Social Language Networking

I discovered the details about the social language networking sites completely accidentally: an article from the NY Times. I would always love to learn new languages and to improve the ones I already knew. Without exercise, continuously, we cannot maintain a coherent relationship with our language skills. And, in some cases, it could be available including regarding the mother tongue.

In Western Europe, and not only, learning new languages - and, in general, the idea of continuous education - is not only an useful tool for understanding new cultures and acquiring new mental abilities, but also to help your professional career. More language spoken, more chances to find a new and better paid job. And the market is offering a lot of new opportunities to those able to adapt. China and the new vague of interest for learning Chinese is just the most recent case-study.

But, when you want to learn a foreign language, some of them with a different system of writing and different logical structures, you need lots of time and, last but not least, money: to pay the classes, to but materials etc. The tandem-partner idea could work as well, but again you have to be able to allocate a certain amount of time - daily, weekly or monthly, depending of the emergency of learning a new language.

Given these apparent difficulties, the idea of social language networking sounded very appealing for me. And decided to register on the largest one - LiveMocha. The system is basically one following the idea of the tandem partner: you could register for a class - the choices are amazingly rich: from the classical English to very rare ones; soon they will be also Thai, Lithuanian, Norwegian or Filipino. It is truth that in some cases, for some non-widespread languages, the quality of the translation is not very high. Or, you do not have always the native speaker pronunciation.

Part of the training is for free - the basic - you learn basic words and are able to make short sentences. You have exercises, after each lesson, you are able to share with other members, native speakers of the language you are trying to do. There are some speaking exercises as some written tests. As a native speaker, you could be as well contacted by other members in order to review a homework or spoken submission. And, you could start when you have time - a lunch break, a short morning hour. It's up to you to manage your time. For American English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, there are offered Travel Crash Courses. Up to your degree of involvement in learning and the submission process, you receive points you could convert in credits for learning the language(s) at an updated level.

In addition, you have all the time the opportunity to find people interested to share their language, to talk with, to improve your grammar and vocabulary.

Of course, not all of the participants are fully interested in (only) reading a language. Some are looking for dates as well. Knowing more languages could improve as well the chances to find a perfect match, isn't it? But, despite all these small problems, the system in itself is very interesting and shows that Internet could make wonders in improving yourself and getting more and more knowledge. Knowledge as a social process.