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Publisher: Ubisoft

Genre: Educational/Casual

Platform: Nintendo DS

What they say:

Easy to Learn, Fun to Play:

Entertaini9ng games help you learn French words, grammar, and sentence structure, while keeping track of your progresss.

Evertyhing you need to speak like a native:

1,000 enjoyable, interactive lessons. Learn close to 10,000 words and 700 phrases. Test your pronunciation by recording your voice via the built-in DS microphone.

Travel with confidence:

Hit the road with My French Coach by your side. Know a word or phrase in English, but want to say it in French? Just use the easy Reference Feature.

What I say:

My French Coach is one of the three inaugural games in the My Coach Games series published by Ubisoft, the other two being My Word Coach [DS, Wii] and My Spanish Coach [DS]. Despite some of my poor experience with some other educational type games for the DS [Brain Age, in particular], I found My French Coach to be an enjoyable and educational.

Just as I am sure that more and more children in the US are being taught Spanish as it continues to grow into a pseudo-official language down south, I was force fed French as part of my education in the Great White North. Needless to say, when I picked up my copy of My French Coach, I thought it was going to be a free ride. I soon learned that there is no such thing as a free lunch, or rather, un déjeuner gratuit.

When you first create a profile in the game, it allows you to take a pre-test that tries to gauge your current understanding of the language. Based on your results, you can bypass a number of the lessons and start at a later stage. The game placed me somewhere in the Kindergarten level, and despite how it made me feel, it was a pretty accurate placement. The games/lessons weren’t overly challenging, but it did present me with a good number of new words to add to my vocabulary.

Each lesson is structured identically, with 10 screens to introduce the player to new words, sentence structures or verb conjugations, and two embedded games to let the player try out what he or she learned. The next part of the lesson are the games. This is how the player masters each new word in the presented vocabulary and unlock the next lesson. The games are designed to engage the player in visual and oral recognition of each word in different ways. These games are the typical ones you would expect from an educational game [flash cards, matching, spelling, word searches] not because the creators have little imagination as to how to engage the players, but rather because these are the pedagogical methods that have been shown to work. Hundreds of thousands of elementary school teachers can’t be wrong, n’est-ce pas? The games themselves offer a varying level of difficulties so that you can take it slow and easy or fly through the lessons on the hardest setting. The difficulty can come in the form of less time alloted to complete the game, switching from visual to audio cues for flash cards, or adding other layers of complexity to the game. Like all good teachers, though, you are free to select the level of difficulty before each game.

Like all good [and bad] games, there are some gripes that surface after the initial joy of playing the game wears off. The game is highly audio intensive. After all, aural learning is one of the main educational pedagogies. It’s essential that you play the game in a quiet setting, or at least carry headphones. The lessons can be a bit slow at times, and despite the advertised usage of the microphone to match pronunciation, I doubt many players will actually use it. These are, however, minor flaws with the game design, and doesn’t truly impact the greatness that is My French Coach.

The game has a number of fantastic features that will make the game a valuable addition to your collection, especially if you are an avid traveler (with little foreign language education). The Reference section is easy to use with both English and French search options. The lessons and games are all repeatable, so that any words you’ve mastered already can be reinforced. Each block of lessons presents a part of French geography such as Omaha Beach or the Louvre, which adds a bit of interesting reading to your French journey. The game is easy to pick up and put down, without any pressure or guilt attached. This game is definitely a keeper if you enjoy learning on commutes or before bed.

Was it worth it? A resounding Oui