Mango Languages

10 Ways English Takes You Out To The Ball Game

Yesterday was a reminder of the extent that American sports has infiltrated the English language and just how unique baseball is to the American culture.

The Mango Team got to spend the afternoon at a Detroit Tigers’ Game, where we sported our orange Mango shirts proudly. Much of our staff is international and many of our team members had never been to a baseball game. Jamie our accountant is from China, and she even printed out the rules of the game before she went. It was really hard for me to even imagine not knowing the names of certain aspects of the sport because baseball is so much a part of life here in the U.S. If you don’t the the game than you probably would have a hard time with these idiomatic phrases.

Think about it:
1. 3 strikes and you’re out (you only three chances to do it right)
2. Hitting a homerun (when you do something well)
3. Hit it outta the ballpark (same as above)
4. First Base, Second Base, Third Base (all sexual dating terms)
5. He is out in left field (when someone is thinking differently than the group)
6. Batter up (who is next in line to speak or present)
7. Being on deck (same as above)
8. Someone throws you a curve ball (tells you something you didn’t expect)
9. He made a bad call (when someone doesn’t see what really happened or make the right choice)
10. He is on the Home Team (someone who is on your side)

Can you think of any I missed?

We had a great time at the game – check out a clip of the fun below.

The Sounds of Silence

One of the most famous and moving stories is that of Helen Keller, a deaf-blind woman who managed to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree despite her adversities. The oft-quoted part of her story is when she managed to make the connection between the words her teacher, Ann Sullivan, was making in Helen’s palm and the objects they represented; Helen came to understand one day that every object has a name, and this was the beginning of everything.

Ann Sullivan used fingerspelling –spelling words with the fingers– and “spelled” the letters of each word in Helen’s palm in the hope that Helen would make this connection. Fingerspelling though is only a tool in the languages of the deaf, the so-called sign languages. There is a misconception that sign languages are just an imitation of oral languages, just a compilation of gestures, and that the deaf represent the letters of the alphabet with the fingers and “speak.”  However, this is far from the truth. Sign languages are not another way to represent oral languages, and what’s more, they have nothing to do with the corresponding oral languages that are spoken in a place.

For example, although American and British English speakers share the same language, American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL) are different and mutually unintelligible. Sign languages are natural languages, like English and Spanish, for example, with the only difference that whereas oral languages use the sound-hearing mode, that is we pronounce them through the vocal tract and we hear them, sign languages use visual-place mode, that is we “pronounce” them by using the fingers, face and body, and we see them. One very interesting event is the birth of the Nicaraguan Sign Language: when schools for the deaf were created in the country, the deaf children, who were isolated from each other up to then, were taught lip reading. However, when they met in the playground, the children invented their own sign system (LSN).

This brings us to a characteristic of all sign languages, which makes them similar to their oral counterparts:  they follow the same phases of first language acquisition, i.e.,  the various structures of language are acquired at the same age in both hearing and deaf children, and there is a critical age between 0 and 4/5 years for both. For example, at the same age when hearing children mistakenly use “you” to refer to themselves, the deaf children point to the other person (the sign for “you”) to refer to themselves.  Nicaraguan deaf children were past the critical age and so they developed some sort of a pidgin which slowly evolved into a language (ISN).

Sign languages have their own grammars, which are far from simple.  ASL’s grammar, for example, is reminiscent of Navajo. The various grammar structures are shown with a combination of hand shapes, movements of the palm, hands and body, facial expressions, and body postures. To give an example, in ASL, to show the part of a sentence that is the subject, as in “John I really like” where we want to stress that it is John, and not Mary, that I really like, one raises the eyebrows and lifts the chin together with the sign for John. To understand what a signer signs, one has to literally have in view everything and not only the sign.

I will end this post on a personal note. Sign languages have been persecuted and forbidden as usually happens with languages of minorities. In the book by N. E. Groce, “Everybody here spoke sign language” we read that in a small town in Martha’s Vineyard, an island outside Cape Cod, for about three centuries the hearing inhabitants also knew the local sign language because the deaf population of the island was numerous and rich. In 1960, William Stokoe argued that sign languages are natural languages. From then onward much research has been done in Linguistics which has revealed many interesting things about the structure of sign languages and how similar in structure they are to oral languages. Moreover, many discoveries have been made regarding the nature of human language which would never have been made if we just studied oral languages. All this as well as the work of many psychologists and educators has helped give sign languages and signers the place they deserve in society.

Do you have a story that relates oral languages to sign language? Please share!

Sicilian and Italian… What's the difference?

Lately, a few of us around the office have been bugging the product development team (jokingly) to come out with a Sicilian course. This begs the question, isn’t Sicilian just a dialect of Italian? It turns out there is actually a good deal of debate over this subject.

Some linguists believe that Sicilian may have actually been the first Romance Language, arising from a vulgar form of Latin spoken by Roman military men and everyday people. It is placed in the Italiano meridionale-estremo group of languages along with the Greek influenced Calabrian dialects of southern Italy, and actually has at least eleven regional dialects of its own.

