Mango Languages

Guest Post: Brazilian Portuguese for the Utterly Confused

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 three:

One of my recent Mango Languages lessons in Brazilian Portuguese was entitled Direções Para o Hotel (Directions to a Hotel).  As luck would have it, shortly after completing the lesson I found myself navigating the streets of Istanbul with my Portuguese-speaking friend looking for an elusive hotel that housed a visiting professor from Brazil and his companion. The professor was interested in the history of Byzantium, I was told, and, as an aspiring scholar of Byzantium and a great admirer of the historic city where I happen to live these days, I agreed to give the visitors a brief tour of the Byzantine monuments in Istanbul.

Thus started a new chapter in my adventure with Brazilian Portuguese. Although the professor spoke English, his companion did not.  My Brazilian flatmate cheerfully joined our improvised field trip along with her sister, who was here for a visit, and so Portuguese was heard with increasing frequency as our small group moved from one historical site to another.  My brother, who does not share my Lusophone passions, dutifully tagged along, and so it is to him and to his patience in the midst of Brazilian and Byzantine chatter that I dedicate this post.

The field trip proved to be exceptionally rewarding, linguistically speaking.  After beating myself up for forgetting the simple phrase, “Prazer em conhecê lo” (“Nice to meet you”, Mango Languages – Lesson 1), I eventually found myself understanding quite a bit of the conversation and even surprising my brother by translating a joke from Portuguese. Alas, I did not succeed in breaking my self-imposed vow of silence in encounters with the speakers of foreign languages.

Apart from this day-long immersion experience, however, I am not very happy with my lack of significant progress in Portuguese.  This, I believe, is a direct consequence of letting too much time elapse between my Mango lessons (exacerbated, perhaps, by my earlier decision not to supplement Mango Languages with other learning materials at this point).  Whatever breakthroughs in understanding that I experienced recently were largely a result of exposure to spoken Portuguese.  Since visiting professors from Brazil are hard to come by in Istanbul, I suppose it is time to intensify my Mango Languages lessons, aiming for at least 3 lessons per week (as opposed to the once weekly lessons I have been doing so far). This should be easier to do now that the spring semester is over and my university-related commitments are not nearly as overwhelming.

I find it crucial to maintain a consistent schedule for reviewing previous lessons. For this purpose, the “Phrasebook Review” option offered by Mango is usually sufficient: I am quizzed on various parts of the lesson’s dialogue, which are then presented in their complete form.  I presume that if I complete more lessons per week these “forced” reviews will become unnecessary, since there appears to be a repetition algorithm built into the Mango Languages system.

As I work to complete my Mango Languages challenge, the support of my Twitter followers is invaluable.  Many a time I find myself being cheered on by fellow language learners or by Portuguese native speakers.  Sometimes, these brief interactions turn into learning experiences: a few days ago a Brazilian follower wrote to me saying, “Português é Legal!” Who would have thought that “legal” can also mean “cool”?  Luckily, I have my flatmate to explain the intricacies of Brazilian slang in moments when it leaves me utterly confused!

Learn Portuguese – Go to the Olympics

A couple of weeks ago Rio de Janeiro was awarded the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Brazil is a wonderful place with happy people, music and dancing. Over the last decade the country has become part of the emerging BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) markets. Especially, when it comes to bio fuels as the country is completely independent of oil.

The national language is portuguese. Portuguese is part of the romance family of languages (along with Spanish, Italian and French). The language has roots in Latin and was create about 2000 years ago. Due to historical struggles, colonization and migration; French, Creole, Arabic and other languages have influenced the language.

According to Wikipedia, Portuguese is one of the world’s major languages and is ranked 6th according to number of native speakers (between 191 and 230 million). It is the language of about half of South America’s population, even though Brazil is the only Portuguese-speaking nation in the Americas. It is also a major lingua franca in Portugal’s former colonial possessions in Africa. It is an official language in nine countries, also being co-official with Cantonese Chinese in Macau and Tetum in East Timor. There are sizeable communities of Portuguese speakers in various regions of North America, notably in the United States (New Jersey, New England, California and south Florida) and in Ontario, Canada.

We hope the Olympics inspire more people to learn this beautiful language. What about you, are you going to learn Portuguese?

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!