How good are MOOCs for learning a foreign language?

Mynaaa
Sat, 06 Dec 2014 00:56:09 +0000

Hey all!

I’m a chem major and I really, really want to learn a new language. I’d like to learn Russian, as I want to work in central Asia (Mongolia, Siberia etc, not as far south as Afghanistan or Pakistan) someday and Russian is a really good language for getting around the region.

My university offers Russian classes, but it might become difficult to fit them into my schedule, as the chem major is very intensive here.

I am pretty good at learning languages, and I really enjoy it. I placed into a higher level Spanish course when I got here, and it was quick paced course (combined two levels into one), and it and the course I took the next semester were a breeze. I also have some background in Hebrew, so not just romance languages. However, I feel like my Spanish course didn’t give me adequate speaking practice and I don’t want to run into the same issue with Russian here.

I feel I could handle the workload, but are MOOCs good for learning languages in the first place? How would you practice speaking with a MOOC? How can it check your results on written work and make sure there are no grammar errors?