Free Chinese lessons in new Web 2.0 app

An excellent blog on Web 2.0 apps, Webware.com, has mentioned a new program aimed at learning languages online called Mango. The website uses a slides system complete with audio and examples to teach languages. So far, the site offers Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Russian, and of course, Mandarin Chinese.

I checked out the site earlier today. It requires a sign-up which only takes about 30 seconds. Then you select the language you want to learn, and it launches into Lesson 1.

I have looked briefly at the Mandarin Chinese and Japanese lessons (I used to study Japanese back in high school, and I am trying to brush up) and they seem pretty basic. There are over 100 lessons in Mandarin Chinese already, with the lessons getting tougher the further along you get.

The first slide of each lesson shows a dialogue (using characters) between two people. Then all further slides in the lesson breaks down each sentence and word. It can be very repetitive: it will show you the phrase, repeat it, break it down, repeat it, then ask you to repeat it. Probably pretty good for memorizing these things.

The one drawback in Chinese and Japanese was the lack of information regarding the characters. If you hold the mouse over a phrase, a pop-up will appear showing the word spelled in Pinyin or Romaji, respectively. Other than that, there is no character instruction, so you might need to learn that on your own.

You can check out the site here. It's worth a try.