John Fotheringham: This is episode 4 of the Foreign Language Mastery podcast. I'm your host, John Fotheringham. In today's show, I interview Clint Schmidt, vice president of marketing and product at Livemocha. For show notes and a transcript, go to languagemastery.com. Here is the phone interview originally recorded on May 12, 2010.
So why don't we start out, maybe you can just give my listeners a brief overview of Livemocha, what it's like, how it's different from other sites? And then I'll go on to some specific questions then. Clint Schmidt: Sure. Livemocha is the world's largest online language learning community with free and paid online language courses in 35 languages and more than 5 million members from over 200 countries around the world. Livemocha is growing very rapidly and really quite virally around the world. A lot of them are word of mouth and recommendations from Livemocha members.
I think people are enthusiastic about Livemocha because it's really different from alternative or conventional language learning approaches. We studied some traditional self-study language products to understand why they were so ineffective. And we identified two critical elements that were lacking; motivation, sustained motivation, and opportunities to practice the language with another person. And we created Livemocha to deliver both of those elements and to make language learning more fun and more effective and more social.
So each of our structured online courses include speaking and writing exercises that are reviewed by native speakers of the language that you're learning. And those folks provide helpful tips for you to improve your language skills. And in returning the favor, you can help them learn your native language. So it's community-driven learning and it's all based on reciprocity. And it's really exciting and it's a very distinctive way to learn. John Fotheringham: Yah, I've actually done a few of the corrections already on the site, a couple of people, you know, it pops up on the screen, “Would you like to correct so-on-so's writing sample?” So you mentioned about motivation being one of the biggest problems with traditional language learning, which is absolutely true. How specifically does Livemocha keep people motivated?
Clint Schmidt: Part of the motivation problem, we found, is that it's just boring to use some of the more traditional self-study methods. They give you a book. They trust that you're going to read the book, and then you're going to memorize it, and then you're going to talk to yourself out loud in your room, in the closet or in your car. Wherever it is, you're just going to talk to yourself, and that gets boring. It's like homework without the teacher: you know if the teacher is not going to review it, you don't do it. A couple of things that are motivating about Livemocha; number 1, you know somebody is going to review your spoken and written French, or your spoken and written Russian right there. Somebody who is actually going to be there to review it. So you want to do a good job. It motivates you to do your best work, if you know that somebody else will review it.
But it's also motivating in another important way in that you're actually working with real people. And these people are helping you over the course of time, repeatedly, make your way to the lessons. Perhaps you're helping them as well to learn your native language. And you start to develop a bit of a rapport with people. And that rapport brings the social element back to language learning. Imagine that: being social as a part of language learning.
It helps keep people engaged. It helps keep people excited. It helps make it fun and bring a real person and a real character and a real interaction into the equation. And it doesn't make it so brutally boring to go back and pick up that book again. Instead, it's fun, interactive exercises with people there to help you along. We started to change the whole approach to make motivation no longer an issue.
John Fotheringham: Now, how do you guys account for quality control for tutors and for things like that? It's obviously crowd source. It's anyone who wants to help can help. But if you get a case where there's a tutor who is giving blatantly bad advice or is being offensive or whatever, do you have a means to control that? Clint Schmidt: Absolutely. So I can answer that in a couple of ways. First the easiest answer to give is that if somebody says anything inappropriate or just not very nice perhaps, you can easily block any user on Livemocha. When you do that, you will never see that person on Livemocha again anywhere. They won't appear to you in the community. In fact if a specific member of Livemocha is blocked by many others, we automatically remove them from the community entirely. And so it's sort of a self-policing community in that way; if people who aren't productive or aren't being helpful, they're just removed naturally. Now with regard to the specific feedback that you get, yes, some people are more helpful than others. Some people will just say, “Yeah, good job.” Other people will say, “You know, that was a good job but actually we pronounce this word a little bit different. You need to roll your R a little bit more this way.” They'll go to a sort of greater level of depth, if you will, to instruct you. And what we find is that the people who give that greater level of depth tend to attract a lot of language partners to help them, because you're rewarded by your students, so to speak, who can rate you as being particularly helpful. John Fotheringham: OK, so that was my next question. How do you sort of rise up or go down in the ranks of tutoring? So your actual feedback you give to your students will be rated or they'll just rate you as a teacher? Clint Schmidt: That's right. Your students will rate the helpfulness or not of the review that you give to them. And so on LiveMocha, we keep track of both the quantity of the help you give others and the quality based on student ratings.
