Then prepare the directions–as these are always written in the imperative, it’s a great way to practice using the second person, while also sharing a taste of home. Be sure to add some personal commentary–why this dish is a personal favorite, memories associated with the dish, and so on. Swap recipes with friends, and then have a world cuisine fair! Make the recipes and personal commentaries are available for visitors to take home, and attach one of each to a large-scale world map to visually represent the origins of the international cuisines.

6. Meet and Greet — A kiss on the cheek, a bow, a handshake, a question: How do you greet your friends? The Times reported that in American culture, more and more teenagers are saying hello with a hug. Read the article, then practice your listening skills and learn more about teens and hugging in the accompanying video. Then hold a “meet and greet” event, where people who are from various countries and/or have traveled and learned greetings from around the world share their greeting traditions, including both verbal and nonverbal components (such as a handshake and a “hello”) and translating where needed. Afterwards, sit the participants in a circle and hold an open discussion about how it feels to experience a culture where a basic component of everyday life-saying hello-is different from what one might be used to.

Reading The Times is a great way to develop your understanding of American culture. Use the Culture Shot sheet to describe and comment on Times photos that seem to capture American culture.

7. Learning Debate — How do you think ELL’s learn best? The Room for Debate blog has explored how best to educate immigrants. Read the posts on this subject, including the reader comments. (We also have a lesson plan on this topic.) To guide your reading and keep track of the arguments, use our Debatable Issues sheet, and/or our Problem-Solution Organizer. Then hold your own debate on this topic, in which participants draw on their own personal experiences and viewpoints as well as on their knowledge of effective teaching and learning practices. Afterwards, compare the views expressed during the debate with your school’s ELL program-how does it match up? If desired, write to school administration with suggestions on improving the ELL program.

8. Look Back — On This Day in History is useful for boning up on your knowledge of American culture and news reporting, as it features important past events in the U.S. and the world as reported in The Times. As you look through the list of historical events, see if you can identify the past tense form of the verb in each item–while many of the past tense verbs end in -ed, you may find some irregular verbs, too.

Further down the page you’ll see a list of Current and Historic Birthdays. Often the first person on the list is someone who is well known in American culture. Do you recognize this person? At the bottom of the birthday lists is the link “Go to a previous date” that takes you to the On This Day Archive. Find your birthday and then practice using the past tense by writing a short paragraph explaining a few of the historic events that happened on this date and identifying some of the people who share your birthday.

A fun and engaging way to use On This Day in History is with our List, Group, Label activity. (Teacher directions are available here.) Hold a competition: Which group can guess the historical event based on a group of words taken from the Times front page article about it?

9. Compare and Contrast — Drawing comparisons between two things that don’t seem to have much in common is an excellent way to practice and broaden your English vocabulary, as well as your use of comparison words. What do music and basketball have in common? In the NYTimes.com video Rhythms of Basketball and Music, a musician and a sports writer explore the similarities between the two based on the ideas of form, the evolution of players and the concept of improvisation. Before watching the video, explore these three similarities based on what you know about music and basketball. Then, as you watch the video, pay attention to how they develop and explain these similarities. (You may want to use our Venn Diagram.) Finally, write your own comparison exploring three similarities between two topics of your choice. As you write, use a variety of comparison words to keep the paragraph from sounding repetitive–check out this Compare and Contrast Paragraph list of helper words for some suggestions.

10. Eliminating Errors — Oops! The New York Times is generally a reliable source of correct English usage. But even the Times makes mistakes, and casual grammatical errors can often be found in quotations. NYTimes.com resources for looking at language errors and usage issues include the following:

• Our collection of five easy ways to learn grammar and ways to solve “grammar emergencies” with The Times.
• Our English skills bingo game.
• this lesson based on a common grammatical error made by President Obama.
• The blog After Deadline, in which weekly posts identify errors that appeared in previous Times articles and explains the mistake and solutions, such as Words to Watch, a list of typical errors caused by problematic words that are often confused, such as the homophones “effect” and “affect” and “principle” and “principal.”
• The On Language column in the Sunday Magazine
• The Times Topics pages on Grammar, the English Language and Language and Languages.
• Reviews of books on English language grammar and usage, such as this one.

Brad Reitz contributed to an earlier version of this list, which appeared on our old site.

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Yesterday, we asked the Livemocha community on Facebook to share memorable personal experiences with language – anything from an embarrassing language mishap to a breakthrough moment in speaking or understanding the language. We got some hilarious stories in response!

