Learn a New Language…For Free!
Like most of you American (high school) graduates, I have a little experience with foreign languages. In fact, I took two years of French and two years of Latin during my high school days. At the time it was kind of hard to see the value, and to therefore stay engaged… so I pretty much did what I needed to get by. Well let me tell you, the moment I moved to Belgium, I was wishing I spoke fluent French. Practically everyone here in Brussels speaks it.
So with this newfound sense of need for learning a foreign language, I’m much more likely to actually learn it this time. I figure with a little motivation and the exposure to many French speaking people on a daily basis, I should be fairly conversational after my 6 month stint here.
So it comes with great pleasure, that I present Mango to you. Mango is a great, free, language learning tool that is newly available on the web. Here is an excerpt from the Mango site:
“the first Free enterprise language learning course available on the Internet. Eleven of our courses are now available in our beta release. Each course has 100 lessons available.”
I don’t have extensive experience with the software yet, so expect an update on my experience at a later date. Of course there’s probably no substitute for a personal tutor, but when you’re young and strapped for cash, sites like this are a beautiful thing.
Here are a few screens of Mango in action:
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September 21st, 2007 at 9:24 am
Great post, I will look forward to future updates. I would be interested to know if it teaches more textbook languages or if it includes spoken slang, etc.
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September 21st, 2007 at 11:08 am
You gotta write a follow-up to this one in three months. I wanna know if it worked. I had a friend move to Germany to go to dental school. The only problem was that she didn’t speak any Germany. She took an intense (and expensive) 4-hour per day class, but it got her fully operational in about six weeks.
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September 22nd, 2007 at 3:30 am
Here’s an interesting blog article (from the 4 Hour Work Week Blog) about how to refresh a language quickly that you haven’t used in awhile. I’m becoming a big fan of the author — he’s livin’ the dream.
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September 26th, 2007 at 8:41 am
This would have been useful BEFORE we went to China, haha…nice find though, I tried it out and seems like a pretty useful site, even did a quick refresher of my formerly fluent French.
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February 11th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
That looks like a really cool application. I’ve never used it before but I will definitely check it out. Thanks!