John Fotheringham: And then that shows up in your points? Is that translated to…?
Clint Schmidt: It shows up in your points. It shows up on your profile. It's visible to the rest of the community. So if you're choosing somebody on Livemocha to be your language partner and ask them to review your speaking and writing exercises, you're gonna choose somebody who has done a lot of work for others and who's particularly helpful. You'll invite them to help you. But you'll also be very keen to help them because you want them to reciprocate. So what happens is, kind of, the creme rises to the top. People who are really engaged in language learning and want to do a good job, they attract the best partners, and those people help each other. What we're finding over the course of time is that the community, because of the dynamics that are sort of naturally baked into the structure, the interactions on the site, the community just keeps getting better. Better people, better instructions, more recommendations with a higher quality of experience overall.
John Fotheringham: Right. Yeah, the bigger the pool, the higher the quality gets, that's for sure. Well what I did in the last few days I started studying Arabic on LiveMocha, which I have absolutely no experience with. I wanted to see what it felt like as a new learner. I briefly had used it for Japanese a few years ago, but I've already studied Japanese for many years, so it wasn't an authentic experience for me as a newbie. And yeah, I did enjoy it. The only thing I encountered which may be my lack of understanding about how it works yet, it didn't seem like there was any place on the site that would teach me how to read Arabic from the very, very beginning. You know, what a specific Arabic letter is; how it's pronounced. I think it sort of assumed that you already knew how to at least read the letters. Is that something I'm misunderstanding or is that case? Clint Schmidt: No, in fact you've heard exactly right. That's a gap on LiveMocha that we're actually quite eager to fill. And we're working very hard right now to fill that. I think that those types of instruction are best provided by the community. You know, how to say it in traditional Arabic as opposed to, you know, broader regional Arabic. There is slightly different pronunciation, slightly different characters. And so you start to do very quickly take on a responsibility for content development that far exceeds our ability to deliver on it.
So, what we're trying to build, and it' taking some time admittedly, but what we're trying to build is an infrastructure on LiveMocha that acts as a repository and self-rating if you will, a repository for community-generated grammatical tips, grammatical feedback, specific pronunciation guides, even cultural and travel tips. There is a framework of community-generated content that we can wrap around the lessons that will make the lessons more effective, and will make them more relevant.
John Fotheringham: I did notice that on the right side of the screen. It had a little section you could thumb up or thumb down a tip for any of the… Clint Schmidt: Yeah. That's a poor man's manifestation of the features that I'm talking about now. John Fotheringham: Well it's a start. It was helpful. I mean, you could see if somebody would spend enough time to write something meaningful, it would get thumbed up and that will be the first thing that showed up. And when you click to view all the tips, you know, you'd see some there that were not very constructive. And then they didn't show up as often. So… Clint Schmidt: Correct. We can do a much better job with that and we will and are doing a much better job with that. But it does take some time when a site like ours is growing as fast as we are. And sometimes just keeping the lights on is a challenge so to speak. So we'll get there but it is taking time. John Fotheringham: Right. I know how that goes. So down the road what are some future things that LiveMocha users can look forward to? Features? Functions?
Clint Schmidt: Yeah.
I have a little bit of insight that I can share there. Some of it are super top secret. But one thing that I would be happy to share is the type of content that we make available on LiveMocha is going to be changing. The best manifestation of this change is represented by our partnership with Pearson.
