Mango Languages

Meet Our Newest Mango, Elizabeth!

We would like to give a warm and official welcome to Elizabeth Currie, our newest Mango! Elizabeth joins Mango Languages as our Customer Service Lead, focusing on providing great customer service for all the markets that we serve.

Elizabeth shares a little bit about herself:

“I heard about Mango from www.mangolanguages.com. I watched a few of the videos and I knew I had to work here!
I have both a BA and MA in French. I taught French for three years at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I also lived in the south of France (I know, poor me!) for a year. While living there, I traveled around Europe and France quite a bit. Being a true francophile, France was definitely my favorite place to explore.
When I’m not working, I hang out with my dog Luc. I’m also an avid reader and a runner.”

Welcome Elizabeth!

Click here to find more information about the Mango culture and what it’s like to work at the Mango Grove. Also check out our YouTube channel, MangoLanguagesTV to see a-day-in-the-life-of-a-Mango videos. They are hilarious 

Press Review-Wandering Educators

Check out this review from Wandering Educators:

“Language learning is the key to successful travel overseas. We’ve found a great way to Learn Languages Online (French, for us) with Language Learning Software from Mango Passport.

We’ve all been there – living overseas, trying to make ourselves understood in English, when we could’ve been more prepared and speaking that language. Although I pick up languages fast in context, I find that it is far easier to be prepared before you go. It opens up a new culture that you won’t find by just speaking English.  We’ve studied languages before – and it’s difficult to find one that will work with our entire family, including our 8 year-old daughter. That’s changed – let me tell you about Mango Passport.” Read More…

So Excited About Mango!

With all the new, fun, and awesome developments here at our Mango office, our Product Director has decided to show his excitement by sharing a poem with all the Mango fans out there.

Languages languages everywhere I see.

Foreign language smiling back at me.

French and Hindi sitting down to tea

Merci, and dhanyawad, happy as can be.

Conversing is fun now that I found the key

Mango makes learning, ever so easy

Here come Swedish and Dari making a plea

Next I’ll speak Azerbaijani

-Steve Perakis

As you can see the excitement level is at at high here. What languages are you excited to learn?

TopTenReviews Review

With a basic and fundamentalist approach, Mango Languages is an easy way to learn French online. Mango Languages is a well developed system, calling on the necessities of language learning to aid you in your quest to become a fluent French speaker. You will learn grammar, vocabulary, and basic conversational phrases through their basic flashcard system, leading through 100 total lessons to raise you to the French speaking level you desire. Read more…

It's Not Only What You Say, But Also How

Good Morning Mango Fans!

Last night, I was motivated to improve the little bit of French that I know, and decided to drive in the world of Mango, in French.  I was interested in learning about the etiquette, culture, and vocab when it comes to restaurant outings.  I got to chapter six, lesson 41, slide 7, which was about un plat principal, the main course.  I read the phrase a few times, heard the narrator say it, and memorized it. Each time I said the phrase to myself, I pronounced the phrase louder and louder, feeling confident with my French accent.  I was ready to test my pronunciation skills with narrator using the “voice compare” feature.   As I recorded myself saying “un plat principal” as clearly as I could and played it back along with the native speaker for the 4th time, I realized what I was trying to do.  Why did I want to record and play my pronunciation back over and over again? I was trying to perfect my French accent. I then started to ponder, about accents, specifically English accents…

There are many countries in which English is the native language, yet in all of these countries English sounds very different because of the accent.  In linguistics, an accent is a manner of pronunciation of a language.  Accents are not only phonetics, but they are an identity.  There are two types of English accents widely spoken in the world today; they are the General American English and the Received Pronunciation (RP), also known as the Queen’s English.  In North America, the interaction of people from many ethnic backgrounds contributed to the formation of the different varieties of North American accents (making up a Boston specific accent and one that is specific to Texans).

Looking back at history, it is difficult to measure or predict how long it takes an accent to formulate.  Accents in the USA, Canada, and Australia, for example, developed from the combination of different accents and languages in various societies, and this had effects on various pronunciations of the British settlers.  Yet North American accents remain more distant, either as a result of time or of external or “foreign” linguistic interaction, such as the Italian accent.

