Santa Fe College students and faculty can now learn more than 60 languages for free online — including Pirate.
The college recently subscribed to Mango Languages, an online database that allows people to learn everything from Hindi to Yiddish. Each language has the equivalent of about two semesters worth of study, said Diana Matthews, Santa Fe Lawrence W. Tyree Library librarian.
And, she added, the database is constantly adding more languages.
“Many of the more popular languages also have specialized courses,” Matthews said. “For instance, Spanish has a medical Spanish module. So if you’re going to be going into the health care field (and) you need to brush up on some medical vocabulary, that’s in there.”
Some of the popular languages also include full-length films, audio recordings and the ability for users to speak into a microphone to compare their pronunciation with a native speaker’s accent.
Matthews said students and faculty will be able to access Mango for free both on campus and remotely, as well as through an app. Mango can be accessed through eSantaFe by clicking on Study Tools and selecting Library Databases.
Nichole Pierce, a 20-year-old Santa Fe linguistics sophomore, said she’s using the program to learn three languages — Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese and Korean.
While she acknowledges the best way to learn a language is to immerse oneself in the culture, Pierce said Mango is a good start.
“People should really invest in taking a second language,” she said. “It’s very lucrative. A lot of companies and places like people who … are familiar in international settings, or they know another language.”
[A version of this story ran on page 3 on 2/3/2015 under the headline “Santa Fe introduces free online program, offers 60+ languages"]
Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Latin America), French, Italian, Arabic (Egyptian, Iraqi, Levantine, Modern Standard), Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese Chinese, Japanese, German, Hindi, Brazilian Portuguese, Bengali, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Biblical Hebrew, Cherokee, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dari, Dutch, English, Farsi, Finnish, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Kazakh, Korean, Latin, Malay, Malaysian, Norwegian, Pashto, Pirate, Polish, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Tuvan, Ukranian, Urdu, Vietnamese and Yiddish.
