Nintendo DS Lite: My Chinese Coach

Yes, I'm a banana.

Banana: Chinese who don't speak chinese. Well in my case, I guess you could say its half ripe cause I can actually speak chinese (I have no problem with hokkien and even kanto, thx to TVB dramas...mandarin's a bit challenging)...but when it comes to writing...i'm pretty hopeless. Thankfully I still know how to write my name so...its still cool.

QJ and a few other friends got me a DS Lite for my birthday last March. Been a lovely companion during journeys back home as well as times when I don't have my PC to use :D . Games aside, I've been using it as an ebook, mp3 player, I can even watch movies with it but quality kinda sucks compared to PSP (of course).

Last week while I was surfing for new games for my DS Lite, I found this interesting 'game' by Ubisoft: My Chinese Coach.

This is not the first language coaching game. My Coach series include French, Spanish, word coach, life coach and even weight loss coach (ok I gotta check this out XD )

So far I've only tried the Chinese one. And I find it kinda great. I don't know how long I'm able to stick to this lessons (I've taken chinese lessons before..but that was kinda long ago :P ) but I'm gonna give it a shot since its free lesson for me.

How do they teach you? After going through a placement test, I started off with lesson 3. Most words were taught in romanized (pingyin) form. Audio sample of the pinyin's pronunciation is also available and what's nice, you can also record your own pronunciation of the words and compare it with the sample provided.

One of the games that I really really enjoy is the Fading Character game. They'll show you how to write some words in chinese, with the strokes in the correct order. After that, you're required to trace the strokes in the correct order and correct number of strokes. In the last frame, they will only show the word briefly and you're required to re-write them from memory. Something I've been looking forward to have on the NDS.

Another game that I've unlocked so far requires the player to match the pinyin/word to the english word given, or the audio sample provided. There's also a lesson that teaches you the 4 different tones in pinyin. I found this sentence very interesting: Mama(1) ma(4) ma(3)...means Mum scolds the horse...pretty much like phonetics :P ...just pronounced in different tones.

Too bad this game relies heavily on the audio...otherwise it'd be nice to play during clas- whoops! XD

My Japanese Coach will be released on 14th October 2008 for $29.99. Will definately get my hands on the program then :D