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Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha

livemocha.com

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Re: Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha

#31

Post by Ovid »

keiferski wrote: post #25

For anyone who's looking to learn a foreign language - try Pimsleur. Easily the best program I've come across. It's primarily audio, but it works really, really well.

Pimsleur is awesome for pronunciation (I've had a Dutch speaker tell me I sounded Dutch when I explained, in Dutch, that I couldn't speak Dutch), but after you finish the initial work, you get a rather limited vocabulary of about 500 words or so.

Instead, many recommend using a serious course like Assimil, Michel Thomas, or Barron's (basically revamped versions of the Foreign Service Courses) with Pimsleur to help you perfect your grammar and pronunciation. It's a great balance.

Re: Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha

#32

Post by Ovid »

dreamling wrote: post #20

I've really enjoyed Livemocha, for years, and really thought that having native speakers in one language grade written and spoken exercises of those learning new languages was a great idea. I hope that some part of this stays free. But it looks like a lot of the other options in this thread are worth looking into.

Except that I've had native French speakers butcher my French on several occasions (my wife is French and she begged me to give up LiveMocha for this reason). The quality of help you get is very hit or miss and if you're not already comfortable with the language, you may not realize that you're getting rubbish feedback.

Just think about how awful many English speakers are on the Web and ask yourself "do I want them teaching me English?"

Re: Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha

#33

Post by camus »

rhema wrote: post #23

I worked at livemocha as an intern back in 2008. It was a hip startup company. There were maybe 20 employees. They had a ping-pong table in the office. The CEO invited everyone to his home to watch the World Cup and eat bbq. I remember celebrating their 1,000,000th user. There was something special about being able to run SQL queries on 1,000,000 users. The whole system, then, ran on cake PHP code. One of the things…

what did you do there exactly ? they are from seattle , rigth?

Re: Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha

#34

Post by camus »

nodata wrote: post #4
camus wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isnt rosetta stone a paid service ? LM was free if i remember. what alternative is there as free service for learning languages ?

www.duolingo.com is utterly excellent, particularly if you know bits of a language already.

there is also this app with some kind of african name i cant remember , i've seen that on techcrunch but i cant find it again , if anyone knows ;)

Re: Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha

#35

Post by jcampbell1 »

snoonan wrote: post #30

I run a language learning business that nominally competes with Rosetta Stone in part of the market. Language learning really is about communication with humans, not cramming linguistic junk into your head. Having worked in the same market with them for 1/2 a decade, it's not in their DNA to connect people with language (despite their TV ads to the contrary!). LiveMocha, on the other hand, is all about this. I can on…

LiveMocha grew because they bought about $7 million dollars worth of ads. They blew through much of their $14M in venture capital just acquiring users who never had any intention of paying.

Re: Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha

#36

Post by rhema »

camus wrote: post #33
rhema wrote: post #23

I worked at livemocha as an intern back in 2008. It was a hip startup company. There were maybe 20 employees. They had a ping-pong table in the office. The CEO invited everyone to his home to watch the World Cup and eat bbq. I remember celebrating their 1,000,000th user. There was something special about being able to run SQL queries on 1,000,000 users. The whole system, then, ran on cake PHP code. One of the things…

what did you do there exactly ? they are from seattle , rigth?

I just finished my sophomore year as an undergraduate at that point.

I was a integration testing intern. I did things like find bugs, write bug reports, write testing scenarios. I also did some load testing with jMeter. Another automated too they used at the time is called BadBoy. It could record and somewhat generalize testing. They had the whole process from starting an account, to communicating, to running through lessons automated in this way.

I can't remember why I needed to access the "real deal" production sql. I wouldn't have given it to me if I were the boss of me then.

They even let me work from home for a semester after working for them in the summer.

I was able to talk to anyone I wanted to. I remember making a spreadsheet to show that the scoring metric for ordering user suggested translations take into account the percentage of thumbs up and not just the difference between up and down. I showed the designer and it was in production three weeks later.

Re: Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha

#37

Post by athgeo »

There's also lang-8.com, where you can get your essays corrected by native speakers. It's particularly great if you're learning Japanese, because the majority of users are Japanese natives (the company that runs the website is in Tokyo).

Re: Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha

#38

Post by [deleted] »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #35
snoonan wrote: post #30

I run a language learning business that nominally competes with Rosetta Stone in part of the market. Language learning really is about communication with humans, not cramming linguistic junk into your head. Having worked in the same market with them for 1/2 a decade, it's not in their DNA to connect people with language (despite their TV ads to the contrary!). LiveMocha, on the other hand, is all about this. I can on…

LiveMocha grew because they bought about $7 million dollars worth of ads. They blew through much of their $14M in venture capital just acquiring users who never had any intention of paying.

[deleted]

Re: Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha

#39

Post by snoonan »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #35
snoonan wrote: post #30

I run a language learning business that nominally competes with Rosetta Stone in part of the market. Language learning really is about communication with humans, not cramming linguistic junk into your head. Having worked in the same market with them for 1/2 a decade, it's not in their DNA to connect people with language (despite their TV ads to the contrary!). LiveMocha, on the other hand, is all about this. I can on…

LiveMocha grew because they bought about $7 million dollars worth of ads. They blew through much of their $14M in venture capital just acquiring users who never had any intention of paying.

I didn't mean to imply a single factor. The ad spending may be the lighter fluid and the match, but community referrals are the fuel. They did a good job with that part. I've never seen an ad from them and I refer them to hundreds of thousands of language learners.

Re: Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha

#40

Post by smackfu »

Ovid wrote: post #31
keiferski wrote: post #25

For anyone who's looking to learn a foreign language - try Pimsleur. Easily the best program I've come across. It's primarily audio, but it works really, really well.

Pimsleur is awesome for pronunciation (I've had a Dutch speaker tell me I sounded Dutch when I explained, in Dutch, that I couldn't speak Dutch), but after you finish the initial work, you get a rather limited vocabulary of about 500 words or so. Instead, many recommend using a serious course like Assimil, Michel Thomas, or Barron's (basically revamped versions of the Foreign Service Courses) with Pimsleur to help yo…

Yeah, I found Pimsleur great for the quickie intro courses. Only covers the basic tourist stuff, but pronounced correctly, and well memorized. I did Spanish, Italian, and French, and felt fairly confident in my limited vocabulary.

But when I tried to use the real Spanish I course, I found I wasn't really learning the language, but instead memorizing whole sentence translations. At a certain point, they try to get you to make the logical leap to something you haven't heard before, and I just couldn't get it. And repeating the lessons just improved my memorization, instead of giving me a framework to work on. I think I need the grammar to be explicit, while Pimsleur tries to have you learn it implicitly.

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