Mango Languages

And the winners are…

We asked what Journeys you would take with more advanced language learning content from Mango Languages. The results are in and the following Mango fans are each receiving a  free Mango Passport Journeys One, Two and Three bundle! Congratulations and happy learning to everyone who submitted a response!

Tony from Redondo Beach said:

I have completed your free trial for Brazilian Portugueses over 38 times. Over the last 17 years, I have trained in the Martial Art of Brazilian Jiu jitsu, have met so many people who are Brazilian.  I am traveling Brazil in August and it has been time to finally learn the language.

With Mango, I am excited and your program is fun and keeps my attention with the interaction on screen.  

With the Brazilian Portuguese bundle it will open more doors for my in Brazil this summer and help with social projects I am doing the children such as “Kites for Kids!”

 Jason said: 

After my husband died in 2000, I started to travel with two ladies who grew-up in Puerto Rico, and are fluent in both English and Spanish. 

I wanted to learn Spanish and surprise my Puerto Rico friends with my accomplishment, so I began taking lessons from a college student. Unfortunately, I was having a terrible time trying to learn a new language in my late sixties.

Recently I discovered Mango Languages when it was offered through my local library. I was thrilled with the teaching method used by Mango Languages, and I was learning Spanish at age 70!

We are so thrilled and honored to have amazing fans like all of you. Your stories have touched us. Enjoy your courses and stay in touch. We all want to hear how your journeys unfold!

LOLcats and Linguistics

Let’s have a little fun and check out the linguistics behind our favorite interweb felines! While cats might not really be able to learn a foreign language, LOLcats have won our hearts with their endearing language.

Check out this fascinating video by Lauren Gawne: “I can has language play: Construction of Language and Identity in LOLspeak.”

Once you’ve watched the video, try out this fun LOLspeak translator and leave us a comment in LOLspeak!

English is weird.

As native speakers, there are so many nuances to the English language that we don’t even realize.  Things like the graphic below give me an even greater respect for ESL learners.


What’s the weirdest thing you can think of about the English language? If you’re an ESL learner, what has been your biggest challenge?

Theory Thursday: Mental Dictionaries

I’d like to share a couple funny and cute linguistics stories in this blog. I will be talking about how bilinguals recognize and speak words in each of their languages.  What? That doesn’t sound cute? Just hang in there.  I promise that this will be a cute but informative linguistic blog.

I am the mother of four children who are all bilingual in English and Spanish.  Some time ago I was sitting with my now nine-year old son (I think he was 7 or maybe 8 at the time) as he read to me “The Digging-est Dog” by Al Perkins.  He was doing an excellent job, but when he got to the page that reads, “I dug up fences, I dug up gates” without realizing his mistake he very confidently read, “I dug up fences, I dug up cats.”

So why would my son read “cats” instead of “gates”?   Obviously “cats” and “gates” don’t rhyme or even really look similar, at least not in English.  However, as I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, my children are bilingual in English and Spanish.  Well, the Spanish word for “cats” is “gatos.”  Ahhh, you say! “Gatos” and “gates” look very much alike!  It is easy to see how he could mistake “gates” for this other word “gatos.”  What makes this case even more interesting is that while his brain apparently recognized the Spanish word “gatos” he produced the English translation for this word: “cats.”  Although my son was reading in English and produced an English word, “cats,” it is evident that his Spanish lexicon (or mental dictionary or vocabulary list) was still very much active.

On another occasion, my older son asked me if he could fill and use a salt shaker I had brought back from Cuernavaca, Mexico.  To which I replied, “No! You can’t use that! It’s a memory!”  Does it seem strange that I referred to a salt shaker as a “memory”?  Well, it may help to know that the word for souvenir in Spanish is “recuerdo” which literally translates to…you got it…“memory.”

Yet another time, I recall shopping for a digital video camera with my husband.  We had picked out the camera, a bunch of editing software and additional accessories.  My husband approached the salesman who was assisting us and asked, “So, how much for todo?”  The salesman just smiled and continued to talk about the different features of the products we had chosen.  My husband asked again, “How much for todo?” I was standing right beside my husband and could not figure out why the salesman was not answering him.  Until of course it dawned on me that while I understood my husband’s question, the salesman who obviously did not speak Spanish, did not, because my husband was mixing the two languages: English and Spanish.

The focus of research in bilingualism for a long time was whether or not bilinguals have a single lexicon (mental dictionary) that comprises all of the words they know in both of their languages, or separate lexicons.  And additionally, whether access to these is selective or not.  Multiple theories to address these questions have been proposed.

One of these, the hierarchical model, proposes that the lexicons are combined at the conceptual level but separate at the word representational level.  Basically bilinguals have separate “dictionaries” but that the entry for a particular word in each language links back to the same “meaning” or “concept.”

