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Play the game and learn a language
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WHEN Australian investment banker William Abbott arrived in China for the first time in 2005, he could barely speak the local language.
Ten years later, he has created a unique and engaging mobile game, Mandarin Shooter Quest, to learn Chinese vocabulary.
Set for late July release, the game adheres to the principle “gaming for good,” presenting players with a repetitive and rewarding way in which to grasp the language.
The user is asked to match the Chinese character, its pinyin pronunciation and its English meaning by blasting the correct targets bearing the answers.
“We spent so much time on our mobile devices playing these mindless games. Our actions became second nature and it’s very easy to clock one to two hours a day, during our commute or before bed, without even realizing it,” Abbott recalls.
“One day, I was playing one of those addictive games, and I thought, I should really have been studying Chinese for the time I just spent on that.
“Then I thought wouldn’t it be great to combine gaming with learning Chinese and actually make it fun and rewarding.”
Like many expatriates who put in hours learning Chinese, Abbott too tried everything available to him — from staying with a Chinese family in a kung fu town near Shaolin Temple for a few months to taking lessons from private tutors, pouring over Chinese textbooks and CDs, but it didn’t help much.
Just remembering the words seemed to be the most difficult thing to do.
“If you have an one-hour lesson, you don’t remember that much from it. Things don’t stick,” he says.
“You have to think about effective frequency, to repeat the words certain times to stick it, like the flash cards, but in a more appealing way so that you can enjoy it even when you are waiting for a taxi for five minutes.”
Abbott did his own research and figured out that the most effective frequency was seven times (like for advertising messages). So he designed the game in such a way that the player is forced to repeat the same word seven times in different ways in the same round.
He also cites the 80/20 rule, where the first 20 percent of effort produces 80 percent of the results, and applies it to the Chinese language-learning game.
“In Chinese, the top 100 words make up about 50 percent of the volume of all the words you use in daily life. The top 1,000 words make up 75 percent of it,” he says.
“Once you master that, you will be able to understand general daily-life sentence structures, which is why the first edition of the game will contain only 1,000 words.”
Abbott has divided the 1,000 words into 20 rounds — each named and designed after a major Chinese city — with some interesting facts about each place.
For example, the barrels containing the words for the Qingdao level are in the shape of beer cases, while the Shanghai level is set against the famous Bund.
“That way, it doesn’t bore the players to see the same design all the time, and we also include a little bit of the geography of China through the visual background,” he notes.
Adding competitive aspects like a ticking clock, rewards and penalties makes it all the more addictive.
In future, he plans to design specialized sets of vocabulary for specific careers and words for standardized HSK (Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi), the official test for learning Mandarin, and words designed for school curriculum, among others.
He also plans to expand the game into other languages, especially for Chinese to learn English because the key idea is the same.
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