If you're a laowai living in Shanghai struggling with Chinese, fear not, you're not alone. Some people expect you to speak the local language regardless of how long you've lived here, but we all know it's not as easy as that - Chinese can be tough to get your head around. But if you wanna learn without the pressure of tutors, exams and expectation, then a stress-free game may be the thing to get you speaking the lingo with more confidence.
Indie developer Cognitive Gaming has recently launched a revolutionary gamified learning system that might just be the key to perfecting the Chinese language. During its pilot test, Mandarin Shooter Quest successfully 'increased players recall on 50 words 2.87 times, from 30% to 86% after only a week of playing the game for on average, 14 minutes a day'. Apparently, through use of the game, it takes a player just 2.57 minutes to successfully learn and retain a new Mandarin word. Sounds hen you yong to us.
'The game allows players to choose from three avatars to help navigate through 24 Stages, including 150 levels, covering over 2,000 vocabulary words. Players travel around Greater China, exploring metropolises such as Shanghai and masterpieces of nature like Yellow Mountain and Yangshuo, pandas in Chengdu, historical artifacts in Xian, the Gobi Desert from Xinjiang into Inner Mongolia, finally finishing in the old capital Nanjing.' If it doesn't help your language skills, it'll at least improve your Chinese geography...
'Black Belt' players can learn the Chinese characters while 'White Belt' players can learn correct pronunciations through pinyin. The lazy but ambitious amongst us can also opt for in-app 'weapon' purchases such as time freezers and translation assistants to speed up the game and help progress through the levels, while the game also includes a vocab stream for HSK levels 1, 2, 3 and 4. You'll be speaking putonghua in no time.
Mandarin Shooter Quest is now available for free on Apple's App Store, with the Android version currently in development.
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