It worked.

First, the languages:

Arabic Korean Bengali Latin Brazilian (Portuguese) Norwegian Chinese (Cantonese) Polish Dutch Punjabi English Russian Farsi (Persian) Slovak Finnish Spanish French Swahili German Swedish Greek Tagalog Hebrew Thai Hindi Tibetan Hungarian Ukrainian Irish Vietnamese Italian Zulu Japanese

Every language is formatted exactly the same. I started with the German CD since I already speak enough German to make an intelligent evaluation of the program.

Each CD autoplays with no installation required: just stick one in your CD drive and it cranks right up. It works on both a PC (Win 95 and above) and a Mac. You will need a CD player, a sound card and a microphone to take full advantage of the program.

The first screen (above) is the main menu. From the central wheel you select the category of words and phrases that you wish to learn. The categories are: Introductory words, food, colors, phrases, parts of the body, numbers, telling time, shopping and countries. This is also where you keep track of the score from the games you play (when you get 1,800 points, you win) and also get to play an additional game, indicated by the goofy little guy in the lower right hand corner.

Each category has word practice, speaking practice, an easy game, a hard game and the option to print a picture dictionary. Each category is slightly different – the variety keeps it interesting – but let’s look at a sample from each of the sections:

1. Word practice lets you hear the word pronounced. Note that there are both male and female speakers; I found that having two different speakers makes you more comfortable with the language. You can hear the word pronounced as many times as you want.



2. The next step is speaking practice. Here the speaker says a word and you immediately repeat it into your microphone. You then play back the sequence and can hear your pronunciation compared to the native speaker. As you gain confidence and vocabulary, you can record and play back your answers without prompting from the speaker.



3. Next, you play games and earn points. Below is the easy game in the body parts category (you build your own Frankenstein monster by selecting the body parts called out to you) and below that is the hard game in the phrases category (you select the picture that matches the phrase.) You can go back and play the games over and over.





4. Finally, you can print a picture dictionary of each section. The shopping dictionary has about 50 words and is five pages.

The goofy-guy game that you enter through the main menu (below) is a croupier who plays a form of concentration with you: he shows you the objects, turns them over, then calls out their names in the target language and you have to point to them. It’s a feat of memory as well as language!

There is a little installation program that you can use; it will store your student records. If the language uses another alphabet – as I found with Hebrew and Arabic – the words will appear only in the native alphabet, not accompanied with an English transliteration.

As I mentioned, the interface is the same for all of the languages, so if you are learning Swahili or Korean you will have the same blonde “native” speakers that you get with German. That was disconcerting.

At the end of my session I felt quite confident with several hundred easy words and phrases. And I had fun doing it!

This is far from being a complete language-learning program. You won’t learn how to conjugate verbs. But if you’re taking a short trip and want to be able to say please, thank you, I need a doctor and I’d like fries with that, it will meet your needs.

Although the company produces other programs specifically for children, this would also be a good introduction to languages for kids. Since the program is totally aural – no reading is required – a child as young as a first grader could have fun with it.

This program is marketed in the States by Topics Entertainment and was developed by Eurotalk. Neither of them sells the 33 Languages package on their Web site but you can get it from Amazon.com for $39.99; the list price is $49.99.

Auf Wiedersehen!