Mango Languages

What Mango’s All About!

Because today is Mango Monday, it’s only right to talk about Mango and what we’re all about. Language learning is a passion of ours, we live and breathe it around here. Besides analyzing language learning trends, perfecting the Mango methodology, and creating educational products for everyone to enjoy, there is a core value system we all strive to follow and live by here at the Mango grove.
Our core purpose is to deeply enrich lives by leading the world to language and cultural understanding. How did we get to this? I’m glad you asked… through our six core values!

-Quality
-Innovation
-Entrepreneurial Spirit
-Fundipline
-Integrity
-Positive Attitude

These core values come together to create what you know as Mango Languages. We try to put our best effort into everything we do while coming up with creative and new ideas that ultimately better the world through language learning. We’re driven and we have fun! Although we follow these core values on a daily basis, we couldn’t have done it without your support. Thank you to all our fans for allowing us do what we love, who create and provide opportunities for people to learn about different cultures and the world around us through languages.

Video: Mango Call on my Blackberry!

Watch as our CEO, Jason Teshuba, gets an important call for Ryan, our Sales Director, on his Blackberry…

Good times here at Mango Languages! Just another example of how we work hard and play even harder!

Video: Mango Languages – The Mango Culture, Webisode 9

We are a crazy bunch and act very much like a family…see some of our antics here!

If you worked at Mango what kind of office culture would you want to see?

Video: Mango Languages – The Mango Fleece, Webisode 8

One of our staff members lives in his Mango Languages fleece…we are not sure what he would do without it!

Mango Elves Launch New Website

We are so excited to announce our new website. www.MangoLanguages.com

This has been a labor of love to all of our current customers and their requests. We tried to make it user friendly, fun to go through and helpful in finding the information you need. We have customized our new website to provide information for all of our markets and all of our fans. Our new website is all about about our passion for language learning and international communication. From cool graphics, getting to know the Mango elves, new product information, the Mango Blog, to our methodology and testimonials, the new www.MangoLanguages.com has it all.

Please take a look around…get comfortable, so you can watch the videos, click on links and let us know what you think! After all you helped us build it!

Please leave us a comment and share your impression of the site!

Video: Mango Languages, Where is? Webisode 7

We have lots of meetings at Mango Languages…and some Mangoes are notorious for missing them.

Check out the elusive Mangoes here!

“Syntax – It’s not another tax on beer?” Continued…

In my last blog I began to delve in to the wonderful world of Syntax. I looked at the linguist definition of a sentence and more importantly the abstract idea of the proposition. I also briefly touched on word order as it is involved in sentence grammaticality. So from my previous blog we can now make two statements: 1) Sentences are abstract mental objects and, 2) word order is somehow involved in the “grammaticality” of sentences. However, we have not yet determined what role word-order plays in grammar. We will begin to look at that in this blog entry.

In her entry, Did you know languages have constituents?, my colleague briefly touched on an important component of Syntax: constituents. Constituents are a group of words which have an internal coherence. That is, they belong together. For example, the words in the phrase ‘that glass of milk‘ seem to belong to each other, as do, ‘the black wooden chair‘, ‘the big red odd shaped container’, etc. We know this because in a complete sentence all of these phrases can be replaced with one little word: it. However, compare those “constituents” to these segments: ‘the table over’, ‘wooden chair by’, and ‘big red odd‘. In contrast these segments don’t seem to belong together. They most certainly cannot be replaced in the sentences with any one word.

So now we have determined that some groups of words belong together and we call these groups constituents. Within constituents there are even smaller groups. These groups are given different titles depending on the “head” of the group. (I will explain headedness in a later blog). Some of these are: determiner phrases (DP) (sometimes referred to as noun phrases, NP), prepositional phrases (PP), adjective phrases (AdjP), adverb phrases (AP) and, verb phrases (VP). An example of a determiner phrase (DP) is ‘the container’. However, ‘the big red oddly shaped container‘ is also a DP, only a larger one also containing an adjective phrases (AdjP): big red oddly shaped container. Additionally, ‘the apple‘ is also a determiner phrase. However, ‘ate the apple‘, is a verb phrase (VP) that also contains a determiner phrase, ‘the apple‘.

Can you get creative and come up with a large phrase that contains more than one other additional phrase? What are the constituents in the phrase?

Video: Mango Languages Juicing Episode 6

Mangoes are pretty healthy and many of the Mango employees are too. A few really love to juice fruits and vegetables and boy do they make a mess.

Do you juice?

Video: Why Mango?

Ever want to know how the Mango Elves create our foreign language learning software? Well, sit back and enjoy this 5 minute video and meet several folks from the Mango team.

Video: Mango Languages Idea Incubator – Webisode 4

Innovation is one of our core values, and we have tons of ideas! However, one person, Drew Kelly, thinks he has all the best ideas. The best part is that Drew likes to make fun of himself, too.

Thanks Drew for having fun with us!