Although we’re all a little afraid we’ll say something foolish when we try to speak a new language, making mistakes is actually a VERY good thing. If you make mistakes, it means you’re actively trying to speak the language. Of course, that also means laughing at yourself is an important part of learning to speak a language.  So, in the spirit of embracing awkward situations, check out these language fumbles!

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I’m learning Spanish and currently living in Spain. A few months ago, our boiler stopped working and I had to explain it to the landlord. The Spanish word for boiler is “Caldera”, but I told him “Mi cadera no funciona”, which means “My HIP doesn’t work”! He offered me a lift to the hospital, asking if I was in pain!

-Greg Armstrong

In Spanish, we only have 5 vowels, so, words like “ship, sheep, man, men” etc… sound the same for a monolingual beginner.

When I was starting to learn English, I used to speak with some American and Canadians through Ventrilo. One day I was at the beach, and I told them, “I am in the beach”. One of them wrote “Are you already there?” and I answered: “Yes, I came to the beach.”

They all started to laugh and I couldn’t understand why. It was a few months later when I realized what happened… I had been pronouncing it like “bitch” the whole time. Oh God, why.

Now that I think about it, I wanted to say: “I have already arrived to the beach, I’m in the hotel using my laptop” or something, but at the time my English was really bad…

-Freddy Guerra

In high school, when I studied abroad in Spain, we got to stay with a host family. One day when my roommate and I were having a discussion with our host mom and she asked what we eat for lunch at school. I usually ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. She understood the jelly part, but she was disgusted by what this peanut butter stuff was and it was very difficult to explain to her! She kept telling us that they don’t have that in Spain and she has never heard of such a thing.

Before my roommate and I left we had to get a gift for our host mom. I had already gotten her a gift, but I thought it would be fun to try and find her some peanut butter. We searched many grocery stores and we finally found a jar. When I presented it to her she laughed and then tasted it, she loved it! She said she will learn how to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for her family. It was definitely a culture shock for me trying to explain something so simple that everyone in the United States uses all the time.

-Lauren Elizabeth Weber

After one week of learning French in Cameroon, Africa, I tried my best to go to school alone. I told the taxi driver “amene-moi a hygiene mobil” – a popular place just near our school. The driver brought me somewhere completely different, and when I told him “pas ici” (which means “not here”), he pointed to a sign that said “hygiene mobil”. I couldn’t explain where to go, got lost and had to call someone to come and fetch me.

-Charlie Magne Gano Buyayo

I just had a breakthrough experience this afternoon, had my first ever Hungarian conversation on Livemocha chat, felt great!

My favourite language mishap though was while I was first learning Czech. I was living in a part of Prague 6 where there are two tram stops next to each other named “břevnovský klášter” (břevnov monastery) and “u kaštanu” (“at the chestnut tree”; name of a street).

Once I was in a café in Brno with a Czech girl and an English friend of mine from home and I was translating the menu for her. One of the items was “palačinky s pečenými kaštany”, which I looked at dumbfounded and translated as “pancakes with roast monastery” (rather than roast chestnuts).

-Zeibura S. Kathau

I was born in Romania to a Hungarian father and a Hungarian mother, but worked many years in Germany, married to an Irishman, residing in Spain. Therefore, I speak a few languages -
Romanian, Hungarian, German, English, and Spanish.

I was sent to Taipei for the first time about fifteen years ago on a year-long assignment (working in Animation).
After a few weeks I started to get tired of eating out in restaurants and decided to check out the nearest supermarket in order to buy some beef. I wanted to make a stew, at home, in my nice rented apartment.
At the time not many people spoke English, though now the situation is much better. As you probably know, you find meat of a lot of strange animals on the shelves in Asia. So I wasn’t entirely sure if the packet that I had picked up was actually beef or not. The labels were all in Chinese characters, which was ALL Chinese to me.
At the checkout counter, I tried to ask the lady if the meat is actually beef, using my best body language. The best idea I had was to pretend I have two horns on my head with two index fingers indicating them, questioning eyes in addition. The lady looked puzzled. but I really wanted to purchase beef.  So in a last desperate attempt, not only did I use my index fingers to create horns on my head, I also made the sound of cattle (moooooo?). Checkout girl looked even more puzzled than before.

The queue behind me, in the meantime, got longer. Lots of impatient shoppers. And I walked away with tail between my legs and without the packet of meat I was longing for, as I had no way of finding out what type of meat it was.

This incident forced me to learn Mandarin Chinese. I never ever wanted to be that embarrassed.  As it turned out, with a small effort by buying a few good books, being relocated year after year in mainland China, and later joining the Livemocha programme, I can now manage to survive in Mandarin   The first words I learned were “cow” and “beef”.

