Although visitors to foreign lands often communicate at a basic level by pantomiming, Americans inevitably give away their tourist status by gesturing with an accent. Pole vault over language barriers without resorting to charades with today’s Groupon: for $10, you get a complete one-month online language course from Livemocha (a $20 value). Choose one of four languages:

• Spanish
• French
• German
• Italian

One of Time magazine’s 50 Best Websites of 2010, Livemocha opens the door to multilingual mastery thanks to comprehensive lessons and a helpful online community that has grown to more than 7 million people. Pick up a foreign tongue without wondering where it’s been or how to explain it to a customs agent by working your way through one of the company’s Active courses, which help students learn conversational French, German, Italian, or Spanish while working at their own pace. Courses progress through four levels of fluency, from beginner to intermediate, and incorporate a series of Internet-based multimedia lessons. Role-playing exercises give you a chance to raise your conversational experience level without having to fight the same three Cactuars over and over again. Livemocha's 7 million members will also be a mouse-click away to offer feedback and provide lips with the motivation they need to break out of their one-language rut. Each course includes linguistic lesson content from educational megapublisher HarperCollins, as well as cultural notes to help you understand subtleties such as slang. Stick with it and you could be talking your way out of an embarrassing baguette faux pas in Paris or talking your way into an exclusive graham-cracker boutique in Hamburg in no time.

Reviews

Livemocha with Pearson Education won the 2009 English-Speaking Union's ESU President's Award for its Active English course. Time magazine named Livemocha one of the 50 Best Websites of 2010. It also has multiple other press mentions, including the New York Times and CNN. More than 157,000 Facebookers are fans.

• Livemocha offers basic instructional tutorials and exercises in some 30 different languages, but the service's real value is in its community. Livemocha has assembled more than 6 million members, each listing fluency and linguistic skills. When submitting an exercise, you have the option to get someone in the community to grade your effort, correcting your pitfalls and helping you hone your skills through the careful lens of a native speaker. It's a social approach to learning a language – Time