We collaborated with Pearson to create a new course on LiveMocha that's a premium, paid-only course for people who are learning English. It's called “LiveMocha Active English”. And the focus of the course is entirely around conversational English: real conversation, real day-to-day dialog, showing English native speakers conversing with one another with subtitles available for language learners in dozens of languages; presenting English grammar to a student in their native language; in dozens of native languages; presenting vocabulary in a similar fashion. And then with that familiar LiveMocha reciprocal learning that's integrated into an even richer course. It would deliver a lot of things that LiveMocha's current courses do not, including that video content and more explicit grammar instruction. We're taking that model and now also expanding it in collaboration with Harper Collins to create similar courses for Spanish, French, German and Italian. And we may be looking forward to similar such courses in the future for a longer list of languages beyond.
What we're finding again and again is that what draws people to Livemocha and what they're enthusiastic about language learning for, is to have those conversations with native speakers with confidence. They want be able to go to the plaza in Madrid and ask for the best place in the town to have cafe con leche and to be able to understand what they're saying and to say “Thank you” and to greet new people, introduce themselves. It's not rocket science the types of things that people are aspiring to do. But the traditional tools just don't really get from there. John Fotheringham: Yup. I completely agree. That's what my entire site is about. It's why the traditional method doesn't work and what does work. Now, you mentioned about adding more explicit grammar explanations in people's native languages. In my experience and research that actually partly contributes to the inefficiency of traditional methods; focusing too much on information about the language and then not getting enough input in the language.
It's not to say that the occasional glance at a declension table can't be somewhat useful. But especially for beginners, I find that the reason they never get excited about the language and the reason they never get enough practice listening and therefore cannot speak the language is because they spend too much time, whether it's in a book or on a website, not listening enough to the actual native language and spending too much time thinking. How do you think LiveMocha can overcome that handicap?
Clint Schmidt: Well I think the one thing that's often lacking from the same traditional methods is, just as you've mentioned, the ability or the opportunity to put the language into practice and to actually have those conversations. The best way to learn how to have a conversation is to try having a conversation. The sequence of our lessons, the sequence of our exercises for these new courses, while they will indeed teach you more about the language you're learning in your native language, they culminate in asking you to put the language into practice in real interaction with native speakers. So the introduction of let's say grammar and vocabulary is a means to an end, not the end itself. John Fotheringham: My basic contention is that if you learn a language what I consider the “correct” way, and there are many minor variations that differ from person to person, but basically if you're learning the language through input, through topics you're interested in, through just lots and lots and lots of listening and reading input, you'll eventually get it. You don't need to be too academic about it, and I think, as I said earlier, I think being overly conscious, consciously looking at how things work, I think is what slows people down. And I think it's what makes people believe Chinese or Japanese are difficult languages. They are difficult if you go about them academically because they're so different from English. But in their essence all languages have evolved the same way. They all use the same part of our brains. They all, you know, rely on the same basic structures deep down.
Clint Schmidt: That's really interesting. To me it touches on one of my, sort of, dissertation topics. They are somewhat connected. Traditionally, just because of technology limitations, you were really constrained in being able to teach a lot of people a new language just because it was a one-too-many type of thing. You had a teacher, and they were the one who had the knowledge, and they were the gating factor for disseminating that knowledge.
John Fotheringham: Yeah. It was broadcast only. Now we have “unicast” education.
Clint Schmidt: You got it. You got it.
John Fotheringham: Which is cool. Yah, there is no excuse now. I mean, with so many wonderful products available online, many of which have a “freemium” model like LiveMocha, you know, you can try it out. You can do…It's up to 202, I guess, which is free? Clint Schmidt: That's right. John Fotheringham: So there's no excuse. You can get on there. You can try it out. Podcasts, like this one. I mean a lot of my listeners and readers are actually EFL students. So they're using what we're talking about right now to learn English, or to improve their English. And then what I do is I provide a transcript of each podcast so they can actually listen and then read, and listen and read each episode. So anyway, there's a plethora of opportunities now; there's no excuse. Now, you mentioned you have 30-plus languages on the site?
Clint Schmidt: That's right, over 30 languages. Occasionally we add new ones or take some other's off to further improve or adjust the content. But right now we have 35 languages.
John Fotheringham: What are the top 10 most popular on the site?
Clint Schmidt: Top 10, let's see… I can give it to you in a rough order. John Fotheringham: That's fine. Clint Schmidt: Number one most popular is clearly English, followed by an almost tie for Spanish and French, followed by an almost tie for German and Italian, followed then by an almost tie for Japanese and Mandarin.
