Mango Languages, like Pimsleur but better
Written By: 孙智谦 on October 1, 2007
14 Comments
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| It’s Monday morning, and I have a cold, so this post is gonna stink. But it’s ok because I’m just introducing a website, anyway…here goes. |
| A little while ago, a friend forwarded me an e-mail with the subject FW: You may find this very helpful for some who are trying to learn Chinese language…especially because it is free. Free is good. I like free. So I opened the e-mail and saw that the URL was TryMango.com. I thought maybe someone had sent the wrong link for a minute because it sounded by the name like it was yet another Mangosteen or Tahitian Noni Juice type of thing that so many people seem to be into. Those are fine and dandy, but not for learning languages. So I hit the link and went to the main page… |
| …and breathed a sigh of relief. It was indeed a language learning website. And the graphics looked to be pretty polished, which shows that somebody put some actual thought into in that area at least. But pretty graphics are one thing, and the ability to teach is another thing entirely. It purportedly had 11 different language courses on the site. A lot of “language learning web sites” are actually just hastily-designed blogs with poorly-thought-out lessons on some foreign language and nothing whatsoever to help visual learners. So I clicked the Try It! button to see if this site was any different. |
| Ah, you have to register to use it! But what will they do with your information once they have it? I’m very wary of giving my e-mail information to any site these days because you never know where it’s going to end up. Their privacy policy is right on the page in plain site, though, assuring potential users, “We will NOT sell or provide your email address to any third party. We will only use this email address to authenticate your access to the Mango Language application and provide you with update information. You may unsubscribe at any time.” Yeah, I realize that they may be total liars and that they may very well sell my information to a third party, but I tend to want to believe what people say (yeah, I’m probably a sucker), so I registered and logged in. |
Once I was in, I got a look at the basic interface. It’s powered by Flash Player 9 and looks just as good as the main page, so I was starting to think that it may actually be a good little tool…but again, it’s just pretty pictures. I clicked the drop-down arrow under “Course Selection” and looked a little more closely at the languages. They have courses in the following languages:
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The Pig Latin course threw me off…ok, was this whole site some kind of joke? So I clicked on it to see what it was about. The first lesson came with the text:
Ah, someone has a sense of humor! Nice! |
| Moving along, I decided to try a real language course. And since the current focus of my “language geekism” is Chinese, I went with the “Mandarin Chinese for English Speakers” course…and I was impressed by how much material they have on the language. As of this post, they have 100 lessons for the Mandarin course. That’s nice! But how are the lessons designed? |
| As the title of this post gave away, it’s not too awfully unlike Pimsleur. It actually may be better than Pimsleur in some ways. PImsleur is audio-only, so if you’re a visual learner, you’ll be left up to finding your own supplementary material to help you along with pronunciation using Pinyin. And since Pimsleur is an audio-only program, it’s a little harder to go back to just the right spot if you miss one minor detail. The advantage of Mango is that each lesson is presented in slides (like a Power Point presentation), and users can easily move back and forth between different slides at any time without having to worry about finding the exact spot on the CD (or if they’re still living in the 1980s, cassette tape) where they want to be. |
| For the sake of checking things out, I began with Lesson 1. It starts with a conversation between two native speakers and also displays the Chinese characters that correspond to what the speakers are saying. A speaker icon beside each line of conversation allows users to replay any particular sentence of the dialogue if they miss it somehow the first time. The speakers go along at a decent pace, neither too fast nor terribly slowly. The rest of the slides in the lesson break the sentences down into their smaller parts to help users get the meaning of each individual word in the sentence. Hovering the mouse pointer over the Chinese characters on each slide gives a pop-up balloon with the characters’ pinyin pronunciation in it, and some slides actually feature color-coding to show which Chinese word directly corresponds to each English word. These two cool features are illustrated in the picture below: |
