Most of the content on the website is audio content which can be downloaded as mp3 files to the local computer and from there on the mp3 player so that you could learn on the trip.

You also find Grammar Tips and interactive games that test your language skills. The quality of the spoken language is excellent but the courses remain pretty basic from what I can tell. I think it’s a great way to get a first impression of a language but one has to use additional courses to fully understand a language.

I personally prefer Mango over BBC Languages.

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All classes are in American or British English depending on the University or school that hosts the course. Most courses do not simply display textual contents but also multimedia like audio recordings, videos and flash presentations. The list has some links to even more courses at the end including a link to 1800 Open Courseware courses at the MIT for instance.

I guess this is an excellent opportunity to take courses that you are interested in without having to actually attend University or pay a fee. No signups are required either to access the courses.

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The beta version of Mango is open to all users but language courses are only provided to English speaking users. Once signed in users can select from eleven different languages including Japanese, German, Mandarine Chinese , Spanish, French and Russian. All courses are divided into several lessons which are made up of sheets each.

The Japanese language course for instance is made up of 101 lessons, the first lesson of the course has 91 sheets which are called slides here.

Each slide takes up one sheet which means information are separated to concentrate on the important aspects. I was first a little bit worried because the Japanese course began with a conversation that was only displaying Japanese characters which I could not understand.

Luckily those characters were all explained on later slides of that language lesson. I really liked how this was done. The English meaning first, below the Japanese letters and a Japanese speaker who pronounces the words. Everything can be replaced immediately and if you move the mouse over a Japanese word you get an overlay showing how the word is pronounced.

That help does not use the International Phonetic Alphabet but a simply English word of the Japanese characters. Still really helpful to get it right at the beginning.

Several slides contain important information about basic language concepts. Others ask the user a question which he has to answer (for himself) in a time given.

For example. The first sentence that you learn is “Hello ! How are you.” After showing and pronouncing these words in Japanese and giving the user background information the user is asked what Hello and afterwards what How are you means in Japanese. This is shown after a certain time so that the user exactly knows if he was right or wrong.

Speakers seem to be professionals only. I took a look at the German language course as well and it seems that all courses have the same setup. A difference in the German course is that they use colors to show which English word belongs to which German word and explain what it would mean literally.

Mango is in my opinion an excellent online language course which I will be using to learn at least Japanese. Something which I always wanted to do but never had the motivation to do. I hated those book courses with tapes or CDs which were just to uncomfortable to use.

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Mango

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Not all podcasts are like radio shows of course, some look much more like audio lessons, like university courses without the classes. And this is what I will be talking about now. I found a great website that has three large lists of links to websites that offer podcasts that teach you something. That something is either languages, cultur or university courses. It is up to you of course to decide what you want to learn and hear, just download all the podcasts you like and transfer them to your mp3 player. All podcasts are encoded in mp3 format which makes it possible to have even large lessons take up just some megabytes.

Let us take a look at the three possibilities:

Languages: Links to podcasts that teach you 14 languages including German, French and Japanese. Most of the courses are for beginners, I suggest you read the explanation at the website that compiled the list before you download the podcasts.

University Courses: A compilation of links to colleges and universities (US) that offer free podcasts of some of their lectures. You find a wide variety of courses such as law and social sciences.

Culture: Many links to interesting podcasts and even audio texts. Concentrates on art, pop culture and media. Great.

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All courses consist of audio and text lessons divided into chapters and those are divided further into courses like basic course volume 1 and  volume 2. Most units and audio files seem to be really big, the test mp3 files that I listened to had a size of about 10 megabytes each and lasted for about 20 minutes.

The language courses could serve as an introduction or supplement for learning the language but they seem to be rather old, the first basic volume of the German language course for instance was printed in 1961. If you want to learn a new language and lack the money to purchase one of the high priced language courses you might want to try this online course and rent additional books from a local library.

source: lifehackers

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