Date Sun 01 September 2013 Tags linguistics

I love foreign languages, but that's never changed a simple fact: there's not enough time in anyone's life to learn and maintain many languages. Not compared to the six or seven thousand which are in use today, not even compared to the languages spoken in your neighbourhood. Whilst we can't learn to speak many languages, we can at least learn to recognize them when they're spoken.

The game

In this spirit, let me introduce my latest project, the Great Language Game. Drawing on language samples collected from news podcasts in 68 languages, the result is super simple: listen to an audio sample in an unknown foreign language, and guess which one it is out of a handful of options. Rinse and repeat.

You get three lives, which you lose if you make a mistake. As you get more answers correct, the questions get more difficult, with more options to pick from. At the end of your game, you find out your score and get to learn a little about the languages you made mistakes on. After a few games, you'll find yourself learning about languages you've never heard of before, spoken in regions all across the world.

If all this sounds interesting, why not give it a try?

Some thanks

The game wouldn't have made it this far without the benefit of a whole bunch of feedback from my brother Andrew, many friends and my long-suffering wife Lauren. So, thank you everyone!

Have some ideas on making the game better still? Shoot me an email.