Reviewed: December 22, 2007
Reviewed by: John Bowlin

Publisher
Ubisoft

Developer
Sensory Sweep

Released: November 6, 2007
Genre: Edutainment
Players: 1-2

8
6
7
8
8.5

Supported Features

Enter Ubisoft, a big player in games of all sorts for all platforms. Ubisoft has had moderate success on the Nintendo DS platform, but now they are starting to get serious about educational entertainment and using the NDS as an excellent and highly appropriate tool for learning. They have two new foreign language games out now for the US market, My Spanish Coach and My French Coach. Each of these games strives to act as a beginner-to-intermediate electronic tutor for learning the languages of Spanish and French respectively.

Now, let me just say, that I am almost a complete novice in Spanish. Furthermore, I have very little training in Spanish apart from a high school class long forgotten, and I have little experience with other learning-a-language software. So if you're looking for a review comparing this product to other tools available on the market, I am afraid I cannot help you. What I am, however, is a gamer, and I can tell you how a gamer unfamiliar with the language felt about spending a few weeks with this educational game.

Features:

• Includes 1000 enjoyable lessons.
• Learn up to 10,000 words and 700 phrases.
• Test your pronunciation by recording your voice with DS microphone.
• Use the phrase or word lookup to aid in speaking Spanish on the go.
• Eight educational mini-games help you remember the lessons.

Also, the game keeps track of up to 3 profiles on one cartridge. So, if you want to share one with a family member or two so that you can learn together, that is supported, and you each get your own profile and scores. Your profile also lets you keep track of statistics so that the game can chart your progress over time.

The “gameplay” of My Spanish Coach is to go through increasingly difficult lessons where you’ll be introduced to a handful of related words and concepts at a time. You are blocked from jumping up to lesson 20 if you have not already successfully placed out of or completed lessons 1-19. In order to move on to the next lesson, you must also achieve “word mastery” over every new word that was introduced in the lesson you just completed. How do you master words? Well, quite simply you play mini-games and every time you get a question right related to that word you get points for that word, and you need several points to reach mastery.

The default setting for the mini-games is Easy, which I found to be too easy and I found that I was not really actually learning the words that I had supposedly “mastered”. When I bumped the difficulty up to Hard that helped, but I still felt like I wasn’t master of the words yet, even though I was eager to move on to learn new words. The Easy, Medium, and Hard settings on the different mini-games will alter how they work to some extent. On some it may just mean you have a stricter time limit, on others it may throw more previously mastered words at you or actually change the mechanics of the mini-game some.

These games are designed to be played for about 20 minutes per day, but they do not restrict you from continuing on to new lessons if you want to. What I really found was that I could easily get through most of the mini-games without too much problem to get to the next lesson, but a few hours later when the DS was off, if I tried to remember those words, I could not recall all of them. I suspect that you will need to put in a great deal more practice in memorization than what the game provides if you want to achieve actual fluency in Spanish.

During the lessons one of the really nice features is to switch to “compare” mode on the screen that shows you your new words, which will then let you listen to the instructor say the word or phrase in Spanish, and then let you record yourself repeating it, and then play them back so you can compare how your voice sounds to the voice of the instructor. I found this to be a very interesting and handy feature, but since it isn’t mandatory for acing the mini-games, in practice I didn’t use it very often.

I think this feature actually betrays a flaw in these games, in that while it may help you be able to learn to read and even understand spoken Spanish, it will take a great deal of extra effort and learning on your own to actually learn how to pronounce the language correctly, and this software has no way to test you for that to judge if you are saying it correctly or not. That’s likely a limitation in voice recognition software technology in general, much less something that could fit on a Nintendo DS cartridge. But the “compare” screen definitely is a step in this direction that helps.

But what about the mini-games? Well, the simplest one you’ll do is a straight up multiple-choice question quiz. It shows you the word or phrase in English and you have to choose the correct word or phrase in Spanish. Or sometimes it’s in reverse. Other mini-games include:

• Hit-A-Word – this is basically like the old Whack-a-Mole arcade game, except these are gophers and they have word boxes under them and you have to click them with the stylus if the word matches the English word you’re given on the top screen. For example, if you are told to whack Green, you will slam the little verde gophers until they die. The goal here is to whack only the gophers with the right word on it. If you whack the wrong one, it lowers your percentage of correct ones whacked, and you can end up failing that word for that round. The harder the difficulty setting on this, the more correct gophers you need to whack in a small time frame, and the more it penalizes you for an incorrect whacking.

• Word Search – this is like the word search puzzles in newspapers where you have a block of letters and have to circle (or in this case, draw a line with the stylus through) words from a list. In this case you’re given the English words and you have to hunt for the Spanish equivalent. On easy every hidden word is arranged horizontally from left to right. On the harder settings the words will be arranged in more difficult directions, like vertical or diagonal positioning.

• Flash Cards – this is probably the most useful mini-game of the bunch. You are given a Spanish word or phrase, and you have 4 seconds to click one of 4 cards on the bottom with the corresponding English word or phrase. On the higher difficulty you aren’t even given the written word, you just have to listen carefully for the Spanish pronunciation and choose the right answer. The game can also be reversed and give you English and you have to choose the right Spanish answer.

• Memory – this mini-game plays out like the old “memory” game where you have a spread of cards face down and you have to choose 2 of them and answer whether or not they are a match. Fortunately it has the English cards with a different color card back so you don’t have to waste guesses between two English cards. Even on the Easy setting this mini-game can be challenging.

• Bridge Builder – A sentence in English appears on the top screen and you build a bridge of words by moving Spanish words into their correct slots to translate the sentence. If you translate it incorrectly, the blocks drop and you have to start over again. Now you’re learning how to put together actual sentences.

• Spelltastic – Listen to a word and then use the stylus to spell it using a little keyboard on the touch screen. All incorrect letter guesses subtract from your time limit. You can buy a hint but it costs you more time. You can press the repeat button to hear the word again. Mastery points are higher than some of the easier games.

• Fill-in-the-Blank – Fill in the blanks for verb tense to get a lot of mastery points. This game is perhaps one of the more difficult ones since you aren’t just selecting a correct answer from a list but you must provide the answer yourself.

The only problem I found was that some of the text in a few of the fast-paced mini-games was too small for rapid recognition, and a lot of my mistakes were made simply due to font similarity rather than misunderstanding the concepts. But that is a minor quibble, really, since most of the words are recognizable enough most of the time.

Could there have been more? Well sure, if cartridge memory was of no concern, they could have provided cute little animations for each of the words and maybe even had another mini-game where you are only shown the animation and have to guess the word it belongs to or something along those lines. But would that really make the game a better learning tool?

One minor nit about the sound is that during the various numbered lessons there may be some written Spanish phrases given that are never spoken in voice, and it would have not only been more interesting but also help you learn more if there was full voice for all of the lessons.

Find yourself in Cozumel and need to know how to ask, “Where is the toilet?” Just go to the phrase search feature from the options menu and key in “toil” and hit the enter button for a list of phrases that match that search criteria. You may find it under “bath room” as well. Unfortunately if someone cusses you out in Spanish, this family-oriented software won’t help you find what they said or how to respond in kind.

In addition to many different lessons and the mini-games, this tool also provides a very handy and portable English-to-Spanish dictionary and phrase book, complete with pronunciation so that you can actually look up what you want to say while traveling and hopefully not sound like a complete idiot. My Spanish Coach probably will not be your only tool you use on the road to complete Spanish fluency, but it is certainly a good starting point and one of the best educational uses for the Nintendo DS on the market. Anyone who has an interest in learning a foreign language, which should be nearly anyone, can get something out of this.