Another theory is the Bilingual Interactive Activation Model (BIA). This theory argues that letter strands activate possible lexical candidates (words) in both languages, which then compete for activation.

As with many questions in the field of Linguistics and specifically bilingualism, whether bilinguals have one or two “mental dictionaries” and how they access these is still not fully understood.  However, for me as a Linguist it is exciting to be able to point to and analyze these everyday aspects of real life and apply it to my passion for languages.

Have you experienced a situation where you interchanged your “mental dictionaries”?

Translation Theory

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Russian

With the release of many e-readers, like the Nook, Kindle, iPad, Tablet, etc., books have become available to us at the touch of a button. Not only can we get millions of books electronically but nowadays we don’t even have to read them if we put on our headphones and tune in while multitasking with audio books.

With the availability to provide a plethora of books to readers within seconds, the demand for classic books translated into many different languages has significantly increased.

One of my favorite books is Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I originally read, or struggled to read, the book in its native language, Russian (this was my mother’s brilliant idea to get her 12 year old to learn Russian). When I found out that Crime and Punishment was on the summer list of books to read for my 11th grade English class, I was one of the very, very few who were ecstatic.

After having many discussions about the book in class, I realized many of the students were frustrated with this particular reading assignment. Aside from 576 page time commitment, I noticed that English students were having  a hard time with understanding the content of the book. Having read the book in Russian and English, the problem seemed to be in the translation. I couldn’t help but wonder, how much of the book’s original context got lost in translation?

It seems like there are just some cultural concepts that cannot be translated into another language. I noticed this also, when I read J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. To many people’s surprise, I enjoyed the book in Russian more than in its original language, English. It seemed like there was more sarcasm that exuded from the main character in the Russian version. Some would say that this would depend on how proficient one is in a language, but I would challenge that by saying that English is my strongest language yet the the Russian version of the American classic appealed more to me.

This led me to think about the practice of translation and what that process incorporates. I recently came across linguisticblog.com, a great blog that has posts about all things linguist and language theory related. There was a great post, My Translation Theory by guest blogger Aleksandra Milcic Radovanovic that talks about the art of translation.

Radovanovic says, “During translation, the translator does not judge, he is open to every idea that can cross the author’s mind.” She explains that the translator is more like an actor and needs to put aside their own personal emotions and personality to play the character they are assigned, or in this case, to translate an original piece to another language without adding their personal thoughts.  She goes on to say, “It is not always possible to discover what the author’s intention was: to provide information or to provoke an aesthetic experience. Therefore, the translator must serve the author, stand behind him trying not to miss any of his ideas.”

Is it true that there are just some things that are not possible to fully translate into another language? That no matter how professional and experienced the translator is, some of the context will get altered  a bit due to the language of the book?

What are YOUR thoughts? Have you experienced this when reading a book that has been translated from its original language?

US vs. Them: British vs. American English

[Thanks to Matt Owen for this guest post and his perspective!

Hey there! I’m Matt, and I’m from England. I was trying to write a few words for Mango on the differences between UK and US English. I thought it would be fun.

Unfortunately I can’t do it.

I mean, I can write the words down easily enough, but it’s nearly impossible for me to point out the differences.

Because Microsoft Word won’t let me.

As in all fields of combat, the US tends to rely on technology to dominate the battlefield, and the battle for control of the language has been running since you guys decided you were probably better off without the King sticking his royal nose in your business.

And yeah, I’ve tried changing my settings (which incidentally, read “English” or “UK English” – make of that what you will), but every time I save or reopen a document, Microsoft discards all of this.

I’ve tried to convince it that I like spelling “Favour” like that, but it won’t take the hint. Or do me any favors.

Of course, this isn’t the only way American English has become the version most of the world speaks. When Britain was at the height of its powers, it spread the language by forcing people to use it to buy and sell, and by using it in churches and schools across the globe.

America on the other hand simply visits any given country, and quietly builds a Starbuck’s around anyone speaking another language.

I’ve already mentioned the war of independence, and John Adams himself was (unsurprisingly) a great fan of “Americanisms”, happily announcing that he thought the US would do a great job of “Polishing the language”.

What John forgot to mention was that we Brits had been polishing away ourselves for several hundred years already, and people continue to do so on both sides of the Atlantic.

To really understand the differences, you have to delve further back into history.

Despite the name, English is actually something that crawled out of the mud of French, Saxon and pig-Latin  [He’s kidding about the pig-latin part, ightray, Attmay? -Rachel].

You can also add a few other factors to those weird roots: A history of being invaded by nearly every country in Europe (quite why the Romans were so keen on trooping all the way from sunny Lazio to get their hands on a small grey island with nothing but a bit of tin and constant rain going for it remains a mystery), and books written by semi-illiterates on printing presses that couldn’t handle all the letters.

