Mikis Theodorakis - Romiosini (parts 1, 2 and 3 live)

I have been very slack with keeping up with my Greek learning but mashing up my Web 2.0 skills again is helping. Today I have been watching live performances of Mikis Theodorakis, particularly the Romiosyni cycle which he composed from the Ritsos poems. I wonder if I own a translation of Ritsos? I know I have the Greek text but that might just be a bit much for my rusty old Greek. Guess I should get back to Livemocha.

Learning Languages Using Social Media

People who follow my blog know that I am interested in learning languages and have recently been going back to try and re-learn some of the Greek and earlier the French that I have forgotten. I have been using Web 2.0 skills for that and primarily have focused on Livemocha, though I do feel some inadequacies in the site which I have described elsewhere.

Laura Gomez over at Mashable recently did a guide to learning languages using social media. She looks at three categories of sites: Community, Video/interactive, Blogs and Twitter. Most of the examples she gives for Blogs are really general stuff about language quizzes, language learning and not really about intensively learning an individual language. The video/interactive category includes a range of things from BBC languages to plain Youtube, with a number of them being paid courses.

Twitter was an interesting newcomer to the field with a range of sites to follow which give words of the day etc. Examples Laura gives are of Linguick, I kinda like languages, Learn Japanese, Learn Spanish, and French language. I have signed up to follow these (excluding the Japanese one) and I'll report back on how I find them.

I am particularly interested in those that fall into the category of Community as I think that that is where social media has its strengths. How good is it to be able to get in touch with native speakers who are happy to help you learn a language in an unthreatening, sharing environment! I already use Livemocha, of course but was keen to explore the other five: Babbel, Busuu, SharedTalk, iTalki, and xLingo.

Babbel is a site where you can learn French, English, German, Italian and Spanish. There are free vocabulary and phrases packages but the actual online courses are charged for. Though this is essentially a business, there is a community element to it with learning partners, chat, messaging etc.

Busuu whose image heads the post also focuses on four main European languages, English, Spanish, French and German and was established as a project of UNESCO's Year of Languages. It is free and provides online interactive courses as well as a learning community. There's vocabulary, dialogues, interactive exams as well as community elements. Check out an introduction to Busuu at Youtube. It looks quite good, so I might give it a burl for my slack French some time, but it's not much help for my Greek given the limited number of languages it offers.

Shared Talk by Rosetta Stone (cool image that if nothing else!) is a place for practising what you have learnt, according to Gomez. It is also an adjunct to paid Rosetta Stone products. There's voice chat, text chat, language partners and all in about 30 languages, ranging from Afrikaans to Yiddish with a lot of minority languages in between on the list. Presumably this list is dependent on whether anyone is signed up on the site for a particular language. I checked out Greek and discovered a potential pool of 99 people who were interested in Greek. They were listed by name, native language, practising language, country, and age. I am not sure what relevance age has, but maybe some people only want to form communities with people their own age? I also checked Amharic and found 15 possibilities. This might be a site worth checking out - it is certainly worth knowing about.

iTalki is more of a learning exchange: it helps you find a teacher, find a language exchange partner, ask questions and discuss in groups, and find resources. They seem to cover most languages, though there is more focus on the more populous European languages. Resources seem to be submitted by members as well as by links to other resources. The teacher marketplace puts one in touch with paid tutors. Again I checked out Greek and found resources and nine teachers. Amharic wasn't on offer, so I tried Latin and came up with resources and eight teachers.

The final site, xLingo, is also a language exchange where you can find language partners to chat either one on one or in forums, make resources and share. I checked out what was available in Amharic and came up with three possible language partners: you can choose by age, gender and country. Then I checked out the Greek and found a page and a half of possibilities. I tried Latin for fun and came up with 12 people. So here's another site where I could practise my lost language skills.

Use of social media for language learning is an interesting topic and probably an area that is going to grow. I was interested in a comment I received on my blog about a new site hello-hello.com. It's not up yet but it says it is about learning a new language anytime, anywhere and with language partners and teaching others yourself. There was an offer for pre-launch signups to become VIP members though I don't quite see the benefits of that if it is all free as stated.

