Living Language (Platinum)

Living Language Platinum ($179 for one year access), a language-learning package by Random House, fuses online learning modules with mobile apps and excellent live e-tutoring sessions, delivered in a web-conference style format. Living Language doesn't use an immersion approach to teaching foreign languages, as Rosetta Stone TOTALe (from $249 for Level 1, 4 stars) so the instruction, explanations, and additional context needed to learn all occur in English.

While Rosetta Stone is one of our Editors' Choices for language-learning software, its live but tightly scripted Web-based classes aren't its strong suit. It's Rosetta Stone's highly interactive and engaging software application that make it an appealing word and phrase builder. Living Language, on the other hand, offers some of the best live courses I've seen. In my experience, the instructors consistently hit the highest standards, and it was an absolute pleasure to be a part of the class. If you want to practice speaking a new language with a small group (three learners and one instructor, maximum), Living Language is the way to go. For $179, you get one year of access, an unprecedented and unbeatable value if live coursework is your aim.

Living Language's main problem is uninspiring lessons in the software. The online content mirrors what's found in the Living Language iPad and iPhone apps, and it's all rather dull. Flashcards and old-school learning games, like Memory and word searches, fail to teach language content effectively. I've always preferred audio-heavy program, especially those with storytelling or some other thread of humanity, such as Rocket Languages Premium ($99.95 for lifetime membership, 4.5 stars), another of our Editors' Choice recommendations. For additional recommendations, see "The Best Software for Learning a Language."

Languages Offered and Mobile Apps
Languages offered through Living Language vary by platform. The Web-based content covers the most languages: Spanish, French, Italian, German, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic. Random House does offer other products for learning language, including Swahili, Croatian, and English (moderated in Spanish), but these are not available in Living Language.

The Living Language iOS apps cover six languages: French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese. Nook users can choose from French, Spanish, and Italian, with German, Chinese, and Japanese due out sometime this year. Android users so far can only get Spanish and French content. Future support for German and Italian are on the horizon, with Chinese and Japanese reportedly in the works for a release on Android later in 2012. All the apps include 46 lessons, covering beginner through advanced material.

How to get the apps, and figuring out what's included in the Living Language Platinum package, caused me some confusion. Most of the apps are free to download, but only give you access to a small sampling of content. If you buy the Platinum package, you can sign in from within the app to get full access. Or, if you're not a Platinum member, you can buy the content separately through an in-app purchase after downloading the freebie. The iPhone content goes for $9.99, while iPad users pay a little more ($19.99) for the luxury of being on the bigger screen. Both Nook and Android content will run you $14.99.

Lessons
Living Language's modular lessons use flashcards, games, interactive sentence-building exercises, and fill-in-the-blank exercises. It lacks a strong audio component, which is a major weakness of the program. Primarily, you're listening to single words and single sentences, rather than stories or dialogue in context. Flashcards, for example, all contain an audio file that you can play to hear a word spoken aloud. Reading sections also contain audio icons that, when pressed, play spoken words. But it's all very fragmented.

When learning a new language, a lot of people benefit from deep listening exercises of 15 to 30 minutes a day. Pimsleur Comprehensive ($119.95 for digital download, 3.5 stars) and Rocket Languages excel in the audio department. Pimsleur, named for the linguist who developed a precise listen-and-repeat methodology for adult language learning, uses audio almost exclusively, while Rocket Languages offers visual and interactive components mixed in. However, the audio portions of Rocket Language require a good 15 to 25 minutes of exclusive and uninterrupted listening. It's not meant to be broken up with the other learning modules.

In Living Language, exposure to new vocabulary mostly comes through flashcards. For the most part, you see a word in the language you're learning paired with an image on a card. Click to flip the card, and the it reveals the English translation. When you've got a word down pat, mark the card as "mastered." If you don't know the word yet, mark the card as "study." It's rather dry stuff, not at all engaging or memorable.

There's another learning module that shows dialogue bubbles one by one, which I think is basically just more flashcards in disguise, because these too have a click-to-flip function with a translation behind them. Both the traditional flashcards and the dialogues contain audio files so you can hear the word or words spoken in the new language, but they are derived of any real-world context.

Short reading passages remind me too much of dry very textbook material. Sure, they get to the point, often explaining a grammatical rule, but I never once looked forward to reading them.

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