Learning a language for many people is more of a chore than a pleasure and most will dive into it with enormous initial enthusiasm, only to give it up shortly after ‘where is the post office’ and ‘my souvlaki has too much salt’.
Enter the Nintendo DS and Ubisoft’s My Coach range: My Spanish Coach, My French Coach, My Japanese Coach, and My Chinese Coach.
Now these certainly aren’t the first games to be made to help people learn languages, they are not even the only ones available on the Nintendo DS, but they are without a doubt some of the most effective language learning games on the market.
Finally someone has made an engaging, enjoyable, and most importantly, an effective game to make learning a language fun and easy. And these games are not just for kids; they will appeal to anyone who enjoys computer games. Let’s face it, if you have a DS already, you like games, and I am pretty sure you will like these.
Each game comprises about 1000 interactive lessons and mini games which can be played through from the start for newbies, or begun at the appropriate level for more experienced linguists. This is achieved by an initial quiz to gauge your level with quizzes popping up throughout the game. Overall the game does an excellent job of teaching vocabulary, grammar, and even pronunciation with its voice recognition software, and does it well enough to make a quality, stand up, language learning suite feel like playing a game.
I don’t understand why it has taken so long for game designers or language product designers to marry the two formats together so well. We all know the importance of learning foreign languages, and we all know how much we like playing games. To me it seems an obvious combination; my Coach combines them seamlessly. I hope we see many more language games on the market in the future, available for all platforms, and as consistently good as these are. This is an ideal way to learn a language
Hats off to you Ubisoft.
