Bad Sign Number Six Million And Twenty

[bloodyrosemccoy]

If you have ever asked yourself, “What kind of crazy motherfucker picks up a ‘My Chinese Coach’ video game and plows into it headfirst because it looks like fun?”, then, well, I have your answer.

Yes, in a casual attempt to overcome my fear of tone, and because I had not yet done something this summer that was so fucking geeky that I had other geeks trying to push me down and take my lunch money, I have started learning Chinese through the extremely thorough and doubtless infallible world of video games.* And I’m treating it like a video game.

For the record, I’m on Level 9. Soon I will beat Chinese. I’m hoping that when I do, the last thing it teaches me is how to say “A Winner Is You.”


*Of course, this is coming someone who would pick a stack of Rosetta Stone programs over a vacation to Disneyworld if given the choice.

Comments

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

One of my Aikido senseis says that My Japanese Coach is pretty good, but has some downsides, like glitches and the fact that the vocab quizzes have very few words, and once you've been quizzed on a word you'll probably never see it again in the game (s there's very little reinforcement).

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you sort of have to take the initiative to reinforce on your own. In the Chinese one, at least, you can set the games to either new words, words you've already covered (optimistically referred to as "mastered" words), or both. But mostly it just plows forward.