Since my night school Japanese class ended in April, I've been doing a lot of searching around online to find good learning tools for continuing my Japanese studies. Yesterday, I reviewed Smart.fm and today is Live Mocha.
Live Mocha is a community-oriented way to learn languages, which is fantastic because learning languages doesn't just involve reading and writing, it involves speaking, too! When you sign up, you have instant access to members from all over the world who may be fluent in the language you wish to learn, and might be trying to learn your native language.
You complete various lessons that include listening to a particular word or sentence, reading it, or typing it. At the end of each lesson, you are encouraged to type a paragraph that relates to the lesson and submit an audio recording of a paragraph that you read aloud. Then, members are able to help you learn the language by critiquing your submissions and helping you fix up your mistakes.
You are also encouraged to help out others who might be learning your native language. I am able to read English written submissions and listen to the English audio submissions and provide some help or corrections to the assignments. In order to study beyond the first course, you must help out other members of the Live Mocha community. You also get points based on how many people you help out, and how much you are learning.
There is also an option to create flash cards of the lessons that you learned, or to create new flash cards. Other members of Live Mocha share flash cards as well, so you can always view their creations and add them to your page.
I have completed two lessons of Japanese 101 and it has been great so far! Some criticisms of the site - you are not allowed full access to optional quizzes and reading assignments unless you pay a flat rate fee for the year. Since I really like the site but I'm not in love with it, I am not inclined to pay any additional fees. I wish that the Japanese lessons did not rely so heavily on Romaji (Romanized version of Japanese for foreigners). It is great for beginners and you are able to see the Kanji/Kana versions of the words and sentences, but only in certain sections and in the flash-card mode. Sometimes you can only see the Romaji and I wish there was an option to always view the Kanji and Kana as I am trying to get away from relying so heavily on the Romaji.
If you're interested in learning any aspects of any language (they have TONS of different language courses!), be sure to check out Live Mocha - it's free to join and there are lots of native or fluent speakers willing to help you out! If you end up joining, be sure to add me as a friend!
2 comments:
Thanks for the post. Smart.fm is really interesting.
There are some other sites that do what LM do but you pay for the lesson time, so the tutors are often pros or native speakers (e.g. learn2lingo)
Babbel is also good for resource-based study
LiveMocha is great for touching base with native speakers. Probably the best for that. I'm not a huge fan, however, of the curriculum they sell. I would much rather use learnalanguage.com to get me started with vocabulary I need to know.
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