It has been interesting to do this survey but I think that I'll stick with LiveMocha for the present. I want to do free, actual online courses specifically in Greek and LiveMocha has that for me. I am happy to participate in the Livemocha community by helping others to learn English, though I don't do much of that. If I want to pursue my French further (and I have done some French on Livemocha too) I can see that there are other options out there for me, as indeed there are if I want to practise Greek rather than doing an actual course.

A retake on LiveMocha!

Well, I am still sitting at my PC and I haven't dusted off any of my Greek grammar or poetry books. But I did go back to an earlier post on this blog and check out LiveMocha again. When I tried LiveMocha last time there was a very limited range of languages available and the site was very new. From the choice available I chose French, not because it was new to me but because I feel it was a lost skill.

I worked my way through quite a few lessons but found some of it a bit frustrating. I felt the course needed clearer instructions and some components to the course did not add value for me. There also seemed to me to be mistakes in corrections made to my work but I was too slack to chase these up. A reason for that could well have been the voluntary, social networking type of learning approach and that's fine.

LiveMocha has regularly kept in email contact with me since I slacked off with my French last year so I knew that there were new languages available and somewhere in my head was a memory that Greek was now available. So today I checked it out! Three hours later I have completed the six lessons in Unit 1 of Greek 101, including optional sections and quizzes! I have two more units to go to complete Greek 101.

Greek 101 is for absolute beginners, so given the fact that decades ago I did complete Modern Greek 1 at University level it wasn't too hard for me and it really wasn't until Lesson 6 that I found I had to bother about some vocab. I thought LiveMocha had improved: there were good instructions for each lessons and the components of lessons were useful and clear. It was good to have revision exercises.

I will try to continue with reviving my lost (and never very good) Greek and might even go back to my French. However, I do wonder with Greek how an English first language person with absolutely no knowledge of Greek would go at starting the Greek. There is an assumption that you know the alphabet it seems to me, but maybe I am wrong. One day I will try out a language I know nothing about but for the moment sticking with Greek will be a good learning exercise for my brain.

#41: Live Mocha - learn a new language and make friends along the way

Like many people I know, I have the desire LATER, like when I retire, to go back to languages I have learned in the past and try to revive those competencies, or to start new languages. I know that to some extent this will always be a dream. I have never had any trouble learning the grammar of a language or reading it, but when it comes to oral competency just forget it! I do not have the ear for it. So, I am interested to see how this site works. I really want to brush up my grammar and reading skills in a couple of languages and think that I am capable of doing so, but do I still dream of the oral competency?

I was interested to notice recently on Facebook an ad for another social networking language learning program, My happy planet. This program also talked of connecting with others to learn, though it was closed down for production when I sourced it. However, it seems that the idea is not limited to LiveMocha.

So I logged in and joined LiveMocha. It seems that one can learn, practice and return the favour there,i.e.help people who are learning your native language. A whole list of languages was offered initially and I chose French because I'd like to revive my competency in that. I did study it for six years at school and for a year at University so I am hoping that I can get into this reasonably easily. Louise and I, however, were quite challenged a couple of years ago when we thought we might get back to French at Alliance and were freaked out by the induction test.

Once I had chosen French, I discovered that despite the long list of languages being offered, in fact the only ones really offered were English, Spanish, French, German, Hindi and Mandarin. Others are "coming soon". There were a few people who were learning French whom I asked to be my friends, though I think that for this program to be effective there would need to be a greater network.

I then embarked on French 101 (I was offered 101, 102, 201 and 202) and completed the first lesson. The course (French 101) is supposed to take a total of 50 hours but as yet I haven't any sense about how long it will take me. I found it quite confusing in each section as there were no instructions and I had to play about trying to work out what to do. I lost scores while playing around and felt that with clear instructions I would not have, as absolutely none of the language was new. I wondered what it would have been like to start a course with absolutely no knowledge, and maybe that is really what I need to do to test the usefulness of the site.

It's an interesting concept and maybe an area where social networking can really help one's learning. I think from my experience of LiveMocha and MyHappyPlanet that this is still very much in an embryonic phase but I'll continue with the French and maybe later when I have time to ponder it I will have access to the other languages I am interested in.