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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| WandaShaw Newbie United States Joined 5279 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes | Message 17 of 24 12 July 2010 at 6:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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"Usually there's a button to the lower right that allows you to switch from one orthography to another (ie. characters to pinyin). You should start learning characters ASAP anyway, and play the audio files, otherwise the reliance on pinyin can hold you back significantly as you learn." Thanks for the info. Yes, everyone says to learn characters but it's pretty overwhelming to learn 1000 different symbols just to read a newspaper. Still trying to master pinyin! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5867 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes  Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 18 of 24 12 July 2010 at 10:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
Check out the thread "SOS - Swedish on Livemocha" in the Scandinavian lounge. It is basically me and some others ranting about how terrible the Swedish on Livemocha is. The first thing Livemocha should do is make sure that people who pronounce words and sentences have a STANDARD accent and no speech impediment. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6938 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 19 of 24 13 July 2010 at 12:59am | IP Logged | |||||
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I haven't heard anyone at LiveMocha with a speech impediment. As long as the accent isn't to thick, I see no problem in having several accents/voices. Not everybody speak like the do in the news, you know... And for what it's worth, I've seen people make comments about the learner's pronunciation based on their own accent which of course isn't that good either. Too many native speakers have no clue how they speak themselves, what vowel sounds they really make, how they pronounce acute and grave accent words and so on.
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| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6040 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 20 of 24 13 July 2010 at 11:52am | IP Logged | |||||
A) The people at LiveMocha promised something they couldn't provide. B) The algorithms, as I said, don't work. This makes the situation worse, and it's entirely within LM's control. B1) When you go in specifically looking to provide feedback, it starts by default with the most recent submissions, even if they have already had feedback. This favours the people who have been waiting least time, at cost to the people who have been waiting longest. B2) When you submit a task for feedback, you are asked to provide feedback on someone else's submission. It's "one in, one out", effectively, so it seems crazy to supply one for feedback that already has feedback when there are others that don't, because simple maths says that some people are going to get missed out that way. In the last 24 hours, 31 Swedish submissions have been made that have already received comments, and of those, 7 have received 2 comments and 3 have received 3 comments. Yet there is still a large number without any comments. Why have these ones been presented for multiple feedback? Also, I've just noticed that the search page returns a maximum of 10 pages -- 150 results. For "submissions awaiting comments" in Swedish, that only goes back 2-3 days. It will be worse for more popular languages. It seems like you either get marked immediately or never get marked at all.
Yes, but... A) as I ignore the truckloads of "friend" requests I receive (as a native English speaker) it would hardly be fair of me to do that, would it? B) Swedes are generally very good at English, so it's not going to be an exchange. C) When I've used LiveMocha, it's mostly been on a whim. I wake up on a Saturday and start something new. By the time anyone replies, I might be finished the course. What use is that? Edited by Cainntear on 13 July 2010 at 11:57am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6040 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 21 of 24 18 July 2010 at 2:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks for the corrections Jeff -- very helpful.
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| jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6938 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 22 of 24 18 July 2010 at 4:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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No problem, I'll have a look at the rest of the submissions when I have time.
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| spinpdx Newbie United States Joined 5855 days ago 5 posts - 6 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Vietnamese | Message 23 of 24 21 July 2010 at 3:59am | IP Logged | |||||
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In my experience on Livemocha, the lessons are of moderate value at best (I've done Spanish and Mandarin), and there are way too many errors. However, the feedback and chats can be well worth the time. With regard to getting decent feedback, I think that the key is finding a few people who speak your target language and who provide thoughtful constructive feedback. You might have to wade through some other people's submissions in your target language to find these reviewers if you don't receive any reviews like this personally.
Add these people as friends, and you'll automatically have the option to send them a request for feedback each time you submit an exercise. If you find a core group of 10-15, you can space out your requests to a given person and not become a pest :) Of course if they are learning your native language in return, all the better, as you can return the favor with your own constructive and thoughtful reviews. If I find an excellent reviewer, I don't just send them a blank invitation to become friends - I add a personal note that refers to something like travels I may have done through their country, or perhaps responds to something they've shared about themselves in their profile. I let them know why I've added them - maybe even specifically mentioning a few of their reviews I found to be constructive. This significantly ups the chances that they'll add me as a friend in return. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6171 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 24 of 24 21 July 2010 at 7:06am | IP Logged | |||||
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I agree that most of the site is not very useful, especially as of late now that they have been expanding and adding more and more languages in an attempt to make it "better." As I have contributed to efforts for translating (for Greek and Portuguese) and tutoring (for English and Spanish) on the site, I have a pretty good idea of how a lot of the stuff works.
