Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha

This doesn't bode well. If you get involved in the spoken language learning community (and hey, who doesn't?), you quickly find out that serious enthusiasts hate Rosetta Stone. It's known for its marketing prowess and not its pedagogy. Here's a lovely little blog entry which uses the hilarity of Michael Phelps and his attempts to learn Chinese with RS as an example:

http://www.streetsmartlanguagelearning.com/2010/02/rosetta-s...

On the other hand, there are tools like Assimil which absolutely rock, but no one seems to have heard of them. The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) courses are decent and free (by law because they're in the public domain) but the main site hosting them seems down (http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php). Someone's tried to create "pretty" versions of the FSI courses at http://www.ielanguages.com/fsi/fsiproject.html, but they never got very far.

Update: some of the FSI courses are still available at the Internet Archive (http://web.archive.org/web/20130113232657/http://fsi-languag...), but the MP3s can't be downloaded.

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 I remember is that they had a wall of the weird requests and things they got from users. One was a man that masqueraded as a hot chick and then messaged himself sexy messages from a different account but the same IP. Another I remember was an eloquent and irate englishman who insisted we use words like colour instead of color.

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 only see the new bosses spamming and burning out the LiveMocha vibe & goodwill because they don't understand it's not a "platform", it's a community. It grew precisely because it's the opposite of how the RS management team thinks. To see more of this perspective, read the press release & coverage from the RS side... very telling.

I love Livemocha - the online community with feedback from native speakers, and the breadth of languages offered are phenomenal. It's the only service I've found that offers Hungarian; Rosetta Stone doesn't have it, so I certainly hope Livemocha doesn't get shut down or otherwise degraded.

According to http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/02/rosetta-stone-buys-up-onlin... , Rosetta Stone acquired LiveMocha for 8.5M in cash. This seems like a fire sale since LiveMocha raised ~19M in funding from institutional investors.

It'd be an interesting move from RS to keep Livemocha as a free service to get people engaged, then upsell them onto a more premium package through RS. So from basic French to advanced French or similar.

Although I guess the cynic inside all of is fully expects livemocha to be down inside a year.

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.

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.

Goodbye Livemocha. So RS have decided to try and remove some competition. Who's next in line?

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).

Sounds like a perfect match. I've always thought about LiveMocha as an online version of Rosetta Stone. It's probably how they thought about it in the first place, when they built it.

I do appreciate how many languages they have, but the courses themselves are not as good as on other sites, and what bothers me most is that they are boring, which can kill the will to learn a language.

My favorite are Duolingo and Busuu (especially if you like the social aspect and want to meet foreigners speaking that language). I wish Duolingo had as many languages as LiveMocha.

Duolingo is good for understanding structure and is far more mobile and immersive than RST. I agree with most of the comments here that it's difficult to find a full-service solution since different learners have different needs.

It's very interesting that general consumers recognize RST for what it is: a massive marketing machine that took a standard, linguistic approach to language learning and applied it across many languages. What other products are so bluntly recognized as overpriced but fantastically executed from a marketing & sales approach to where year in and year out people are coming through the door?!?! I would argue that LiveMocha was just as guilty of applying a standard solution across many langauges. Different languages require different methods and approaches.

I run http://lingo-live.com/ which is focused solely on Spanish. As a result, we have a small customer base who NEED or REALLY WANT to learn Spanish and have catered our product to this very specific need (also we further segmented our users into people who mainly want to SPEAK Spanish vs. write or read it, have very busy schedules, and are comfortable accessing their learning entirely over the internet, including live lessons with their tutor over Skype). Not having to worry about how we teach Chinese/Portugese/English/Esperanto... is a huge benefit and we can rely far less on ad spend and more on referrals and WoM since our students are actively engaged with our Spanish service and have someone keeping them accountable to their learning.

Then again, the number one answer we get when speaking to potential students when we ask how they would have gone about searching for a Spanish learning solution is "Rosetta Stone Spanish". Maybe the marketing is more powerful than WoM but how sustainable is it? RST has been running in the red for the last 3 years despite some significant cost-cutting and there are countless articles about the inefficacy of their solution (a few below) http://language101.com/reviews/rosetta-stone/ http://www.fluentin3months.com/rosetta-stone-review/ http://seekingalpha.com/article/254261-why-rosetta-stone-s-s...

I don't believe LM offers them much in the way of technology but it will be interesting to see what happens with RST's balance sheet behind them from a marketing perspective. The acquisition was a great deal for RST even if they dissolve LM.