Livemocha: Social Learning

It's a big world, and not all of it speaks English. Maybe you want to learn a little Mandarin to impress that cute Chinese chick three seats up, maybe you're thinking Oktoberfest would be a bit more entertaining with a little German to go along with the lederhosen—or maybe you just want to meet some cool people who speak cool languages.

Livemocha just might be for you.

Livemocha is a website riding the globalization wave in a very different style from your typical elearning program. Think Facebook meets Rosetta Stone. Completely ad-free, spam-free—and most critically, cost-free—it's revolutionizing the way people are learning languages on the internet.

Just like with many sites, upon signing up you type in your interests to a little profile form; favorite books and movies and so forth. Added to the usual gauntlet, however, is your language resume. See, the deal with this site is trading your mastery of your languages for that of other members: you seek out other members who are fluent in a language you want to learn, and who wish to learn a language you happen to be fluent in, for instance. As long as there's one language in common, communication is bona fide. One of my first conversations on the site was one in (admittedly stilted) English with a Russian about Nabokov's stylistics. I like Nabokov, she likes Nabokov, I speak English, she learns English. Let's talk.

Since then, I've had conversations on a huge variety of topics—9/11 conspiracy theories, the economics of India-Pakistan relations, comparing bubblegum between Germany and the US—in just about every single language I could conjugate a few verbs in. Just everyday talk between two curious people results in a simply fantastic amount of learning on so many levels: you learn a language, you learn a culture, and best of all—you learn people.

It's a wonderful premise, one that goes straight to the reality of what many people really want out of a language. It's not the French of Maupassant or the Spanish of Cervantes. It's teaching everyday, conversational language, as spoken by native speakers, and it's not doing it through the conjugation charts and textbooks that scare so many away from learning a language.