Miranda González, Livemocha tutor and co-host of LiveEnglish with Livemocha on Facebook, shares her thoughts and advice for teaching your kids a second language.

In her words, Miranda

In 2012, it’s not just a nice idea to be bilingual – it’s crucial.  There’s no need for me to lecture you about the benefits of being bilingual; after all, if you are reading Livemocha’s blog, you certainly have interest in other languages.  But have you thought about teaching your children to be bilingual?  If you want to teach your child another language, the sooner you get started, the better.  As both a teacher and a mom, I’d like to share with you how I am teaching my kids two languages.  I’m not saying…  read more

By Miranda González

As a teacher for LiveEnglish with Livemocha on Facebook, I usually like to start my class with a warm-up question like “What do you like to do in the summer?” or “If you had a million dollars, what would you buy?”  These warm-up questions serve two purposes: 1) Students get a chance to practice their writing and 2) They get to share their interests with people from all over the world.  These LiveEnglish students come from distinct nations and speak many different languages, but they make a lot of the same mistakes when writing in English.  How can this be?  English is tricky, and some parts are trickier than others, so to help you out, I’ve compiled…  read more

LiveEnglish with Livemocha teacher and host Miranda chimes in on our Diary of a Language Teacher series.
If you are one of the over ten-thousand people who follow the LiveEnglish with Livemocha English language learning sessions on Facebook, you’ll recognize this gal: Miranda is your host and teacher every weekday at 18:00 GMT. When she heard about Livemocha’s Diary of a Language Learner / Language Teacher series, she was excited to share with her students and the Livemocha community what her experience is as a teacher. Here she introduces herself and tells her story of going from student to teacher.

Here’s Miranda in her own words.

Before I was a language teacher, I was a language learner.  I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. …  read more

Your library card is your Gold Key to language learning
We are pleased and proud to announce that the Seattle Public Library system has renewed their Livemocha license for another two years, which gives over 600,000 library cardholding Seattleites free access to the world’s largest language learning community.
Did you know that over 5 million people in the continental United States have unlimited access to Livemocha through their public libraries?
To date, Livemocha is offered in 30 public library systems in the U.S. including:

Multnomah County Library, Oregon
El Paso Public Library, Texas
Boston Public Library, Massachusetts
Shelby County Public Library System, Alabama
Arlington Public Library, Virginia
Tulare County Library, California
St. Charles Public Library, Illinois

Here’s an article from the Multnomah County library about their new Livemocha offering.
Why…  read more

In April we sent out an All-Call asking for people in the Livemocha community to become regular contributors to our Diary of a Language Learner series. When I got this email I was thrilled:

“I am very interested in writing for your monthly language blog.  I am a current Spanish student, hoping to one day be a Spanish teacher.  I will be landing in Chile in two weeks, and will be traveling around Chile (and probably Argentina, Peru, or Ecuador) the whole summer (winter there).  I plan to see many museums, walk around town, mingle with many locals, practice my Spanish, and write about my experiences.”

We were immediately interested in hearing more about Kjera’s upcoming South American adventures and we hope…  read more

One of my duties as Editor of this blog is to find and share resources with our language-learning community; from time to time I find a gem. Last month I spoke with Deanna Lyles and her husband and business partner Ìñigo Gil who started Bilingual Readers, a Madrid-based publishing company specializing in Spanish/English books for bilingual children and adults.

Why did you start Bilingual Readers?
Íñigo and I started Bilingual Readers three years ago to combine our love of books with our love of languages. As a bicultural (American/Spanish) couple living in Spain, we wanted to create books, which reflected both our languages and backgrounds. Since then we’ve published a series of high quality, bilingual (Spanish/English) books for children…  read more

A century and a half after its establishment, the Italian university Politecnico di Milano, is switching to English in an attempt to maintain a competitive edge as an internationally competitive university. Find the full story here.

The university has announced that from 2014 most of its degree courses – including all its graduate courses – will be taught and assessed entirely in English rather than Italian.

The waters of globalization are rising around higher education – and the university believes that if it remains Italian-speaking it risks isolation and will be unable to compete as an international institution.

“We strongly believe our classes should be international classes – and the only way to have international classes is to use the English language,”…  read more

The goal of our ‘Language in the Workplace’ series is not just to share stories from people who practice their languages in their respective workplaces, but to illustrate to our community where and how you can apply what you’ve learned and perhaps find meaningful work or even a successful career using your multiple languages. In this post, Gio Donatelli of the Virginia Institute of Interpreting, outlines what it takes to be an interpreter.

by Gio Donatelli

Imagine that your doctor walks into your hospital room, looks at a clipboard, furrows his brow, looks at you and starts talking. But you have no idea what he’s saying.  Or, perhaps you are calling your bank because you see an error in your account…  read more

Guest Post: Daniel Owen – Recruitment Consultant for Euro London Appointments, Multilingual Recruitment Specialists. Daniel has written for us twice before (links below) and has a unique perspective to offer our readers in regard to what employers are looking for when it comes to bi- or multilingualism in the workplace and in the job market.

By Daniel Owen

Working at Euro London Appointments, Europe’s largest independent multilingual recruitment consultancy, new jobs come in daily for us to recruit for. These jobs are far ranging across many different sectors and at many levels of the pay scale but the one constant that they do have is that they all require the knowledge of at least one other language, sometimes even three or…  read more

We are always looking for tools to help language learners in their quest for proficiency in their target language. In July of 2010, The New York Times blog posted these ten tips on how to use their publication to support English language learners.
I propose we take this exercise a bit further.

If English isn’t your target language, apply some of the tips and ideas that are given here to a news publication that is in your target language. That publication may not have all of the bells and whistles that The New York Times has, but the exercises within are still valuable and will support your language learning process.

Search for stories about a country in which your target language is…  read more