Mango Languages

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

St. Patricks Day is is quickly approaching  and Mango Languages has just what you need to speak a little Irish on St. Patricks Day. But first, check out some of these fun trivia facts about this green holiday:

• The very first St. Patrick’s Day parade was not in Ireland. It was in Boston in 1737.
• Green is associated with Saint Patrick’s Day because it is the color of spring, of Ireland, and of the shamrock.
• 19 Presidents of the United States proudly claim Irish heritage—including our first President, George Washington.
• There are four places in the United States named Shamrock (West Virginia, Texas, Indiana, Oklahoma) and nine Dublin’s (Dublin, California and Dublin, Ohio are most populous)

Using our Irish course, you won’t only learn how to converse in Irish, but you’ll also learn some insight into the Irish culture.

And if you’d like to ask someone if they would like something to drink…

Or if you find yourself on the receiving side of that question…

From everyone at Mango, we wish you a happy and safe St. Patrick’s Day!

Kiss me, I speak Irish!

Dia duit, hello!

Gearing up for St. Patrick’s day? For a wee bit o’fun in the pub, you can learn to speak Irish with Mango Languages!

Here’s an interesting culture note you can use to impress your friends over green beer!

Want to learn more? Mango Languages is available online at thousands of libraries across North America. Find Mango near you!

Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by Learning Irish… for Free!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

The Irish have been celebrating this holiday for over a thousand years. Today, St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated by people of all backgrounds in the United States, Canada and Australia as well as in other parts of the world.

Pubs will be open all day and night, there will be parades held across the country, and rivers will be dyed. From hunter to electric, the variety of shades of green will not disappoint today as people celebrate this Irish holiday.

History.com provides a ton of cool information about St. Patrick’s Day: everything from explanations of the symbols and traditions to recipes and places to celebrate across the country.  Check out these fascinating St. Patrick’s Day facts:

• Corned beef and cabbage is a traditional St. Patrick’s Day dish. In 2009, roughly 26.1 billion pounds of beef and 2.3 billion pounds of cabbage were produced in the United States.
• More than 100 St. Patrick’s Day parades are held across the United States. New York City and Boston are home to the largest celebrations.
• There are four places in the United States named after the shamrock, the floral emblem of Ireland: Mount Gay-Shamrock, WV; Shamrock, TX; Shamrock Lakes, IN; and Shamrock, OK.
• There are 36.9 million U.S. residents with Irish roots. This number is more than eight times the population of Ireland itself (4.5 million).
• There are approximately 122,000 current U.S. residents who were born in Ireland.
• Irish soda bread gets its name and distinctive character from the use of baking soda rather than yeast as a leavening agent.

As you are picking out your favorite green attire, selecting a pub to go to, and loading up on corned beef and cabbage, don’t forget to brush up on your Irish.

Mango Languages is celebrating St. Patrick’s Day by providing a FREE Irish course.

This course will allow you to connect with your Irish traditions to the fullest. You’ll be able to ask the bartender for a refreshing and authentic Irish beverage, impress your friends with your knowledge of just who the heck St. Patrick is, what he did to deserve his own day, and engage in all sorts of practical St. Patrick’s Day conversations.

Click here to get your FREE Irish Course!

How do YOU celebrate St. Patrick’s Day?

St. Patrick's Day

What’s Green, Plays the Bagpipes, and has around 300,000 legs?

There are over 36.5 million U.S. residents who claim Irish ancestry.  To put that in perspective, it’s almost nine times the population of Ireland itself, which is over four million people.  It’s no wonder that St. Patrick’s Day creates such a buzz all the way here in America!

Contrary to what you may think, St. Patrick’s Day began as a very traditional religious time of year, until March 17th, 1962, when the first St. Patrick’s Day Parade was conducted by Irish members of the English military through New York City.  This prompted the creation of many “Irish-Aid” societies, who began to host their own parades with bagpipes and drums.  In 1848, several societies all combined their parades to form one large New York City Parade, which has become the world’s oldest civilian parade and the largest in the United States, with over 150,000 participants (or 300,000 legs, for you riddle solvers).

Currently, more than 100 parades are held all across the U.S., and St. Patrick’s Day has even been celebrated in places like Singapore and Japan!  In Ireland itself, laws mandating that pubs be closed on March 17th lasted until the 1970′s. Beginning in 1995, the Irish government has begun using St. Patrick’s Day as a means to showcase itself to the world, hosting a huge multi-day festival, in which close to a million people participated in last year.

Irish Language – Part II

Why do I love Irish?

The answer to this question is “I don’t know.”

The reason why you like a language is very subjective, so I will just present some facts of Irish that I find fascinating, and which I learned after 4 lessons of Irish, thanks to our developer Colin Parmar and our editor Loig Cheveau.

• Irish employs some phonological processes that change the sounds at word boundaries to show the role of these words in the sentence.  So, while Tom is Tomás in Irish, when you want to call him, you say, “A Thomáis ” (“a” is like “o” in “O Lord”).  Another example: “a” (not the “a” mentioned above) means “his,” “her,” or “their” depending on the change that comes after it.

So:
a chat, a athair = his cat, his father
a cat, a hathair = her cat, her father
a gcat, a n-athair = their cat, their father

You can’t say what “a” means before you hear the following word.  The language plays games with our mind.

• There is no verb “to have” in Irish; when you want to say “I have a pen” you literally say, “a pen is at me.”  The same holds true for when you want to say that you speak a language: to say “I speak Irish” you say “Irish is at me.”
• The affirmative in Irish begins with the verb.  So, to say “Irish is at me” you say “Is Irish at me”; this is not a question in Irish.  How do you ask questions?  Well …
• There are two “to be’s.”  Similar to Spanish, but a bit different in use.  So, you have to know which “to be” to use to say “Is Irish at me.”  Moreover, there are different ways to form a question depending on which “to be” you use.  So, it’s not a simple matter to say “Is Irish at me.”
• Another source of fascination is the number system: to say “fifteen books” in Irish, you not only separate “five” from “teen” and put “books” in a sandwich, but you do not even say “books” – you say “book” – no plurals!  So “fifteen books” is the Irish equivalent of “five book teen.”  Does this sound like Arabic? Is there a connection between Irish and Arabic?  There is a theory … Ok, so you learned how to say “fifteen books”; can you now say “twelve boys”? You will probably say the Irish equivalent of “two boy teen” right?  Wrong!  For counting people there is a another whole set of numerals up to twelve.
• There are no words for “yes” or “no” in Irish.  If you want to say “yes” you repeat the verb of the question that you were asked.

For example:
Q: “Are you American?”
A: “Am”
And the full answer is: “Am, am American I” – Isn’t it tricky?

This is only a sample of what Irish is about. I’ve never been to Ireland, but with all this plus the insular inscription on road signs, I bet that at every corner in Ireland you’d expect to come face to face with some druid and his golden sickle on his way to cut the mistletoe.

Let’s also learn what is said on St. Patrick’s Day:
Éire go brágh! (transliteration – Eire goh brah, meaning – Ireland for ever!)