-Andrea Preda

When i was sent to Congo, Africa as a missionary, I studied their language, “lingala”. “Mabéle” means the breasts of a woman and “mabelé” means soil. I assigned our youth in the parish to fill a flower pot with soil. The following day I asked them, “lakisa ngai mabéle ozwaki” – show me the soil you got. And they burst into laughter! Instead of “mabelé” i said “mabéle”. They thought that I wanted to see their breasts!

-Charlie Magne Gano Buyayo

My daughter generally speaks very good Hebrew, but the other morning for breakfast she asked for ‘avanim (stones) instead of ‘anavim (grapes).

-Matthew Levie

A couple of years ago I first went to Paris with friends. None of us spoke French, so it was difficult to find our way around. We used the subway map to try to reach a particular destination, but on reaching the first station the only sign we saw was “sortie”. Seeing the sign, we hurried off the subway train to try and find the station “sortie” on our subway map. Of course, we never found it because “sortie” means “exit”.

-Ari Mad-name

I am a Brazilian living in Germany and was about to have my second child here. My husband and I had to have an interview with the surgeon at the maternity we chose. I don´t speak very good German and neither does my husband. So, we were discussing whether to have another Cesarian section, which is “Kaiserschnitt” in German. My husband said: “Wir möchten ein Kaiserschnitzel”, which means: – We would like to have a Caesar’s beef. The doctor promptly replied, “We can get this for you later. Our kitchen is closed right now.”

-Arlete Helena Gomes Soffiatti

I met my boyfriend on Livemocha a year and a half ago. He was learning English, I was learning Italian. Our first conversations over Livemocha chat when we first met were pretty entertaining. His English was (and still is) much better than my Italian. One day, when I was visiting him in Italy last year, he hurt his finger. I meant to say to him “do you need a bandaid?” (“hai bisogno un cerotto?”), but instead I said, “hai bisogno un centotto?”…”do you need a 108?” He laughed so hard, he completely forgot about his finger.

That’s my story, but my favorite “foreign language story” happened to my grandfather in the early 1930′s. He was a young man then, still in school, and living with his parents in a mostly Hungarian neighborhood. He didn’t know any Hungarian at all, but knew that some old men would sit and talk about him as he would walk by. He decided to teach them a lesson, so he asked a friend to teach him the phrase “you’d better watch what you say” in Hungarian. The next time he passed by and heard the men talking, he stopped, pointed his finger at them and said the phrase flawlessly. He said they looked at him with their jaws dropped and never did it again!

-Amy Linder

I’m from Cairo, Egypt. I used to study hard in high school, but always got low marks. Especially in French. I spent hours and hours every day studying it but achieved no progress at all. This was quite disappointing to me, and hurt my self-confidence. My parents stood beside me the whole time, encouraging me to keep going no matter what, and kept telling me that I could get a high mark if I just believed in myself.

Then in the 2nd year of high school I finally got a high mark in French. I got 19/20. It was surprising to me but I was so happy! Little did I know…

Two years later:

One day, my family and I were talking about how hard I studied in high school, and I noticed that my parents were looking at each other in a weird way. I asked them what was wrong.

My mom told me: I cheated your mark in French when you were in 2nd year in high school!!

I was totally surprised, and I couldn’t believe it until she swore it was true. And even more, my dad helped her to do it!!

I was like, WHAT?!! NO WAY!! I asked them: why did you do that?

After laughing for a while, my mom told me that it was her idea, and she did it because I had suffered low self-confidence and she was afraid that if I knew that I got low mark in French after spending all that time studying, I would feel depressed and sad – so she cheated it! My mouth was wide open. Then my dad said, this actually worked for you, because the year after that you got the full mark in French on your own just because you believed in yourself!

-Toka Elwetedy

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He’s a linguist and author who has written about language in the New York Times, Slate, Wired, Science, the New Atlantic and more. He recently released his second book, “Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners”, an investigation into super-learners who speak a whole slew of languages – 6, 12, or even 50. Yep, that’s a thing, unreal though it may sound.

I asked him questions from our members – a mix of language enthusiasts around the globe, including teachers, linguists, monolinguals aspiring to learn their first language, and polyglots working to improve their fluency in several. Michael shared some fascinating insights into the mind of a hyperpolyglot, gave us advice for language learning, and talked about whether fluency is the right goal.

If you missed it, fret not! I recorded it for you. Just sit back, press play, and enjoy.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Read more about hyperpolyglots and Erard’s research here.

