Mango Languages

10 Reasons Why You Should Learn Spanish

Spanish has become very important to the U.S. and our culture.  Did you know?  More than 1.4 million university students were enrolled in language courses in autumn of 2002, and Spanish is the most widely-taught language in American colleges and universities.  Of all students enrolled in a foreign language course, 53 percent study Spanish, followed by French (14.4%), German (7.1%), Italian (4.5%), American Sign language (4.3%), Japanese (3.7%), and Chinese (2.4%).  The totals, however, remain relatively small relative to the size of the total U.S population.

Here are 10 Reasons Why You Should Learn Spanish:

1. Spanish is the second most-common language in the United States after English.
2. There are more Spanish speakers in the U.S. than there are speakers of Chinese, French, Hawaiian, and the Native American languages combined.
3. According to the 2007 American Community Survey conducted by the United States Census Bureau, Spanish is the primary language spoken at home by over 34 million people aged 5 or older.
4. There are also 45 million Hispanics who speak Spanish as a first or second language.
5. There are 6 million Spanish-speaking students of all ages
6. The U.S. is the world’s second-largest Spanish-speaking community, only after Mexico and ahead of Spain, Colombia, and Argentina.
7. Roughly half of all U.S. Spanish speakers also speak English “very well,” based on the self-assessment Census question respondents.
8. In total, there were 34,547,077 people in the United States who speak Spanish as their primary language at home, including 3.5 million in the territory of Puerto Rico, where Spanish is the primary language.
9. Over half of the country’s Spanish-speakers reside in California, Texas, and Florida alone.
10. Spanish is the most widely-taught, non-English language in U.S. secondary schools and of higher education, thus establishing its importance to non-Hispanic Americans.

Source: Wikipedia

Learn Spanish

Spanish is the native language of 339 million people in the world. In addition to Spain, Spanish is the official language of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. In addition, it is widely spoken in several other nations, including Canada, Morocco, the Philippines, and the United States.

Mexico contains the largest population of Spanish speakers. Spanish is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. While all Spanish dialects use the same written standard, there are important variations spoken among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. One major phonological difference between Castilian, broadly speaking, the dialects spoken in northern Spain, and the dialects of southern Spain and all the Latin American dialects of Spanish, is the absence of a voiceless dental fricative (/θ/ as in English thing) in the latter.

Spanish is one of the Romance languages in the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European language family, and within Spain, and has two major dialects: Andalusian and Castilian. Many other dialects exist in other geographical areas, namely North and South America. Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese are essentially dialects of the same language. If you learn one, you can learn the others. If you learn Spanish, you open the door to the culture, music, history and possible business dealings with 800 million people in 60 countries, including the US and Canada.

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!