Mango Languages

Learn Chinese

Did you know that there are more people in China that speak English than there are Americans? The need to learn Chinese has certainly increased over the last two decades as China’s booming population and increasing wealth have become more integrated in the global economy.

The People’s Republic of China is one of the world’s oldest civilizations. According to Wikipedia, Most languages in China belong to the Sino-Tibetan language family, spoken by 29 ethnicities. There are also several major linguistic groups within the Chinese language itself. The most spoken varieties are Mandarin (spoken by over 70% of the population), Wu, Yue (Cantonese), Min, Xiang, Gan, and Hakka. Non-Sinitic languages spoken widely by ethnic minorities include Zhuang (Thai), Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur (Turkic), Hmong and Korean.[37]

Classical Chinese was the written standard in China for thousands of years, and allowed for written communication between speakers of various unintelligible languages and dialects in China. Vernacular Chinese or baihua is the written standard based on the Mandarin dialect first popularized in Ming dynasty novels, and was adopted (with significant modifications) during the early 20th century as the national vernacular. Classical Chinese is still part of the high school curriculum and is thus intelligible to some degree to many Chinese.

Mandarin Chinese is spoken by over one billion people. Chinese origin words account for 60% of Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese vocabulary. Knowing Chinese will help you learn these languages too. Chinese culture has influenced the world for thousands of years with its art, philosophy, technology, food, medicine and performing arts. Today China’s economy is booming. Chinese seems well worth learning.

Do you want to learn Chinese? Why?

Two Year Anniversary

Mango Languages Two Year Anniversary

On August 31, 2009 Mango turned two years old. While we have been developing technologies and distributing language learning programs for over 8 years – the evolution of Mango over the last two years has been tremendous.

We began the Mango journey by researching and looking at the science of second language acquisition. We knew and learned foreign languages ourselves, all before the concept of Mango was even born. We believe that creating an online language resource had to have the best teaching and educational foundation to be successful. By using the best linguists and extensive language learning theory, the content for Mango Languages emerged.

We fully understood that the technology behind the product was and is critical for the user to have the best “language learning experience.” We didn’t want users to have to be computer science majors to interface with our software. We created a program that is simply point and click. No need to go through numerous screens or get lost in our software.

Lastly, there was no doubt that our program had to be fun. We wanted people to enjoy learning a new language. To learn English (ESL), Spanish, French, Italian, German, Mandarin-Chinese, Japanese, Brazilian-Portuguese, Greek, or Polish can be a daunting and overwhelming idea. We wanted to help people learn without even knowing that they were learning vocabulary, grammar and conjugation. We created a system to help people enjoy the experience and before they knew it they would be speaking and conversing in a foreign language.

All of this work came with countless hours at the office, lots of growing pains, new offices and an outstanding staff of foreign language linguists, technology folks, sales super stars, integration specialists, accounting geniuses, marketing mavens, intern extraordinaires and good old fashion hard work.

We want to make sure to thank all of our clients and users. Without you, we would not be having the time of our lives! We are humbled and honored to work with you!