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A big thank you to language-learning guru Aaron Myers for these tips on how to get the most out of Livemocha’s writing exercises!

One of my favorite features of the Livemocha community is the ability learners have to write and to get feedback on their writing.  Writing is an overlooked and often underutilized part of the language learning journey.  Most learners just want to be able to speak the language and don’t see the value in writing.  But writing offers some great benefits for language learners.

• First, writing allows you to practice creating in the target language.  You are forming the words in your mind and producing them on paper but it is essentially the same process as speaking – only it’s at your own pace with less pressure and stress.
• Writing on a daily basis also gives you a record of your journey.  You can look back in three months and see how much you’ve improved. (Read Yuki’s Story)
• Finally, writing regularly and collecting these writings offers a great opportunity for creating opportunities for review.  Livemocha allows you to get your writing corrected by native speakers.  Collecting your corrected writings into one document creates a great resource for regular, high impact review.  And you can take this one step further by having a native speaker make an audio recording of these to create handcrafted audio that is filled with context, emotion and all of the words, phrases and grammar structures that you have been learning.  (Read more about handcrafted audio)

Writing can be a powerful part of helping language learners maximize their language learning experience.  Unfortunately, many Livemocha users are missing out on this tremendous opportunity.  Some aren’t writing at all.  The other parts of the lessons are completed but for one reason or another, the writing exercises are skipped over.

Because I believe that writing is such an important piece to a personal language learning program I want to offer a few suggestions to help you maximize your use of this great part of the Livemocha community:

Use What You are Learning

As you write at Livemocha make sure you are using the words, phrases and grammar structures that you are currently learning. This will allow you to get the repetition and practice necessary to begin to remember these and to move them into your long term memory.

Explore and Experiment

Livemocha’s great community offers an amazing opportunity for exploring the language in ways that promotes robust learning.  Utilize this opportunity by exploring and experimenting when you write.  If you have learned a new word explore the different ways it can be used.  Write several sentences and see which ones are correct and which ones aren’t.  This type of experimenting promotes deeper learning as you discover on your own the nuances of the words and grammar forms.  The Livemocha community are tremendously helpful and will appreciate being able to offer real, constructive feedback.

Don’t Be  Afraid to Write What You Want

The folks behind Livemocha understand that we don’t always know what to write as beginning language learners.  For that reason they have provided great prompts to help us get started.  As a learner though, you need to take control and write the things that will help you learn.  If the prompt is helpful then by all means write to the prompt.  But don’t be afraid to write about other topics as well – topics that are important to you.  Writing about your daily life allows you to write about the things that you would actually want to talk about with native speakers.

Keep It Manageable

While the Livemocha community is pretty amazing , they are also people like you. They are busy and they don’t want to spend all day correcting other people’s writing.  For that reason, it helps if you keep your writing to a manageable length.  You will get more feedback if your writing is on the shorter side – five to ten sentences long.  I know for myself, when I have submitted longer writing samples, it takes a lot longer to get feedback.  I can only imagine this is because few people have the time to correct it.  When I keep my writing on the shorter side though, I generally get feedback within a few days, if not the same day.

Cut and Paste

Finally, the key to maximizing your writing at Livemocha is that you cut and paste.  When you receive notice that someone has corrected your writing, select the corrections, copy them and then paste them into a word document that you can save.  I keep a document saved on my desktop that I continue to add my corrected writings to.  This creates a corpus of writing that is filled with all of the words, phrases and grammar structures that I have learned in the last weeks and months.  Reading back through this document or recording it and adding these recordings to my ipod allows me to easily review everything that I have learned.

Livemocha has created  a great resource to language learners by allowing us to write and get near immediate feedback to our writing.  It is a tremendous opportunity and one that I hope you will now be more prepared to take advantage of.

Good luck and get writing!

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Aaron Myers is the author of a growing number of guides for language learners.  These guides, his free Ten Week Journey course, and weekly articles on independent language learning can be found at his blog, The Everyday Language Learner.  Aaron and his family live in Istanbul, Turkey.

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Guest Post – Selina Rawe: Socio-cultural Anthropologist

When a language dies, the culture it once belonged to loses some of its essence. Sad though this feels, in a rapidly globalizing and industrializing world, many social groups face such significant change that the loss of a way of life and, indeed, an ancient language, is inevitable.

Take, for example, the life and death of Nushu. Nushu, which means “women’s writing”, developed in the Jiangyong county in Hunan Province, China. The story behind how it started and the continuing story of the practitioner’s lives demonstrated the culture that arose from this language, and also shows why, when the last “practitioner” died in 2004, that part of the culture died too.