Take the word ‘Ye’ for example, it only exists because old printing presses had a symbol that looked like a ‘Y’ instead of a ‘TH’.

Next up, Britain went through an industrial revolution a bit earlier than most countries, with the billowing smog in London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool filling the local people’s sinuses and having a similar effect on the local accents – they all make you sound as though you’ve got a clothes-peg on your nose [For Americans: case in point; we say clothes pin -Rachel].

Meanwhile, in the US, something more profound was happening. We like to call it “Hollywood”. The movie industry has a huge history of imposing standards on across the world.

Here’s a question for you – what noise do frogs make?

If you answered “Ribbit”, it’s because that’s the noise frogs from Southern California make, most other places they go “Bloik”.

And English is the same. All over the world, countries got used to the language of Shakespeare through films, where trousers were pants, pavements were sidewalks and words followed the general American rule –pronounce it how you spell it.

This approach is sensible, but wouldn’t really work in England, where no word seems complete without a hidden ‘H’ or a silent ‘U’ in the middle. This is why tourists constantly ask me the way to “Li-ses-ter Square”. It’s actually pronounced “Les-ter”, but spelled “Leicester”.

Meanwhile, my American workmate gets weird looks when she asks for Pleated Pants in stores here. In the office, any businessman who wears ‘Suspenders’ probably shouldn’t mention it if he wants that promotion (If you want to know why, try using Google.co.uk to look the word up –just don’t do it while you’re at work!).

We’ve also got different words for commonplace things: some make more sense, some make less. Want to give me a call? I’ll take it on my mobile. It’s a phone, and it’s mobile. Makes sense yes? ‘Cellphone’ actually means ‘battery powered phone’. When you think about it, that’s just weird.

On the other hand, a Truck sounds much better to me than a Lorry…

The differences don’t stop there either: remember the history bit earlier? England has a pretty long tradition of battling with France at every given opportunity, so that any word sounding vaguely French is considered low class, so the Toilet is the ‘Loo’, although you guys might say ‘restroom’. A few years back an Aunt of mine told me that when she first visited back in the 80s, she honestly thought that a restroom was just a quiet area where you could go and sit down and read a book for a while…

And then there’s slang. In the US, English has had a healthy injection of Dutch, German, Spanish, Yiddish and Eminem to help it along, In England we just go for weird rhyming slang (Apples and pears= stairs, dog and bone = phone), text speak and references to weird English sitcoms from the 70s. In other words, If we fancy an ace night out we get bladdered down the nags, and hopefully there’s no aggro involved innit, y’get me?

I’ve tried to come up with an American equivalent for that last line. Let’s just say a few beers after work doesn’t quite sum it up…

Meanwhile the yoofs have well and truly looted the language for all it’s worth. Where I live, most kids is speakin the Jafaican mon [Matt explained this to me as "fake-Jamaican" -Rachel] (when they aren’t stealing ‘Trainers’ from the local sporting goods store), usually in a weird accent that arrives in Hackney after swinging through Kingston Town and early 90s South Central LA. Don U be letting the feds catch ya janga sistrin innit?

Nope, I don’t know what that means either…

Overall, the language we speak is vaguely similar, but history, immigration and culture have changed the two so that visitors from either side have to make a real effort. Whenever I write for a website, a good bit of my time is spent going through and putting ‘Z’ instead of ‘S’ in words – although in England even the letter would be pronounced differently, so bad news for any fans of Zed Zed Top out there.

On the plus side it means that the way we speak gets more and more interesting as we go along. The regional diction of newscasters doesn’t really match what people say in San Diego, or in Des Moines, and in England it has to be said that even the Queen (god bless you ma’am…) has a pretty weird accent compared to most of her subjects.

The reason English is so dominant on the world stage is because it’s inclusive, always happy to add in a new expression from a different country or a new technology – look for ‘Twiterati’ in Websters and the Oxford English soon. And hey, next time I walk into a diner and order a beefburger and chips, cut me some slack yo?

Review-PC Mag:

Check out our review in PC Magazine:

At the beginning of each chapter, you’ll be exposed to a short conversation, which you should be able to mostly understand by the time you reach the end of the chapter. When the dialogue first appears, it’s printed in English. As the speakers move through it, the words switch to the language that you’re learning, in my case, German.

…Read More

Cockney Rhyming Slang

Last week I was having an interesting conversion with a good friend of mine about languages and how people express themselves. We got to the topic of Britain, and how even though they speak English many times it seems like they speak a foreign language. They have so many alternative words for every day things that it’s really hard to understand what is being said. Eventually our discussion led to to Cockney Rhyming Slang, which I knew nothing about. I was fascinated with what I learned.

Cockney Rhyming Slang phrases are created from taking an expression that rhymes with a singular word and using that expression instead of the word. In many cases the rhyming word word isn’t said.

