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There are dozens of reasons for learning a language. Some people primarily want to quickly and efficiently learn the key phrases needed to travel successfully in another country, while others are looking for the first steps towards real language fluency.
Eureka's The Big Box of Languages is able to perform a double duty. First, it's specifically designed to make you travel-savvy in the language as rapidly as possible.
Second, the material presented in this full-featured learning system is uniquely rich and highly effective.
* Comprehensive grammar references complete with alphabet overview; * Interactive dialogue and conversational practice; * Advanced speech analysis with a listen and speak feature; and * 70 languages, each with 7 fun and interactive games.
Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Basque Belorussian Bengali Brazilian Portuguese Breton Bulgarian Canadian French Catalan Chinese - Mandarin Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Esperanto Estonian European Portuguese Farsi Finnish Flemish French Galician German Greek Guarani Haitian Creole Hawaiian Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Korean Latin Latvian Lithuanian Luganda Malagasy Malay Pidgin English Polish Quechua Romanian Russian Scottish Gaelic Serbian Slovak Slovene Somali Sotho Spanish Swahili Swedish Tagalog Tahitian Thai Tswana Turkish Ukraine Urdu Vietnamese Welsh Xhosa Yiddish Yoruba Zulu
Each language contains Grammar Basics which has information on parts of speech, such as adjectives, adverbs, articles, conjunctions, nouns, pronouns, verbs, and more, as well as an overview of the alphabet, sentence structure, gender, and conjugations.
For transliterated languages, such as Japanese or Chinese, there is also an explanation of the transliteration.
Listen & Speak is a great way to practice pronunciation in context. By pronouncing any word or sentence that you choose, you can compare your pronunciation to the native speaker’s by listening to the sound and looking at the various graphs.
The Speech Correctness Meter gives you a general score for your pronunciation of the current word or segment, on a scale from “Keep Practicing” to “Wow!”. This score is based on a comparison of the patterns of upper harmonics in the sounds - in other words, how closely you matched the native speaker’s vowel sounds, pitch patterns, and placement of fricatives.
The Pitch graph indicates the frequency of your voice - how high or low it is.
The Waveform graph plots variations in air pressure across time to give you an overall impression of how similar your pronunciation is to the native speaker’s.
The Fricative graph displays sounds caused by friction - for example, hissing or shushing sounds, such as ‘s’, ‘z’, and ‘sh’.
The Vowel graph helps you master two key elements of pronunciation: Vowel sounds, which are represented by colours, and stress, which is represented by the shape of the graph. By comparing your vowel graph to the native speaker’s, you can tell whether you used the same vowel sounds as the native speaker, and whether you stressed the same parts of the word. Interactive Dialogue and Conversational Practice
Conversation Practice lets you take part in a real foreign language conversation.
This challenging feature is a great way to sharpen the kind of listening and speaking skills you need to converse in a foreign language, because it will teach you what to say in a conversation as well as how to pronounce it. You can hear the pronunciation of a word and listen as often as you need to improve your word recognition! You will also notice how words may sound different when spoken in context than when pronounced alone.
The SlowSound feature plays words and sentences slower than normal speech, making it easier for a non-native speaker to focus on individual sounds.
Crosswords is a fun and exciting way to improve your vocabulary and spelling skills. Fill in the puzzle with words based on the given clues. Type one letter in each square, and don’t forget to add accents if necessary.
Vocabulous! is a fun way to test your vocabulary and spelling. A sentence appears, and you must type the missing word. See how many words you know!
Word Dictation focuses on your ability to recognise individual spoken words. Listen to a word pronounced by a native speaker, then try to type that word. As you do, you’ll be honing your listening and comprehension, increasing your spelling skills, and learning new vocabulary.
Unscramble presents a sentence with all the words mixed up. Click on incorrectly placed words (shown in red) and drag them to their proper positions. You’ll know you’ve got it right when the words turn black. Pay attention to what types of words go where, and you can learn about sentence structure and grammar!
Plug-n-Play allows you to build text along with your language skills. Use your knowledge of vocabulary and sentence structure to drag words into holes in the text on the screen.
Graffiti enables you to practice spelling, word recognition, and sentence formation. In this advanced activity, you must unscramble an entire section of text, letter by letter.
Sentence Dictation teaches you to recognise entire spoken sentences. Listen carefully as the native speaker says a sentence, and then try to type that sentence in the space provided.
