MochaTalk

After many months of hard work, the time has come to unveil the fruits of our labor. Welcome to Livemocha — we are building the world’s largest community of language learners. The language learning market is a huge worldwide market growing rapidly due to macro economic trends such as globalization, immigration and travel. We estimate the market to be more than $20 billion in size with emerging economies like China and South Korea spending billions of dollars on English and foreign language training.

English, of course, remains the number one language for international communication. According to the British Council, the number of English language learners is going to soar to 2 billion people in the next 10 to 15 years. However, with globalization, there’s been a significant interest in learning other languages. French and German have always been popular languages but now Spanish, Chinese and Hindi are in demand as well due to the growing economic role of regions/countries where these languages are spoken.

While the market for language learning is growing rapidly in the new millennium, the existing self help tools on the market have remain stuck in the 90s relying on outdated CD ROM technology. As I have written in my previous blog post (Taking advantage of Platform Shifts), platform shifts such as the shift to internet computing and now to Web 2.0, provide the perfect opportunity for new companies to displace the existing incumbents by being the first to embrace the new platform. It is time to create such a platform shift in the language learning market.

How is Livemocha different? When we designed Livemocha, we built it on the beliefs that:
1. People want to communicate with and integrate into cultures; they don’t want to be linguists.
2. Most of us are capable of learning a second language and it can be a lot of fun, but it takes time and commitment. Having a learning environment that provides strong motivation is critical to success.
3. Self-study provides the basics, but to truly become fluent, you need to have on-going real life conversations with native language speakers.

We believe that we have built a strong foundation for an effective and engaging language-learning solution. It is a system designed from the learners point of view since we are language learners ourselves. Unlike other language learning systems on the market, we don’t make outlandish marketing promises to teach you a language in 30 days or some such guarantee. However, we do believe that through our unique motivational system and the support of the community that you will make significantly greater progress in achieving greater conversational proficiency than you have experienced before with other self help tools. Here are some of the key element of the Livemocha learning system.

1. Over 160 hours of beginner and intermediate self-study lesson content covering 6 of the world’s most-spoken languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Mandarin Chinese and Hindi). The content is presented in an immersive, engaging and game like fashion through careful sequenced set of images associated with text and audio. The user is challenged to deduce the meaning of the words and phrases that they see in each lesson. We provide a range of reading, listening, writing and speaking exercises to test your knowledge and understanding of the lesson content.

2. A social network that brings together a community of like-minded language learners from all over the world. The community runs deep throughout the application. For example, we allow members to augment lesson content with grammar tips, alternate phrases and colloquialisms so that learners can get a much richer understanding of how a specific language is spoken in various parts of the world. We have also provided a number of structured writing, speaking and conversation exercises and tools where they can get help from native speakers. For example, when you make submission for a writing exercise, native language speakers in the community get automatically notified so that they can comment on it and provide feedback. We encourage you, of course, to return the favor by leveraging your native language proficiency to review someone else’s exercise. Finally, we provide conversation exercises and a text,audio, video chat tool to practice your speaking skills with other native language speakers on the Livemocha network.

3. A motivational framework to keep language-learners engaged and making progress. Having a community has allowed us to offer some truly compelling motivational tools. First, we organize each course so that it takes roughly a trimester to complete. We assign lessons and exercises that you need to complete each week and tell you where you are behind. Of course, you are free to proceed at your own pace but you will make the most progress if you stick to the schedule that we recommend. We also let you create your “study buddy” system by inviting other learners to join you in your learning process. As they make progress in completing their lessons and exercises, you get notified through a Facebook like news feed. This way not only can you provide feedback on each other’s exercises (or benefit from feedback they have received) but it also likely will provide the extra nudge that you may need from time to time. Finally, there’s a fun competitive element in the form of a Leader Board that tells you how you are doing versus other learners taking the same course.

The Livemocha service is open now to any user interested in learning language. Please come and join us in our language cafe. Do send us your feedback - there’s a feedback link on the top of each page. We plan to carefully listen to feedback from our users and continue to make improvements to make the learning process fun, engaging and fulfilling.

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