Friday 16 September 2011

One that got away

Here's a curiousity, that had the promise of becoming a useful tool in my Spanish learning kit, but didn't quite make it.
It's a 3D environment, reminiscent of Secondlife, populated with 3D characters, who you engage in dialogues.
There are a couple of difficulty levels, and the program allegedly uses speech recognition to assess your proficiency.
The character voices are obviously computer-generated but, for the most part, fairly clear, although there were some sentences that got cut short  once or twice.
It's an interesting concept, that uses on screen text boxes to prompt you what to say next, with translation to English, and a phonetic guide to pronunciation, along with the text in Spanish.
There's an option to remove the phonetics, and the English, but it would have more useful to leave the English, and remove the Spanish, so you would have to translate for yourself.
You can also click on various object to discover their names in Spanish, and some background or cultural information in English (I have to admit, I did learn a couple of things)
The download is a 60-minute limited version, and the link to 'Buy now' doesn't work, so I guess it was never a commercial success, which is a shame, as it's very easy to get drawn in and find yourself reading the Spanish, without fear of embarrasment, as you're only talking to your PC.
You can download it at http://games.softpedia.com/get/Shareware-Games/3D-Language-Spain.shtml

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