[Review] Mango Languages

Do you love learning new languages? Did you ever wish to become a polyglot? Well, here is your chance to learn almost a dozen new languages for free.

Mango Languages is an online language learning system that facilitates you to learn almost a dozen new languages through their interactive website. According to the Mango Languages site,

Mango ^beta is an online language learning system freely available to everyone. Learn at your own pace with a suite of features that make language learning more engaging and fun.

Each language is divided into 100 lessons with each lesson having almost a hundred slides. Mango Languages actively engages audio and visual cues to help you learn the new language. The language lessons includes audio from native speakers of the language and phonetic transcriptions, so that you can learn the language with the correct pronunciation. Mango Languages also include quizzes to test and improve your language learning. The interface is created in Adobe Flash and I felt very much comfortable with it.

Mango Languages currently supports the following language lessons

• Brazilian Portuguese for English Speakers
• English for Polish Speakers
• English for Spanish Speakers
• French for English Speakers
• German for English Speakers
• Greek for English Speakers
• Italian for English Speakers
• Japanese for English Speakers
• Mandarin Chinese for English Speakers
• Pig Latin for English Speakers
• Russian for English Speakers
• Spanish for English Speakers

By early 2008, Mango Language plan to launch an updated version of the site by polishing the existing languages and by adding new languages to the system. Newly planned languages include Hebrew, Arabic, Korean, Polish, Vietnamese, Thai, Cantonese Chinese, Irish Gaelic, Farsi, Hindi, Turkish and Ukrainian.

Mango Languages also allows offline learning using downloaded mp3 files, which can be burned into a CD or played using iPod. But, unlike the web learning, offline learning is not free and costs you $1.50 per lesson or $149.95 for an entire language.

If you are interested in Mango Languages, you might also be interested in the post How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour by Tim Ferris.