Monthly Archives: December 2014

Learn basic foreign language phrases quickly with Mango Languages, a county-wide database. Mango Languages offers courses in 64 languages, even including the Tuvan language, an endangered language spoken in Siberia. And you didn’t know a language could be endangered, did you? Mango also has English as a Second Language courses for 17 different foreign languages.

One main difference between Mango Languages and other language-learning products is that it focuses on gaining basic conversation skills quickly rather than a slower approach of presenting the complete foundation of each language. For example, characters in non-Latin alphabets aren’t fully taught. Some disadvantages of this approach are that some language fundamentals are missing, and that there is no “real” teacher who can answer detailed questions.

Some unique features of Mango Languages are: the customs of other countries are presented, and 20 foreign language films are offered, with an option to just watch the films or to have them broken into scenes with interactive content. A speech comparison tool helps analyze the learner’s pronunciation.

The interface for learning is called Mango Conversations, and a placement test is offered for each language through this interface. Children have their own language resource within Mango called Little Pim with Little Pim the panda as the star.  Little Pim is based on videos with options for flash cards that have basic vocabulary.

When a user creates an account, Mango Languages will save progress in the cloud and will share this on Facebook and Twitter.  Apps are available for iPhone, iPod and Android.

Have fun learning a language!

Here’s a video too:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dubBh-WgmXo

Ann
Cooper-Siegel Community Library

Apologies for not getting this out in a timely fashion.  The end of year brings holidays, celebration, and, apparently, missed deadlines!

Before getting to this month’s challenge, we want to thank everyone who participated in last month’s challenge.

Forty-five of you posted your responses in the comment section.  Many of them offered great tips about resources to suggest and ways to add customer service value.  If you haven’t already, we recommend a quick scan through the comments.  We bet you’ll find something you didn’t know!

We also have our first lucky winner, drawn at random from all the responses.  A hearty congratulations go to Amy J. from Shaler!

And now, on to this month’s challenge:

A mom calls the library because she is pre-loading apps onto the iPad she is giving her daughter for the holidays.  She’s pleased about all of the free downloadable resources the library offers, but she was alarmed to see a lot of racy covers on the OverDrive site. She doesn’t want her eleven-year-old daughter to have to shift through all of that just to find age appropriate options.  What options can you offer her?

Post your answer and/or eResource tips in the comments below and be entered to win a prize! (Comments are moderated, so don’t be alarmed if you don’t see your comment right away.)

You can respond to challenges any time you’d like, but if you want to be eligible for a prize your comment must be submitted by the end of the week that the challenge is posted (in this case, the deadline is Friday, Dec. 12).