Mango - A free, high-quality language-learning website

I found trymango.com from a story link at digg.com. It's the best language learning website I've seen. I've decided to help promote this by emailing some friends about this site.

It's still in beta, but so far, you can learn Brazilian Portuguese, French, Italian, Greek, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Spanish, and even Pig-Latin.



Each language pack has about 100 lessons. Each lesson has about 100 slides, with repetition built-in for reinforcement.

Each slide has a sentence which is displayed and spoken (in English), and translated in text and speech.

Each sentence is broken down into the part of speech, with a mouse-over that displays a pronunciation guide.


I've never learned a foreign language before, so this was a bit difficult. I've spent about two hours with Lesson 1 of the Brazilian Portuguese language pack because I have a couple friends who are from South America.

So far I've learned six phrases. These two hours were fascinating and educational. For me, it was important to visualize the person to whom I was speaking, and to "sign" each word or phrase to help commit it to memory.

In Portuguese it's important to know what parts of speech are gender-specific for the speaker and the subject.

It also helps to have a goal. In my case, I want to continue practicing these phrases and then surprise my friends with them.

Postscript - Shortly after posting this, I remembered that my "South American friends" were from Argentina and not Brazil. A visit to Wikipedia.org educated me to the fact that their primary language is Spanish - not Portuguese! Ah, well...