Buy Or Don’t Buy

After multiple tries, my opinion hasn’t changed: Omegle is a failure. But if you are still dying to chat with a stranger from anywhere in the world, and you want to do it in a foreign language, I have the perfect site for you!

Welcome to LiveMocha, the free online language learning site. I’m using it to learn German, and it’s awesome. Language lessons are available at the Beginner and Intermediate levels for 11 different languages, including Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Russian, French, Icelandic and English. Again: they’re all free!

The “chatting with strangers” part comes in when you decide you want help speaking the language with others, not just staring at stock photos and murmuring “Ah, ja, er trägt einen schwarzen Pullover!” LiveMocha is extremely interactive: each lesson includes a writing and speaking portion, where you submit your own written and spoken exercises for review by site members who speak your new language natively. (Want an ego boost? Correct someone’s English grammar.)

The site also matches you with “language partners.” These are site members whose language interests match your own. (I keep getting matched with Portuguese speakers, despite my non-interest in learning Portuguese, so the jury’s still out on that feature.) If one of your language partners is online when you are, the site allows you to chat with them live via microphone. I haven’t done this yet, but my Spanish-speaking friend has already successfully talked with a few native speakers and exchanged Skype names for further contact.

Overall, LiveMocha is a fantastic way to get a head start on learning a foreign language. It has its weaknesses - don’t expect to get a perfect grasp of prepositions and conjugation unless you’re good at picking up on patterns - but for a free service it’s good quality. If you’re unemployed, there are certainly worse ways to spend your free time. And best of all, the educational aspect tends to weed out the internet sex fiends.