The Sicilian language has been shaped by many years of foreign influence, occupation, and conquest. Unlike Italian, which is almost entirely Latin based, Sicilian has elements of Greek, Arabic, French, Catalan, and Spanish. This can be seen in many Sicilian words, like “azzizzari” (to embellish, adorn) from the Arabic “aziz” (beautiful), or “foddi” (angry), which can be traced to the Norman French “fol.”

Grammatically, Sicilian is also very different from Italian. For example, all the pronouns for I, he, she, you, and them are different in Sicilian.  Also, take into account that Sicilian does not distinguish between plural endings for verbs, using the same conjugations for masculine and feminine nouns. In Italian, the plural form differs according to gender, and there is much more concern about agreement between nouns and adjoining adjectives.

A great deal of the actual Italian influence on Sicilian has been since 1860, when, during the Italian Unification, Sicily became a part of Italy. More and more, there is risk today that the Sicilian language will eventually die out due to the influx of the Italian language into Sicily, becoming the preferred tongue among the natives. Even Sicilian emigrants, like my own family, speak a brand of the language which is different from what actual native Sicilians speak, simply because the language has changed so much even in the last 50 years.

So what’s the verdict? Have you met anyone who speaks Sicilian? Do you think that it is a language or a dialect?

Video: Mandarin Chinese Tongue Twister

Jamie in accounting at Mango Languages shows off her mad tongue twister skills in Mandarin Chinese. Can you repeat what she says? We couldn’t!

Funny Video: English Lesson – How to Pronounce The "th" Sound

Late last Friday – a few Mango Languages staffers sat down and had a couple drinks while they practiced pronunciation of the “th” sound based on a Learn English Pronunciation exercise we found on the internet. Note…this is not the way we teach English!

The results a very funny video. Check it out and let us know what you think of our English pronunciation!!

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.

10 Reasons Why You Should Learn Spanish

Spanish has become very important to the U.S. and our culture.  Did you know?  More than 1.4 million university students were enrolled in language courses in autumn of 2002, and Spanish is the most widely-taught language in American colleges and universities.  Of all students enrolled in a foreign language course, 53 percent study Spanish, followed by French (14.4%), German (7.1%), Italian (4.5%), American Sign language (4.3%), Japanese (3.7%), and Chinese (2.4%).  The totals, however, remain relatively small relative to the size of the total U.S population.

Here are 10 Reasons Why You Should Learn Spanish:

1. Spanish is the second most-common language in the United States after English.
2. There are more Spanish speakers in the U.S. than there are speakers of Chinese, French, Hawaiian, and the Native American languages combined.
3. According to the 2007 American Community Survey conducted by the United States Census Bureau, Spanish is the primary language spoken at home by over 34 million people aged 5 or older.
4. There are also 45 million Hispanics who speak Spanish as a first or second language.
5. There are 6 million Spanish-speaking students of all ages
6. The U.S. is the world’s second-largest Spanish-speaking community, only after Mexico and ahead of Spain, Colombia, and Argentina.
7. Roughly half of all U.S. Spanish speakers also speak English “very well,” based on the self-assessment Census question respondents.
8. In total, there were 34,547,077 people in the United States who speak Spanish as their primary language at home, including 3.5 million in the territory of Puerto Rico, where Spanish is the primary language.
9. Over half of the country’s Spanish-speakers reside in California, Texas, and Florida alone.
10. Spanish is the most widely-taught, non-English language in U.S. secondary schools and of higher education, thus establishing its importance to non-Hispanic Americans.

Source: Wikipedia

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?

Lunch Time Linguistic Gymnastics

Having worked in Information Technology for many years now, I’ve had the great privilege of getting to know and be good friends with many people from India who have been gracious enough to share their thoughts with me on culture and language.  In particular, something that piqued my interest very quickly was learning about the linguistic versatility which is such a prominent feature in Indian life.  Allow me to explain.

When I was new to the company in which I began my IT career, I was sort of “adopted” by a group of friends who all happened to be from India.  This group of us would have lunch together just about every day at precisely 12 PM, and, in addition to being an opportunity for a meal, it was also a great opportunity for being social.  Being the only person at the table whose sole language was English, I often found myself staring at my lunch, at the ceiling, or into space as several different, exotic (at least to my ears) sounding languages flew back and forth across the table.   It was never awkward at all. Rather, they were sub-conversations within the context of a larger conversational experience which included us all.  Having married into a family which came to America from the Ukraine and speaks Russian at home, I was sort of used to politely grinning at mealtime while similar sub-conversations took place that I could not understand.  But this was a little bit more dynamic because there were clearly several languages at play here, and the use of each seemed to change depending on the situation, context, and speakers.   What gives?   Curiosity forced me to find out as much as I could. First, a little background:

Without making too broad a generalization, it seems that most everybody from India knows two languages: English and their “mother-tongue.”  Held over from British colonial rule, English is still in active use in primary education, government institutions, and everyday life.  On the other hand, the “mother-tongue” can best be understood as the local language that is spoken at home while growing up and there are a great variety of these languages across the Indian subcontinent. Assuming it is common among family members, the applicable mother-tongue continues to be the language spoken at home by most Indians while living in America.   Additionally, many Indians know three languages: English, their mother-tongue, and Hindi.  Hindi, along with English, is the other national language of India and tends to serve as the native lingua franca across certain parts of the country.  Lastly, some Indians know four or more languages with the addition of a second or third mother-tongue due to having parents from different regions of the country, or from having themselves grown up in multiple regions of the country.

