By Ed Sum
(The Vintage Tempest)
Language learning can be fun with the right app on your smartphone, but to find one that performs well in an engaging video game is few and far between. Influent is one that can assist, but it’s not without a few flaws in its design. It’s more of a vocab building and memory tester than anything else.
Navigating around the virtual space is semi-intuitive; there’s a digital joystick to move Andrew Cross, your avatar, in the apartment and that’s where the limitations come in. Depending on the platform, the rendering quality will vary from being very cartoon-like to being photo-realistic. The “first level” concerns learning about the objects that are around this home (an apartment) and not how they’re used in everyday speech. Depending on the language (there’s a choice of 15 that one can buy to master), it’s easy to learn since they’re just romanizations of the English word (in Japanese speak).
Continue reading “Learning a New Language Isn’t Very Influent”