Mango Languages

Guest Post: Brazilian Portuguese for the Utterly Confused

Guest Blogger Marina Khonina has taken on the task of using Mango Languages to learn Brazilian Portugese.  She is providing monthly updates through our blog as she progresses through the course. Here is part three:

One of my recent Mango Languages lessons in Brazilian Portuguese was entitled Direções Para o Hotel (Directions to a Hotel).  As luck would have it, shortly after completing the lesson I found myself navigating the streets of Istanbul with my Portuguese-speaking friend looking for an elusive hotel that housed a visiting professor from Brazil and his companion. The professor was interested in the history of Byzantium, I was told, and, as an aspiring scholar of Byzantium and a great admirer of the historic city where I happen to live these days, I agreed to give the visitors a brief tour of the Byzantine monuments in Istanbul.

Thus started a new chapter in my adventure with Brazilian Portuguese. Although the professor spoke English, his companion did not.  My Brazilian flatmate cheerfully joined our improvised field trip along with her sister, who was here for a visit, and so Portuguese was heard with increasing frequency as our small group moved from one historical site to another.  My brother, who does not share my Lusophone passions, dutifully tagged along, and so it is to him and to his patience in the midst of Brazilian and Byzantine chatter that I dedicate this post.

The field trip proved to be exceptionally rewarding, linguistically speaking.  After beating myself up for forgetting the simple phrase, “Prazer em conhecê lo” (“Nice to meet you”, Mango Languages – Lesson 1), I eventually found myself understanding quite a bit of the conversation and even surprising my brother by translating a joke from Portuguese. Alas, I did not succeed in breaking my self-imposed vow of silence in encounters with the speakers of foreign languages.

Apart from this day-long immersion experience, however, I am not very happy with my lack of significant progress in Portuguese.  This, I believe, is a direct consequence of letting too much time elapse between my Mango lessons (exacerbated, perhaps, by my earlier decision not to supplement Mango Languages with other learning materials at this point).  Whatever breakthroughs in understanding that I experienced recently were largely a result of exposure to spoken Portuguese.  Since visiting professors from Brazil are hard to come by in Istanbul, I suppose it is time to intensify my Mango Languages lessons, aiming for at least 3 lessons per week (as opposed to the once weekly lessons I have been doing so far). This should be easier to do now that the spring semester is over and my university-related commitments are not nearly as overwhelming.

I find it crucial to maintain a consistent schedule for reviewing previous lessons. For this purpose, the “Phrasebook Review” option offered by Mango is usually sufficient: I am quizzed on various parts of the lesson’s dialogue, which are then presented in their complete form.  I presume that if I complete more lessons per week these “forced” reviews will become unnecessary, since there appears to be a repetition algorithm built into the Mango Languages system.

As I work to complete my Mango Languages challenge, the support of my Twitter followers is invaluable.  Many a time I find myself being cheered on by fellow language learners or by Portuguese native speakers.  Sometimes, these brief interactions turn into learning experiences: a few days ago a Brazilian follower wrote to me saying, “Português é Legal!” Who would have thought that “legal” can also mean “cool”?  Luckily, I have my flatmate to explain the intricacies of Brazilian slang in moments when it leaves me utterly confused!

Guest Post: Brazilian Portugese–Lesson 2

Guest Blogger Marina Khonina has taken on the task of using Mango Languages to learn Brazilian Portugese. She is providing monthly updates through our blog as she progresses through the course. Here is part two:

Several weeks into my Brazilian Portuguese learning adventure, I am more thrilled about this experiment than ever. I was able to stick to my (very laid-back) plan of one lesson per week, although the temptation is often strong to abandon my other activities and concentrate solely on my Portuguese. This urge goes hand-in-hand with my habitual impatience, which is regularly challenged by Mango Languages’ insistence on slow, deliberate practice.

Guest Post: Brazilian Portuguese – Lesson One

I am very excited to share this post by Guest Blogger, Marina Khonina. (previous post) She is using our online language learning program and will be providing monthly updates on her progress to learn Portuguese.  She approached us with this assignment – to learn the language and blog about it.  We thought…what a great way for us to share how Mango works and see if there are areas where we can improve.

Today I am starting my experiment in learning Brazilian Portuguese with Mango Languages.  I will track my progress with regular blog posts, in which I will reflect on my experience, as a fairly seasoned language learner, with the lessons designed by Mango.

