GuavaTalk Blog

At least 5 people emailed me recently about this article in the New York Times about learning languages online.  Funny thing is that my twin brother, Mike, is a New York Times reporter, and that day had mentioned that he wanted to email a few editors about our company.  I guess we missed out on an incredible PR opportunity!  But I did want to comment a bit on some of the companies mentioned in the article like ChinesePod and Live Mocha and compare GuavaTalk with their services.

ChinesePod is great.  I am a subscriber and listen to their podcasts when I can to learn new vocabulary words, but I view ChinesePod as a complementary service and not a direct competitor to GuavaTalk.  It’s great as a supplement to your language learning, but if you are a serious Chinese language learner who is trying to advance quickly in language, it really cannot be a standalone substitute for GuavaTalk.  We offer an affordable way for you to quickly learn Mandarin.  With the guidance of a professionally trained teacher, you are going to get a superb foundation in Chinese pronunciation, which is exceptionally important since Mandarin is a tonal language, and grammar.  Your teacher will regularly be putting you in safe situations where you will essentially have to try to speak Chinese, and therefore let your brain’s natural language learning cognition functions start activating Chinese speech patterns in your brain.  Along the way, your teacher will be acting as a facilitator of communicative activities, monitor to correct errors in your speech, and instructor to supplement the areas where you are weak.  For systematic learners, you will get the benefit of using some of the most popular Chinese textbooks on the market, and for visual learners, you will have the benefit of visual aids that we create in powerpoint.  ChinesePod is something that a serious language learner uses on the side to build vocabulary and listening comprehension, but not something that a serious language learner would use to really get up the learning curve on pronunciation or speaking.  Consider using GuavaTalk and ChinesePod together and let us know what you think about the results!

LiveMocha is also very interesting.  I did sign up and chatted with some native Chinese speakers online via their IM client.  My language partner remarked that my Chinese was very good.  What I realized, however, from my experience is that while I could get some opportunities to practice speaking on LiveMocha, I really needed a professionally trained teacher at my level to really help me improve.  Why?  Well, first of all, the best language learning occurs when the teacher is teaching at an “n+1″ level.  This is a level that is slightly above your current level (or “n”).  When your teacher does this, you are not going to be bored nor are you going to be overwhelmed.  You are going to be pushed to try to articulate new things in a realm just beyond what you’re comfortable speaking in.  As a result, you will make mistakes, but you will have a monitor function with your teacher to make corrections.  As a result, you will advance in both fluency and accuracy of the language.  I really believe that unless you have a professionally trained teacher or a very good system to benefit from the language exchange, you will hit a wall in your learning, which is the point when you are pretty comfortable speaking with the vocabulary words you know and in the pronunciation you think is correct.  At that point, you need a forcing function to keep learning new words and grammar and to keep improving your pronunciation, which happens when your teacher is creating that “n+1″ environment, introducing to you new texts and dialogues at that level, and correcting your pronunciation with his/her professional training.  You need a system to learn, review, and reinforce those words.  So in short, use LiveMocha if you want some practice, but use GuavaTalk if you really want to accelerate up the learning curve in your language learning.

Obviously, I’m a bit biased, but I think a lot of people who have tried our service will agree with me!