For the "new" languages (basically the ones that aren't the original eleven or so: English, Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, German, Russian, Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese), they just allow people who supposedly, but may or may not actually, speak the language to translate and pronounce the course material from another language it's already available in. For example, I expressed an interest in the creation of a Greek course and I offered to help with it, and really all I had to do was email the person in charge of translation saying that I speak Greek. Then you get access to the translation page and you instantly are allowed to translate into any language that you have marked as "advanced" or higher, regardless of whether you actually speak the language at all or not. For example, once I had access to the page, all I had to do was add some random language to my profile, say Finnish, and mark it as advanced (even though I know only a handful of words in Finnish) and I am now qualified to translate into it! From there you're given phrases in English, for example, that you are to translate as closely as possible into Greek (or Estonian or Korean or Arabic or whatever). The problem here is that many people are lax about punctuation and spelling and often make errors, not to mention the fact that words or grammatical constructions for the same concept are often interchanged for no reason, which would utterly confuse a beginning student. Of course, your translations have to to be validated and receive at least five "good" ratings before they can move onto pronunciation but still lots of errors made it through (an example is when I was looking at the finished course, I found a whole set of cards which had somehow been translated into Polish instead of Greek!) The problem when it gets to pronunciation is that lots of people have horrible recording devices or don't read the text as it is written, or loads of other problems. Even after the course for Greek was published, I had to go through it and keep sending the project manager emails about all of the unbelievable errors I found that had somehow made it through. In short, the "user translation" feature is a complete catastrophe, as cordelia0507 has already mentioned about the Swedish courses. However, even the original courses weren't all that great because they were all based off the the exact same outline originally created for the English course, and so everything is translated quite literally (for example, excessive use of the present progressive tense in Italian, because it is used that way in English) or more than one card ends up having the same phrase on it because such a difference does not exist in the other language (gems like "Plurals; introducing 'And' and 'S' word endings" in the Japanese course). In terms of the reviewing and tutoring, which would seem like a very good idea, it is also disastrous. Among the colorful events that I've experienced with these was when a Brazilian woman threatened to inform the local authorities about my "harassment" by having told her that I didn't quite understand what she was saying in her writing submission. Another was when a native Chinese speaker came along to not one, but to four or five of my Swedish submissions and wrote messages saying "Well, I don't speak any Swedish at all but it looks like you speak very well." I could have been writing and speaking complete gibberish that looked and sounded like Swedish and she still would have given me the perfect score. Another thing that happens a lot is that people don't understand that for a speaking submission what they are supposed to evaluate is the pronunciation, not the correctness (doubtful in several cases) of what is being read. Finally, I am an official tutor (meaning I get paid) on there for English and Spanish for people with Portuguese as their native language enrolled in premium courses, and I am always astonished to see what Livemocha considers "premium." At least from the exercises that are submitted, I can't imagine it's much. If anything, I would say they are even worse than the normal courses. Some of the tasks are writing memos, emails, etc (an example is given for each and the submission that is sent to me for correction is almost always nearly identical to the example, just with names and places changed) and "conversation practice" which is almost the same as the normal speaking submissions except that you are only reading one part of the conversation. I have also been given a free one of their travel crash courses and it was nothing to get excited about either. Ironically I still use Livemocha after all of these negative opinions I hold of it, because it is still a free resource, even if it's not great. I mostly just comb through the courses for vocabulary and research each word and phrase extensively before putting it on a vocabulary list. EDIT: Need I even perform this edit to remind you all of the enormous amount of notifications I receive even daily to review submissions or for friend requests? It's rare that I don't get at least three or four new friend requests per day and get many, many submission review requests, even when I've put a message on my profile saying that I can't handle any more friends! Edited by ellasevia on 21 July 2010 at 7:29am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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