Language game app to take the pain out of learning

The growth of online learning products has created a huge range of ways to learn a foreign language, from the comprehensive-but-pricey Rosetta Stone to a whole host of free services. However, a major challenge facing such educational products is keeping learners entertained and engaged in what can sometimes be the arduous task of memorizing vocabulary and verb drills.

Pollywords, the first launch by educational gaming startup Erly Stage Studios, uses the simple formula of a classic board game to allow users with different language abilities to interact. The free-to-play mobile app game, which bears a strong resemblance to Scrabble, allows two users to play words from a number of languages on the same board.

Erly Stage Studios founder and CEO Farid Ul Haque believes the market for educational gaming has huge potential, noting that the similar word-based Zynga title Words With Friends had up to 7.4 million daily users at its peak. However, these products have seldom been launched on a major scale for non-native English speakers.

“My mother speaks Arabic, my father spoke very good Japanese, my friends speak Urdu, my brother-in-law speaks Spanish, and I speak a little bit of Norwegian because of my wife,” said Haque in an interview in Dubai. “When you have an environment with so many languages being spoken, one of the things you see is that most of the games are in English. It is a product in itself being able to be able to accommodate players with a broader range of languages,” he added.

The biggest use for Pollywords is for people trying to improve their English but it is also useful for English speakers learning foreign languages and non-English speakers wanting to broaden their knowledge, he said.

Original article by Alexander Hawkes

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Language game app to take the pain out of learning