Before I delve into lesson-specific details, however, some background information is in order.  I find Brazilian Portuguese an exceptionally beautiful language, but I have been hesitant about learning it because I could not possibly imagine how I would get my tongue around all these strange, mesmerizing sounds.  I have been exposed to a fair amount of spoken Brazilian Portuguese (my long-time flatmate is from Brazil), yet pronunciation remains for me the most difficult aspect of this language.  I hope that Mango Languages will help me surmount this challenge, which is exacerbated by the fact that I am extremely shy about speaking in a new tongue.

I dabbled with Portuguese about a year ago, listening briefly to a couple of Brazilian podcasts and asking my flatmate to teach me a few basic words.  At that time, however, I had too many things on my plate to start a new language.  Now I have a great opportunity to devote some serious (albeit, limited) time to the study of this language.

Portuguese is not my first Romance language: I studied French in school, achieving upper-intermediate proficiency, but since then my French has gotten rusty.  I also have a basic command of Esperanto, which should be helpful in my study of Portuguese.  In fact, after I started learning Esperanto, I noticed some improvement in my understanding of written Portuguese.

Now on to the actual lesson. Today I completed Lesson 1, and it was absolutely delightful to discover that Mango did not expect me to learn to say “This is a cat” or some other such nonsense before learning how to greet another person properly.  Another thing that I immediately liked about my Mango Languages lesson was how each sentence or conversational unit (e.g. “Hello. How are you?”) is presented with an appropriate English equivalent and a word-by-word translation.  This enabled me to see from the very first lesson how the language is structured and to pay attention to any peculiarities of grammar or word usage.

For example, I discovered that in Portuguese, you say “How goes the Mrs.?” when politely asking a woman about how she is doing.  Furthermore, a literal translation of this sentence shows that Portuguese speakers use the verb “to go” where an English speaker would use “to be.”  Even more importantly, the individual is addressed in the third person (the Mrs./Mr.), rather than in the second person (you).  These two facts, gleaned from a word-by-word translation of a single sentence, can give me, the learner, plenty of insights into the culture and the language:  i.e. politeness is expressed by emphasizing the distance between the speakers through the use of the third person/noun instead of second person/pronoun; a person’s daily life is seen in terms of movement (going) rather than existence (being).  Of course, it’s easy to go too far with this analysis, and my insights may not necessarily be correct, but they certainly motivate me to explore more of the language and to embrace the culture along with the linguistic aspects.  Failure to do the latter often proves to be a major hindrance to language mastery; as was the case with my study of Turkish, until recently.

What I did not necessarily like was the anglicized pronunciation given for each word in addition to the audio.  I would advise you to regard this as a personal pet peeve, however.  As a language geek, I prefer the International Phonetic Alphabet (of course!), but it would be too much to expect a first-time or casual language-learner to learn IPA conventions before starting a language course.  In fact, this requirement is likely to discourage the learner! At any rate, the phonetic help in Mango Languages only appears on mouse-over, so learners like me, who prefer not to use it, can easily ignore this otherwise useful function.

While I initially found the lesson long-ish and repetitive, it was reasonably—and surprisingly—challenging.  When it comes to learning languages, I tend to prefer speed and novelty over repetition. Yet, with Mango Languages I discovered that if I let my attention wander even a little, I begin to flounder.  This means that Mango lessons are comprehensive enough, so there’s no danger of skimming and forgetting soon thereafter.  Most importantly, the built-in repetition algorithm (and my experience leads me to assume there is one) is close enough to the natural memory curve to ensure sufficient retention.

To conclude, I am happy with my first Mango Languages lesson in Brazilian Portuguese.  I like the feeling of learner autonomy, contrasted to the force-feeding of information that characterizes some other programs.  The recordings are clear enough for a first-time learner without being unnaturally stilted.  The pace feels a tad slow for my taste, but I am beginning to see the value of not rushing through the lesson too much.

As for my study plan, I will try to cover one lesson per week.  This is a relatively slow pace, which leaves large gaps between each lesson, but, given my current schedule, this is the only realistic plan.  Looking ahead, I wonder whether the communicative emphasis of Mango Languages will help me, a self-admitted introvert and fearer of native speakers, to overcome the communication barrier.  If I manage to utter something (anything!) in Portuguese to my flatmate, that would be a major breakthrough already.

Question to ponder: How soon should a language learner attempt to speak the new language?  Some learners believe that speaking a language as soon as you possibly can makes all the difference (Benny Lewis, a.k.a. the Irish polyglot, is an ardent supporter of this view).  Others, like Steve Kauffmann, argue that a certain “silent period” is necessary before a learner can converse in a new language.  What do you think?  What has your experience been with trying to speak a new foreign language?