John Fotheringham: Interesting.
Clint Schmidt: And then right after that it quickly disperses into a very long tail of languages, you know, all the way from Swedish to Czech to Hindi to Urdu to Croatian and so on.
John Fotheringham: Right. That's interesting. If you looked at the list of the most commonly spoken languages in the world by native speakers versus the most commonly studied foreign languages, it's amazing that difference there. Clint Schmidt: Well the fastest riser on LiveMocha easily is Arabic. I expect that Arabic will be among the top 5 languages that people want to learn by this time next year.
John Fotheringham: Yeah. That's one I would point out. In the recent past it was not even in many university programs. And now it's something a lot of people are going after. But if you pool all the Arabic dialects together, it's I think number 3 or number 4. Clint Schmidt: Yeah.
That's exactly right. It's all about English, Mandarin, Spanish and Arabic. Everything else is curiosity. In fact that long tail of languages that are available in LiveMocha are there largely because our community has taken upon themselves to translate our sequence of words and phrases that comprise our lessons into their native language.
John Fotheringham: Ahhh, OK.
Clint Schmidt: So the reason why we have Croatian 102 is because we have enough Croatian native speakers on Livemocha who would like to see us offer that to those who want to learn Croatian.
John Fotheringham: Very cool. I mean that's the way you're gonna do it. There is no way you'll every get all the languages unless there is some kind of open source, crowd source, you know, Wikipedia-esque way of doing it. Clint Schmidt: Yeah.
Do you want hear the really cool thing? The really cool thing is that because our lessons are a sequence of words and phrases, and that sequence is fixed, we can show you translations in any one of those language pairs. So if you're a Spanish speaker who wants to learn Russian, we can show you the pairing there. If you're a Russian speaker who wants to learn Hindi, we can show that pairing; a Hindi speaker who wanted to learn Swedish; a Swedish speaker who wanted to learn Croatian. So you start to get into that long tail and you exponentially increase the number of relevant students and teachers that you can attract in the community.
John Fotheringham: Right. Or, in my experience, because I studied Japanese first, when I start studying Mandarin, a lot of times it's actually preferential for me to use a Mandarin book or material meant for a Japanese person, because, you know, 80% of the vocabulary came from Chinese. Same for Korean if you're going to learn Korean. Clint Schmidt: Yeah.
John Fotheringham: So that actually is helpful in a lot of ways. I can that, sort of, the derivations, “Oh, OK. That character came from that character. OK, I got it.” So it's actually… Clint Schmidt: I'm doing the exact same thing myself in learning Italian. I'm dangerous in Spanish and it's much easier for me to, sort of, absorb Italian with Spanish as my, sort of, orientation point. John Fotheringham: Yes. Well, a thank you to you for your time and for making a good product. I look forward to the, uh…what was the new thing coming down the pipe? You said it's, uh… Clint Schmidt: Yes. Our Active Courses. LiveMocha Active German, Active Spanish, Active French, Active Italian… John Fotheringham: And active Chinese. I'm waiting… Clint Schmidt: That one will be on the top of the list. John Fotheringham: I'll be first in line. Clint Schmidt: Thanks, John.
John Fotheringham: Hopefully by the time it comes out I'll be a tutor instead of just a student. We'll see. Clint Schmidt: We're ready for you. John Fotheringham: All right. Actually that's one more question. Is there any limitations on who can tutor? Do I have to be a native speaker or can I just be proficient in the language?
Clint Schmidt: No. It's all self-selected, provided that you indicate on your profile that you are indeed a fluent or a native speaker of the language. We'll let you try your hand at correcting others. But as I mentioned, if you're not proving to be too helpful, the community will quickly let us know and you may not be on LiveMocha much longer, or identified as someone who is very helpful. But you're free to try it. John Fotheringham: Got it. All right. Clint, well, thank you so much for your time.
Clint Schmidt: You bet. Thank you, John.
John Fotheringham: For a transcript of this show and more tips, tools and tech for learning any language effectively, go to languagemastery.com.
