We’ve given you one month to learn a foreign language, so how are you doing? Remember Elena will be setting the exam in just a week. If you’re still struggling to get to grips with your new verbs, pronunciation and present perfects then I’m going to give you one more chance. Mango is the Internet’s first free language learning course, or so it claims. There are 11 courses currently available in this Beta version of the site and, with each course providing 100 lessons, it really promises to be a fantastic resource for anyone wanting to experiment with some new funny sounding words.
You have to sign up to begin, but then just choose whichever language you want to learn. As an absolutely diabolical linguist I rushed straight to ‘Spanish for English Speakers’ and was delighted to hear an authentic Señor asking me ‘¿Còmo está usted?’ which even I know is a bit on the formal side. But then we didn’t know each o
ther. There is also a nice American woman offering simple instructions each step of the way and every slide has audio dialogue with pronunciation tips whenever you hover the mouse over a word. The site also sets little challenges for you to practise new phrases against the clock.
As a fast learner I raced straight to lesson 103 but this appeared to duplicate lesson 3 which I had of course already mastered. So some little bugs but I’ll certainly be visiting Mango regularly. After all I can now speak Spanish. Thank-you very mucho, Mango.
