Livemocha is our second highest rated site to learn French online and winner of our "TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award." Livemocha offers a refreshing take on learning French online by opening a good deal of their program as a free service. If you want the most from Livemocha, the full subscription will offer the best results. In Livemocha, you’ll be connected with multitudes of other learners, giving you the opportunity to befriend others who are learning French along with you, or that speak French looking for your help with English!
In Livemocha, you’ll be equipped with everything you need to learn French online. You’ll be conducted through four phases of language learning and retention: Learn, Review, Write, and Speak. You have the option of skipping steps that you don’t feel comfortable with, but you will be unable to progress if you skip too many.
To aid your online French learning, there are extra games and review activities that you have the option of completing, if you so desire. Also included are footnotes and key point summaries to help you retain the full amount of information.
In the section titled “Learn” you will begin your learning with slides and audio files. Basic sentences and phrases will be written and spoken for you, allowing you to associate it with the picture. Four basic concepts are taught at a time, as you learn how to say “man,” “woman,” “boy,” and “girl.” After you learn these four concepts, you proceed on to learn four more, and so on.
As you work through the “Review” section, you are presented with the same slides you saw in the “Learn” section. Here, you will be asked to match phrases and audio to the pictures you saw earlier, furthering your retention of French.
As you may have guessed, in the “Write” section, you are given the task to write basic sentences and phrases in French using the words that you’d learned earlier in order to continue. This is a free response section, challenging you to recall not only the structure of the sentences, but how the words are spelled and how the grammar functions. Don’t worry, you can still go back and review what you learned before taking this task on, and you can complete some extra exercises if you feel the need.
To complete a lesson, you must finish the “Speak” section, wherein you must read a paragraph prepared for you in correct French. After completing this exercise, you can work on extra activities, or proceed on to your next lesson!
Standout Features:
- Learning without direct translation
- Strong community
- Quality teaching tools
Livemocha uses much of the same technique as Rosetta Stone TOTALe, in that all of your learning will take place without translation. The course is built around flash cards and audio files, all in French. You will learn to associate pictures to words in French, just as you learned English or Spanish or whichever language you may have learned as a child.
The true benefit of learning a language in an immersive, native environment is shown as you progress through the language. Many issues arise when a phrase is translated directly from one language to another. Learning without translation makes the majority of these problems disappear, as the learner begins to move past speaking French into thinking in French, removing the delay in mental translation. In other words, this method helps you speak faster and more fluently, and Livemocha contains the tools you need to succeed in this endeavor.
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