Language Log December 15th 2017 Please allow me to do a little unsponsered promoting, because wow. I love this game. I did a bunch of research recently on trying to find better ways to study vocab, because flashcards are really hard for me. They’re so repetitive that it gets tedious and I get bored of it especially if I’m getting them wrong, also there’s no audio foir them at all so if I’m pronouncing it wrong I’ve got an issue later. So durring my research for trying to find better ways to study foriegn language vocab better I came across a link for a game on Steam called Influent. With nearly 5 stars and some rave reviews. And I figured, at only $10 it was worth giving it a chance. So it’s got a super basic storyline to set it up where you’re the creater of some marvelous translation software that’s been stolen, and in order to prove that it’s yours you have to learn so many words in whichever language you pick to get the game in (there are quite a few options too, though obviously I bought the version for learning Korean) You start in your house and you have to learn the names of different objects by clicking on them and saving them to your vocab list. But it takes it a step futher because it’s got games in it to test how well you know these words where you can go over your lists repeatedly listening to the native speaker say them, and reading the text, or you can turn off text and just listen to audio or turn off audio and just read the text while hunting around and trying to find the object it’s telling you to find. I was elated that I could turn romanization off too, becuase that’s always the biggest setback for me in these things, because English is my first language those are always the letters that my eyes are drawn to fist. It does it’s games in sets of ten′s so you get simple percentage scores which helps to make me extra competitive. And you can do random lists to make sure you’re not only going through the same sets of words if you want. But it’s nice because you also have to manually add the words to your list by finding them in explore mode which means you can start in one small area, practice those and then move onto a new area, and then get a random set of words to try and find to see how well you’re really doing. The background music is nice too it’s non distracting but makes me feel less self-concious about the fact that my computer and I are just yelling (mostly) nouns back at each other. (though it does have verbs and adjectives as well) Really, most of the time when I get going in this game I kinda forget that I’m studyingand just keep going with it.
It feels like a very natural way to learn, sort of like a kid might with their first language. You point to an object and learn what it’s called. Then you go from there. Pretty straight forward. Though I do try to limit myself a bit so that I don’t get overwhelmed with too many new words in one go, and always make sure that I repeat some of the previous days lists when I start back up. Not to mention I make sure that I’m speaking alloud awhile I play as well by repeating the words I’m learning. I feel like after a day or two of starting to get the hang of the controls for this game (which are really simple but I’m picky about my mouse sensitivity and camera inversions) I’m really loving it and learning well.
If you’re learning a language and it’s one of the options Influent offers I would absolutely suggest considering this game. It’s on Steam for $9.99 and I honestly couldn’t believe it for such an amazing resource with such positive reviews and ratings. It’s interactive and self-competitive and fun and easily wothy the price.