The accent does indeed provide the identity of the country to its native language.  When we hear American being spoken, we associate it with the United States and when we hear someone speak with a British accent with think of England.  Learning the vocabulary, grammar, and use of a language is very important; however practicing the correct accent allows you to indulge in the identity and history of the language and its native country.

Realizing this, I kept practicing, putting the “voice compare” feature to full use.  Un plat principal … u(n) pla pri(n)seepal.

The more I practiced my French accent the more connected I seemed to feel to the French culture.

Next phrase: Comme plat principal, je voudrais le plat du jour (As a main course, I’d like the plat du jour).

They say practice makes perfect… or so I hope.

New Mango: Carly Atto

We are so excited to announce a new Mango.  Carly Atto is an intern and will be helping product development, library integration, and marketing.

She has been studying French since 7th grade, but began to study it much more seriously in college.  She studied abroad from January-July 2009 in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France, near Marseille.  While there she traveled throughout France, as well as to Italy, Ireland, Spain, Austria, the Netherlands, and Egypt.  She graduated from the University of Michigan in May 2010 with a dual degree in French and Communications.

She is 100% Chaldean (Catholic Iraqi) and her mom was actually born in Iraq.  She is the youngest of 4 kids.   She really enjoys cooking and the performing arts and was a member of an a capella group throughout her 4 years at U of M.

Welcome Carly!

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.

Why Learn the Latin Language?

Many people believe that Latin is considered a “dead language.”

Is it really?

Threads of Latin still exist today in our modern day romance languages – French, Italian, Spanish, and Romanian.  So in a sense, are we not still speaking a form of it?  Yes, it may be a stretch but look at words like FORTEM (strong); in French you would say ‘fort,’ Italian is ‘forte,’ and Spanish has ‘fuerte.’  The French and Italian shouldn’t be much of a surprise here for us fellow Latin enthusiasts, as it is known that the final ‘m’ always was dropped in Late Latin and carried over into Early Romance (as was the initial ‘h’ ).  Of course it should also not be much of a surprise that Spanish is the odd man out here. When it came to Late Latin-Early Romance, apparently the Spanish created diphthongs.

But there are cases where French is the one left out in the cold.  When it comes to words like CAMPUS (countryside) French gives us “champ” [sã], while Italian and Spanish make it easy and leave us with ‘campo.’  There are other cases where French did the same thing.  With a word like CAMI:SIA (shirt), the French came out with ‘chemise’ whereas Italian and Spanish use ‘camisa’ — only dropping the final [i].

Although it may seem obscure, each language stuck to its own conventions when breaking from Late Latin.  For the most part, consonant vowel clusters stayed the same (dental consonant+e>ie for Spanish, etc.) But of course like everything else, language goes through evolution and perhaps someday it will come further than it is now from Latin.

Have you learned Latin? How has it helped you?

Haiti Needs Your Support

Over the weekend, I was at the Boston ALA Midwinter Conference and every time I had a chance to look at a newspaper or the TV – pictures of the absolute devastation in Haiti due to the Earthquake flashed across the page and the screen.

The images are devastating for any part of the world, let alone this already impoverished country. The pictures are almost too hard for me to look at or watch. It makes me sick to my stomach to see what these poor people are having to face. Losing their homes, families and I am sure much of their sanity in such a dire situation. We need to care.

According to Wikipedia -
Haiti has a very interesting history. It was the first independent nation in Latin America, the first post-colonial independent black-led nation in the world, and the only nation whose independence was gained as part of a successful slave rebellion. Despite having common cultural links with its Hispano-Caribbean neighbors, Haiti is the only predominantly Francophone independent nation in the Americas. It is one of only two independent nations in the Americas (along with Canada) that designate French as an official language; the other French-speaking areas are all overseas départements, or collectivités, of France.

But on January 12, 2010, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, with its epicenter 16 miles west of the capital and largest city, Port-au-Prince, which was devastated. Approximately two hundred thousand people were killed and counting, although it will take time to determine the exact number of dead; the Presidential palace, Parliament and many other important structures were destroyed, along with countless homes, businesses, hospitals, schools and shantytowns.

How can you help? We are suggesting you go to the Unicef website and donate money to help this country but more importantly to help the people rebuild their lives.

If you know of other ways to help please comment here!