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| Much like Pimsleur’s lessons, the lesson also does a great job of balancing dialogue with explanations of certain technical and cultural aspects of Chinese, the kind of information which is vital to learning any foreign language. And also like Pimsleur’s lessons, users are periodically quizzed to see if they can remember what was taught earlier in the lesson. |
| So all-in-all, as long as every other language lesson is like lesson 1 of the Mandarin Chinese course I checked out, this site seems to be a really solid tool for learning a foreign language. I may even go so far as to say that it’s actually better than Pimsleur in overall content. True, with this program you can’t just pop a CD into your car’s stereo on your way to work and learn Chinese, but if you’re a visual learner or learn better by having both audio and visual aids, this should be a pretty great tool for you! |
| My only complaint is a minor one for the system overall but kind of major for Chinese. The lesson that I checked out didn’t stress how important tones are to correct pronunciation in Chinese. Without the correct tones, a person might as well be babbling because the tones are that important to being understood. I’d like to see that added to the lesson. But since the other languages on the site aren’t tonal, it shouldn’t have any effect on how well they are taught. |
| The site is in BETA, so of course there will be glitches and things to deal with; that’s expected. But it’s free (at least for now) versus the $130+ you’ll pay for a single level of Pimsleur at heavily-discounted prices, so I think the glitches are a minor inconvenience compared to the money you save. Anyway, check the site out for yourself. I think you’ll like it. |
I have seen the site a few times, and I am also extremely impressed. I think you gave a fair and clear assessment of the site.
Thanks,
Marina
I love your website. It’s honest, candid, and frank. Thank you for your service.
I like it but I have been using other website to learn Mandarin and it kind of got me all confuse when you use 汉语说 insted of 普通话 for mandarin…
Hi, Maria.
Yeah, that can be a little confusing. But unlike English where we just say “English” every time we want to refer to our language, there are several ways to refer to Chinese in China, depending on who you’re talking to. You’ll hear 普通话，国语，中文，and 汉语 at the very least. It may be a little confusing to hear that on a program for language learning, but at least it exposes you to more words that you’re likely to hear in real conversation. You may think about e-mailing them to let them know about how confusing that is so that they can improve their lessons.
Thanks for the comment!
Chris
Hi, I used to use ChinesePod, but lately I have switched to ChineseLearnOnline.com.
I like your reviews, cause I find they are very in-depth, and you cover even little details and observations that are of particular relevance to you.
I would like to see your unbiased views of ChineseLearnOnline and Serge Melnyk’s site too please.
Hey, Vinay.
Thanks for the heads-up on this site. I’m checking it out now, and I like it so far! I’ll try to post a review of it in the next week or so. I’d like to do it in the next day or so, but I’m pretty busy right now. I will definitely review it, though!
Chris
I learn Italian at Mango, I’ve done the first 20 lessons of it and I’m REALLY SATISFIED with the service Mango is providing!
I’ve done pimsleur (yes, all of them) and it was great for the memory, but no way to find anything you’ve forgotten or need to review, and no help at all with the written language. I am ready to move onto the written language without pinyin being in my face, but it is there for when I need it. Great! I will complete all the courses and then pester you for more, more, more. Lots of courses use pinyin extensively, but when we are ready for Hanzi to stand alone there is nothing there. I think this course does it.
Glad you’re finding the site helpful, Debbie. For learning how to read, I recommend ZDT, which you can download at
http://zdt.sourceforge.net
It’s not as fun as other things, but it’s really effective as flash cards.
-Chris
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You can take a free trail first.
Do you know that your site looks a little bit strange in Opera on my laptop with Linux .
I’m not surprised. Most of the world uses IE or Firefox, and I can’t please everybody all the time, so I’m happy with that. It should look fine on Firefox under Linux.
Thanks for the great review! I think its great, and I am doing the whole version of it ( That you normally have to pay money for ) for free from my local library system. Its very solid, and its not stressful and lets you learn at a slow pace, or a fast one depending on how often you take the lessons.