Here’s an example, the word “keys” rhymes with “macaroni cheese.” Using Cockney Rhyming Slang, instead of saying, “Have you seen me keys?” One would say, “Have you seen me Macaronis?”  So cool.

Cockney Rhyming Slang is a collection of phrases used by Cockneys and other Londoners.. Someone who is a true Cockney is one who is born close to St. Mary-le-Bow Church in Cheapside, London.  Nowadays, the term Cockney is used to describe people born outside this area as long as they have a “Cockney” accent or a Cockney heritage.

I came across this awesome website that is all about Cockney Rhyming Slang and has many examples.

Here are examples of Cockney Rhyming Slang for parts of the body:

“Feet” rhymes with “Plates of meat” -> “I have size 7 plates.”

“Head” rhymes with “Loaf of bread” -> “Use your loaf!”

Today Cockney Rhyming Slang is used more than ever. Modern Cockney Rhyming Slang is now being developed using the names of celebrities and famous people.

“Cup of Tea” rhymes with “Jay-Z” -> “Make me a Jay-Z.”

I found it amazing how much creativity goes into what seems like a different language.

Using Cockney Rhyming Slang, can you think of alternative ways to say common phrases?

Travel Tuesday: My Trip to Oxford

When I was a student I thought that, like every decent future teacher of English, I should spend some time in the country where the language I was to teach was spoken. I chose Oxford University in England because I wanted to visit one of the oldest universities. I found a good school and I arranged an accommodation at a house that would allow me to practice my English on a 24-hour basis, seeing as I am Greek. Everything was planned; I would land in Heathrow, then I would take the train to Paddington, from Paddington to Oxford, and thence by taxi to my landlady’s house. My knowledge of the language was very good, or so I thought at the moment. We had done most of the works by Shakespeare, so my vocab was rich, right?

So there I was on the platform at Paddington, with Shakespeare’s books in my suitcase, very confident and happy that I was at a place where I could hear only English and my favorite rock songs around me all the time. Fearless, I saw a sign that the train to Oxford would depart in 5 min., I approached the guard thinking it was the perfect time to start practicing. I asked him if the train went directly to Oxford or if I had to change trains, and to my surprise, I didn’t understand a word of his response. Not even a little word that would give me some sort of clue. Oops! But I wasn’t going to give up that easily. I tried again. “Excuse me, could you repeat please?” In response I got the same rumble of words that still made no sense. Oh my.

I gave up the third time; I had to get on the train anyway. Not a very good start. I arrived at Oxford, exhausted, worried, and slightly disappointed. I went to the taxi stand and fortunately the taxi driver’s English was more comprehensible. Feeling relieved, I went to sit in the passenger’s seat only to realize that for some reason the wheel was on that side too. I gave a Hugh Grant, “Right!” and moved to the other side.

My landlady was an older lady who welcomed me with a “nice, hot cup o’ tea, dear.”  She told me that her husband had passed away but…”look here” she said, proudly holding a pic she had on the mantle. “Look who he is with!” Her husband was with another older lady with a lovely little hat – but who on earth was she? “Oh,” I said “He is with the…?” “Yes, right! With the Queen!” Phew! Well, at least I knew Queen Elizabeth, the one from Shakespeare’s time.

She showed me to my room, a lovely little space. She said that she would be hosting another student who had arrived before me and so he took the bigger room and the bigger bathroom. Besides, he was an Earl. Poor me, I would never get a big room. Conclusion: before you go to England, learn a few things about the royal family. Also, look into your family tree. If you are distantly related to royalty, you will get big rooms.

And before we said goodnight, she asked, “How would you like your breakfast, love?” How would I like my breakfast? It dawned on me that in England they have English breakfast which keeps you going till the evening. But what does it consist of? “I’ll have what Jan (the Earl) will have.” That proved to be a good idea since we had orange juice, eggs with sausages, milk with cereal, toasted bread with marmalade (not jam), and coffee. I was now ready for everything.

I had no more adventures, unfortunately. Once, I went with my friend to a pub for lunch and would still be sitting there to this day unless a guy with many tattoos told us that in pubs you need to order at the counter. You live and you learn.

I have only fond memories of this trip. I didn’t mind the blunders, at least in retrospect. My teacher taught us all the dialects, so after that I was prepared to talk to any train station guard. My landlady took me to the oldest pub in the area, something like the Jamaica Inn. I went to all the colleges, walked in the corridors where so many famous people walked too. I visited the libraries. I made friends with people from other countries. Also, I saw a Shakespearean play in a courtyard of one of the colleges. Of course it rained in the middle of the play, but blankets, umbrellas, and hot cider were provided (for free!) so we were able to continue watching it. I had a great experience in Oxford.

Will you be partaking in the English culture by watching the Royal Wedding this weekend?

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