MWC 2014: Ghost World from Pink Dolphin is a swish language learning app
Can you say 'Hola'?
If you were born in Europe you might well remember a series of cartoon episodes titled Muzzy.
This show helped you learned the basic words and sentence composition of multiple languages, through a simple memorise and repeat framework, wrapped up in a low-budget animated series.
Ghost World is the next generation of this type of media, but this time it's on an iPad.
Take a look for yourself...
There are three modes: a comic, an animated comic, and a "role playing" game. The first two are pretty standard - a still or moving series of images present a simple story, the language for which can be changed on the fly. They're pretty nifty, nonetheless.
It's the Role Playing mode that piqued my interest though. It's a more complicated version of the first two, in which you take on the role of one of the characters in the story, and must provide the response when it's your time to speak.
Through a bit of amateur voice acting, you learn, understand, and then repeat phrases in multiple languages, which currently include Spanish, English, Japanese, and Korean.
The stories themselves are about commonly known monsters such as Dracula and Frankenstein's monster, and the art is appropriately strong.
If there's an immediate criticism from this hands-on, it's that the controls can be a little sensitive and fiddly, which might not be fantastic when it comes to tiny hands, but there's every possibility this will be rectified in the future.