It is believed to have been started by a young girl who was selected to become the Emperor’s concubine. She thought she was about to live a great life, but soon learned she was wrong. She developed the language to communicate in secret with her family back home, thus avoiding being discovered for sharing the intrigues of her new life.

It’s a fascinating back-story, but there is no definitive proof that this is how it started. The aspect of a hard life and loneliness, however, is no myth. It was a historical reality for Chinese women over time. At age  seven a girl would get her feet bound. Suitably hobbled, she would grow up in the women’s chamber with a single window from which she could see her world. Ten years later she would be married off to a husband, to inherit another women’s chamber with a single window to view the world. She was never taught to read and write – that was for men. She couldn’t go far or do much with her bound feet. This way of life was repeated generation after generation.

Yet, women still wanted to communicate and express themselves, and whether started by a concubine or not, a language developed that also saw a culture grow up around it. Nushu was a language and culture for women, tangible yet invisible to men through all those generations. A way for women to express themselves through songs, stories and poems, written in public form on fans, and woven textiles. Items were seen by men, but the wispy characters of Nushu appeared as mere decoration, not language.

The cultural practices that arose around Nushu weren’t only seen in the embellishments of textiles and fans, but in rituals that affected the girls throughout their lives.

A cohort of  7-year old girls having their feet bound would form a sworn sisterhood. They would learn Nushu together and develop diaries and “third day wedding books” – the latter being given to their friends on their wedding days. Once all the members of the sworn sisterhood had been married out, the sworn sisterhood would dissolve. Only the handmade mementos of their relationship, containing the written messages, would follow the girls to their new life.

The other ritual began just before the girl turned seven. The mother would take her daughter to the matchmaker to find a girl in another village who would match her daughter in eight characteristics. They had to match birth dates, same birth order, same foot size, same economic status, birth signs, and so on. These laotongs (“same olds”) would last throughout their lives. These relationships were stronger than their marriages, and the women could visit each other and exchange communications in Nushu.

The last practitioner, Yang Huangyi, had stopped writing in Nushu when her laotong died but started again when a visiting scholar asked her to resume it. When she died in 2004, with her died the secret language.

The twentieth century has had a profound effect on the world. Cultural, technological, and political changes irrevocably touched every corner of the world, whether directly or indirectly. This phenomenon of globalization and change, from its naissance to its defacto presence at the end of the century, both allowed us to find out about this secret culture of Nushu, and at the same time marked its demise.

The language was publicly exposed first during the 1930s by the Japanese who had invaded China. They burned and destroyed as many of the artifacts as they could find. Later, during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, a woman carrying Nushu papers fainted in a train station and the papers were examined. Scholars determined that the language was nothing more than a form of communication, but the government didn’t accept that interpretation and sent the scholars to a labour camp. Many practitioners who were discovered suddenly disappeared. At one point women were banned from attending public gatherings to prevent them from speaking or writing Nushu.

The Cultural Revolution also ended the practice of footbinding. Girls were educated with boys and as they grew up they could seek the same job opportunities. The culture of China as a nation had changed. As the prohibitive gender roles tied to the secret language dissolved, the embattled Nushu culture lost its purpose.

Today, the Chinese government supports the preservation and continuation of Nushu. There are records of the cultural history of Nushu practitioners and their ancestors, but Nushu is now an artifact in a museum, a reminder of what was. China is hopeful that it will become a tourist attraction for Hunan Province, but in time it will be relegated to the interest of a few scholars. As with many endangered languages, Nushu has avoided extinction through preservation alone – but the culture and practice are lost.

The violence of the changes in Chinese culture prohibited the Nushu culture from changing and adapting to it. The language itself was robust and unique, with over 20,000 words composed of 1800 characters, each representing a spoken syllable – unlike written Chinese, which represents ideas. Now, this robust language will no longer grow and evolve. The secret sisterhoods (laotongs) are no longer needed.  And we have witnessed the end of a living, breathing language and culture.

Read more:

Race Matter’s article on the death of Yang Huanyi: http://www.racematters.org/yanghuanyi.htm

Cathy Silber’s first few chapters on Nushu: http://cathysilber.wordpress.com/

Author Lisa See’s discussion on Nushu:  http://www.lisasee.com/onwriting.htm

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Selina Rawe is a socio-cultural anthropologist who blogs at Anthropologist in the Attic. She has studied 12 languages and shares her love of languages with her polyglot family.

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