
Rosetta Stone Acquires Livemocha - anu_gupta
http://livemocha.com/blog/2013/04/02/a-letter-from-our-ceo-michael-schutzler-2/
======
Ovid
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...](http://www.streetsmartlanguagelearning.com/2010/02/rosetta-
stone-teaches-michael-phelps.html)

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...](http://web.archive.org/web/20130113232657/http://fsi-language-
courses.org/Content.php)), but the MP3s can't be downloaded.

~~~
billybob255
I was coincidentally looking for the FSI courses the other day and found a
site that catalogs various places to find them.

[http://ielanguages.com/blog/death-of-a-language-website-
fsi-...](http://ielanguages.com/blog/death-of-a-language-website-fsi-language-
courses-org/)

~~~
Ovid
That's awesome! Thanks for that. I love you. Don't tell my wife.

------
rhema
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.

~~~
camus
what did you do there exactly ? they are from seattle , rigth?

~~~
rhema
I just finished my sophomore year as an undergraduate at that point.

I was a integration testing intern. I did things like find bugs, write bug
reports, write testing scenarios. I also did some load testing with jMeter.
Another automated too they used at the time is called BadBoy. It could record
and somewhat generalize testing. They had the whole process from starting an
account, to communicating, to running through lessons automated in this way.

I can't remember why I needed to access the "real deal" production sql. I
wouldn't have given it to me if I were the boss of me then.

They even let me work from home for a semester after working for them in the
summer.

I was able to talk to anyone I wanted to. I remember making a spreadsheet to
show that the scoring metric for ordering user suggested translations take
into account the percentage of thumbs up and not just the difference between
up and down. I showed the designer and it was in production three weeks later.

------
snoonan
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.

~~~
jcampbell1
LiveMocha grew because they bought about $7 million dollars worth of ads. They
blew through much of their $14M in venture capital just acquiring users who
never had any intention of paying.

~~~
snoonan
I didn't mean to imply a single factor. The ad spending may be the lighter
fluid and the match, but community referrals are the fuel. They did a good job
with that part. I've never seen an ad from them and I refer them to hundreds
of thousands of language learners.

------
pragone
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.

------
nigo
According to [http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/02/rosetta-stone-buys-up-
onlin...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/02/rosetta-stone-buys-up-online-
language-learning-community-livemocha-for-8-3m-in-cash/) , Rosetta Stone
acquired LiveMocha for 8.5M in cash. This seems like a fire sale since
LiveMocha raised ~19M in funding from institutional investors.

------
nicholassmith
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.

------
keiferski
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.

~~~
Ovid
Pimsleur is awesome for pronunciation (I've had a Dutch speaker tell me I
sounded Dutch when I explained, in Dutch, that I couldn't speak Dutch), but
after you finish the initial work, you get a rather limited vocabulary of
about 500 words or so.

Instead, many recommend using a serious course like Assimil, Michel Thomas, or
Barron's (basically revamped versions of the Foreign Service Courses) with
Pimsleur to help you perfect your grammar and pronunciation. It's a great
balance.

~~~
smackfu
Yeah, I found Pimsleur great for the quickie intro courses. Only covers the
basic tourist stuff, but pronounced correctly, and well memorized. I did
Spanish, Italian, and French, and felt fairly confident in my limited
vocabulary.

But when I tried to use the real Spanish I course, I found I wasn't really
learning the language, but instead memorizing whole sentence translations. At
a certain point, they try to get you to make the logical leap to something you
haven't heard before, and I just couldn't get it. And repeating the lessons
just improved my memorization, instead of giving me a framework to work on. I
think I need the grammar to be explicit, while Pimsleur tries to have you
learn it implicitly.

~~~
purplelobster
Pimsleur is also great for making you more comfortable speaking the language.
You can memorize thousands of words and expressions, but you need to be
comfortable with them and be able to speak with a somewhat conversational
speed for it to be useful.

I also feel that the implicit grammar learning works fine for me. I had to
memorize German grammar in school, and although I can still repeat my "durch,
fur, gegen, ohne, um" and "an, auf, in, hinter, neben, uber, unter, vor,
zwischen", and I was very good at grammar at the time, that hasn't helped me
at all. To this day I can't speak German even though I was probably the "top"
student (read: the only one who was motivated enough to care).

------
dreamling
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.

~~~
Ovid
Except that I've had native French speakers butcher my French on several
occasions (my wife is French and she begged me to give up LiveMocha for this
reason). The quality of help you get is very hit or miss and if you're not
already comfortable with the language, you may not realize that you're getting
rubbish feedback.

Just think about how awful many English speakers are on the Web and ask
yourself "do I want them teaching me English?"

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

~~~
camus
Isnt rosetta stone a paid service ? LM was free if i remember. what
alternative is there as free service for learning languages ?

~~~
nodata
www.duolingo.com is utterly excellent, particularly if you know bits of a
language already.

~~~
camus
nice ! i'll check it out. please dont hesitate, if you know other (cheap or
free) language learning online services , share them ;)

~~~
sequoia
<http://noexcuselist.com/everything> See the "Languages" section.

I've used duolingo for Spanish review; it's pretty good. Honestly the best
thing about it is the UX: you get little bite-sized exercises you can go thru
as fast or slow as you want, review, etc., so it's easy to squeeze into a
10-20min/day block. The main weaknesses are a) the examples are arithmetically
generated so sometimes you get "My horse only eats milk" or something as an
example sentence (it's usually pretty good tho), and b) you don't get a deep
grammar review, it's just lots of little examples & practices. The latter
point could be seen as a "pro" depending on your learning style.

------
athgeo
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).

------
mtgx
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.

------
lingolive
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...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/254261-why-rosetta-stone-s-strategy-
to-revitalize-itself-will-fail)

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.

~~~
lingolive
The below press release says they will be integrating RST's products into LM's
platform but this seems odd. LM runs on Harper Collins curriculum so I imagine
the only thing they're integrating is the social network. RST hired
Stringfellow last year so this is supposed to be his big splash. We'll see...

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/04/02/rosett...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/04/02/rosetta-
stone-acquires-livemocha-and-expands-its-reach-in-the-cloud/)

