What is your opinion of Live Mocha?

I just signed up after reading your article. It seems very interesting so far but I don't have the time right now to dig into it. I'll keep you posted if you still want more info.

Ken ... to defend what little I've seen of LM, their version of RS presents some pretty nice representative sentence structures. They are not locked into the RS paradigm (which never alters from language to language). The sentences and simple, straightforward -- yet offer enough contrast that you rapidly intuit a lot of useful information about the language; stuff you can build on. It isn't just parroting stock phrases like RS, there is a method to their approach.

Henning, I've written before that this is a kind of giant language exchange. However, in my experience, language exchanges aren't always terribly successful.

About the only source of Hindi I've seen. I've always been curious about that. I'm exploring. So far it looks like an iTalk clone (which is not a bad thing). Haven't checked the lesson material; will do that a bit later.

Ken -- I tend to agree. I don't see much utility in language exchanges in the initial stages. On the other hand, I can see value if you have a language you want to brush up on. (eg: I haven't had a good opportunity to use Russian in several months).

Oh, and in a few places, I saw Mandarin written out in an odd style. Example: 欢huān 迎yíng 光guāng 临lín LiveMocha! THAT could drive me crazy rather quickly. I hope that's not the default format.

The lesson content is formally structures around courses that you enroll in (e.g. Chinese 101, 102 etc.). Each course has a lesson plan which introduces new vocabulary and sentence structures as well as practice sessions for reading, listening, writing and speaking. The lesson content reminds me very much of Rosetta Stone where you are matching pictures with sentences. The site keeps track of where you are within the lesson and awards you points for each correct answer (there is a scoreboard which tracks who has the most points for each course). The social networking aspect of it is interesting although there is some of what henning referred to in his earlier comment - within hours of registering I got e-mails from 5 different people looking for the Chinese-English language exchange (we'll see how bad this gets). You have the ability to add "friends", instant message directly via the site and setup a detailed profile (hobbies, favorite movies etc.) In comparison to ChinesePod, I see Live Mocha as more attractive to the total newbie who likes structured lessons that have a defined path as well as those who enjoy social networking sites with a language learning twist. In no way does it compare to ChinesePod's rich archive of practical lesson content.

I haven't had a great experience so far...just went over to it after I saw your post. I went on a lesson, and some of the material (written words) didn't show up...I was supposed to click the correct answer box, but since no Chinese appeared in the box, how could I guess? Having a live chat was interesting, but somewhat frustrating when messages that I had already read on their site started piling up in my email box. Someone wanted to chat, but by the time I got on the site again, they were gone. Made me appreciate ChinesePod.

Yeah, i checked it out, too. Like you guys already mentioned, it seems like a mix between italki.com and Rosetta stone. Italki is interesting enough, but not exactly language learning, in my opinion. It's just a tad bit of practice. I imagine livemocha could complement my learning in a small way, but certainly not to be compared to our beloved Cpod. For one thing, nothing beats learning complete sentences from the get-go. I hate the whole 'learn words by rote memorization and put it all together later' approach. I don't have time for it now, either. Keeping up with Cpod and my daily (webcam) lessons with my teacher takes more than a fair share of my free time. So, that's my humle opinion right now. Interesting site, sure, but nothing I'm going to spend lots of time on.

Hmm... I just signed up to try and logged into the Mandarin 101. So far, not really impressed at all... it's a web-version of Rosetta Stone.

In the article it reads as if it a heaven for all those desperate "u teach me English, I teach u Chinese ^--^" posters.

I forgot to include this in my post: I tend to prefer ChinesePod.

I was intrigued for a little bit, but I got over it. Others have already pointed out the similarities to Rosetta Stone in the lesson delivery. I don't find that so terrible, but I didn't really care for the user-created "tips" over on the right side of the lesson. Some schmuck would always type the translation into English or something, which defeats the purpose of the RS approach to learning. It also didn't seem to be a complete solution, i.e. I couldn't go from square one to proficiency on that site, and I hate having to change horses mid-stream. Overall, it needs lots of polishing. Although, to be fair, the guy did say it's still in the beta stage.

I don't like, mostly because of the friend request everyday from" teach me english i teach you chinese " people. The structure of the lessons isn't bad but I prefer Chinesepod over LiveMocha anyday. (welcome back ken!)

I duno ... I'm having a ball learning Devanagari in the Hindi section. Reminds me of my ol' linguistics classes when we deconstructed stuff to discover the underlying grammar hidden in the orthography. (Why the heck is there a vertical line at the end of every sentence? Oh, that's a Hindi "period"! Are they using the same pronoun for he/she?? Maybe it's a demonstrative! Is this SOV or SVO structure? Do they have case? Gender?). They provide some nice contrastive sentences in a methodic manner.

Yeah, the Hindi got me too. There's just something about that language...

Live Mocha "borrows" heavily from Rosetta Stone. While the Rosetta Stone concept works well for indo-european languages (because it was designed for them), it is not very suitable CJK languages in my opinion. As someone who is only interested in learning Mandarin and Cantonese, I'll give it a pass....

It's interesting that they would borrow so heavily from Rosetta Stone. That's kind of old hat.

I guess I'm of the opposite view. I don't think RS can handle inflected languages very well, but does a reasonable job presenting CJKs. Granted, I'm not bowled over by the RS approach in either case -- though it makes a nice supplement -- but I enjoyed the Mandarin. On the other hand, since they don't explain anything, they were handicapped in languages with gender, case systems and oddball tenses.

The lessons are not very helpful and are indeed lacking. However, I have exchanged with a few Chinese. It was great! My conversation with one student was enjoyable. I spoke entirely in Chinese and he spoke in English. Another learner did not seem too enthusiastic about learning English, but I enjoyed speaking with him nonetheless. The Mandarin instructor (Chynna, I think it was) was very enthusiastic and supportive. She always includes a jovial 非常好 in her comments.