Getting back to the story, it didn’t, as I said, take me too long to realize there were many layers of complexity and nuance making up the conversations of our group.  After a while I felt comfortable enough to ask about why there were so many different languages being used and what determined their use.  It was explained to me that, for conversational purposes, the language of choice was determined mainly by regionality (possessing a shared mother-tongue) and that another language common to both would be used if there was no common mother-tongue.  This seemed very practical and made sense to me.  Instinctively, I would certainly rather communicate with the language I most comfortably spoke given the choice.

Within our particular group, here is how the linguistic dynamics would play out: there were four in our group who were all from around the city of Chennai (formerly Madras) on India’s southeast coast.  Chennai is the primary city in the province of Tamil Nadu, and the mother-tongue of this particular region is a Dravidian language called Tamil.  When speaking conversationally to one another, these four would always use Tamil.  The other two from our group (besides me) were from a province to the north of Tamil Nadu called Andhra Pradesh.  In this region and around the city of Hyderabad, the predominant mother-tongue is another Dravidian language known as Telugu and this is the language they would converse in with one another.  After a while I became quite familiar with this pattern but noticed something which stood out to me.   Of the two whose mother-tongue was Telugu, one would generally switch and speak in Tamil when conversing with the other Tamil speakers.   However, in the same situation the other would always switch to English. This made me awfully curious, particularly because he and one of the Tamil speakers were best friends and always hung out together.  After I thought about this for a minute it dawned on me that I’d only ever heard them speak to each other in English. Just when I thought I had the rules of the game all figured out I was stumped.

Seeking clarification, I asked about this one day.  As it turns out, the first of my Telugu speaking friends actually spent part of his youth in an area where Tamil is widely spoken.  Thus, he had a command of both Tamil and Telugu in addition to the relatively ubiquitous English and Hindi.   Truly a polyglot!  As for why our other Telugu speaking friend didn’t do the same, I learned that due to the region he was from he did not have command of Hindi or Tamil as neither language was widely spoken.  Only English and Telugu were widely spoken.  That meant that his only common language with the others was English.  Simply put, it had never occurred to me before that moment that English could ever be the lone mutually understood language among those from a country so far away from where the English language originated.  Astonished as I was at this, it simply goes to show how complex the linguistic gymnastic act can become in a part of the world highlighted by such a high degree of linguistic diversity.  When it comes to language, those of us who have only ever needed to know how to speak English seem to have it easy indeed.

Have you had a similar experience? Please comment and share!

Guest Post: Learning French

I am very excited to have Tanya Brothen providing Mango a Guest Blog Post.  She has spent the last 14 years learning how to correctly pronounce French words.  While living in Paris in 2008 she started Parisian Spring, a blog about the life and interests of a Francophile traveler.  Tanya currently spends her days working in Washington, D.C., and her nights wishing she owned a home in Provence.

Question: What do the words “accident,” “fruit,” and “table,” have in common?
Answer: All three are regularly used in conversation by English and French speakers alike.

Thanks to the Normans who conquered England in 1066, roughly one third of all English words are of French origin (some by way of Latin), with many of those words spelled exactly the same in both languages.   Think of “courage,” “original,” and “million.”  On any given day, Anglophones are regularly using French words without even thinking about it.

Question: Does this similarity of vocabulary translate into ease in learning the language?
Answer: Don’t bet on it.

See, while the words look the same, their pronunciations are often completely different.  When pronounced in French, the word “fruit” sounds more like “fwee” rather than its English cousin, “froot.”  Francophones wouldn’t dream of pronouncing the “t” in “accident,” and you’re going to need to perfect your from-the-throat hacking sounds to correctly say “original” in front of a Parisian.  You could argue that the similar-look/different-pronunciation conundrum is actually a hindrance to Anglophone learners of French, tricking them into consistently mispronouncing the words that look familiar.

Adding to the confusion are the famous “faux amis,” or false friends.  These are words that, while spelled the same in both French and English, not only have different pronunciations, but also completely different meanings.  Take the word “sensible,” for example.   To the English speaker, it means having or showing good judgment, but the French speaker uses “sensible” to describe a sensitive person or thing.

Question: So what’s an Anglophone learner of French to do?
Answer: It might sound daunting, but straight-up memorization is what helped me.  Flash cards are another good option; simply write the word on one side of a card and the meaning in both French and English on the other side.  For help with pronunciation, try watching a French movie with English subtitles, which allows you to see a word like “original” written in English but pronounced in French.

You’ll know your French skills have truly arrived when you start searching for the meaning or pronunciation of a faux ami in English rather than en Français.  By this point, the previously foreign language will probably start coming to you naturally.  And if it doesn’t, you can always blame the Normans.