Play the Great Language Game!

[Batman]

I came upon this really neat game and I thought I'd share it here. It's called the Great Language Game and it basically tests how well you can discern the world's languages from one another using listening comprehension. It's pretty fun - especially for those of us who study language as a hobby or career.

From the website:

There are perhaps six or seven thousand languages in the world. Even so-called hyperpolyglots, people who learn to speak six or more fluently, barely scratch the surface. You and I will never be able to communicate in all these languages without machine aids, but learning to identify what's being spoken near us, that's within our reach. This is the challenge the game provides.

The game currently has audio from 78 different major world languages:

Spoiler

•Albanian
•Amharic
•Arabic
•Armenian
•Assyrian
•Bangla
•Basque
•Bosnian
•Bulgarian
•Burmese
•Cantonese
•Central Tibetan
•Croatian
•Czech
•Danish
•Dari
•Dinka
•Dutch
•Estonian
•Farsi
•Fijian
•Finnish
•French
•German
•Greek
•Gujarati
•Hausa
•Hebrew
•Hindi
•Hungarian
•Icelandic
•Indonesian
•Italian
•Japanese
•Kannada
•Khmer
•Korean
•Kurdish
•Lao
•Latvian
•Macedonian
•Malay
•Malayalam
•Maltese
•Mandarin
•Maori
•Nepali
•Northern Ndebele
•Northern Sami
•Norwegian
•Polish
•Portuguese
•Punjabi
•Romanian
•Russian
•Samoan
•Scottish Gaelic
•Serbian
•Shona
•Sinhalese
•Slovak
•Slovenian
•Somali
•South Efate
•Spanish
•Swahili
•Swedish
•Tagalog
•Tamil
•Thai
•Tigrinya
•Tongan
•Turkish
•Ukrainian
•Urdu
•Vietnamese
•Welsh
•Yiddish

So play the game a few times and post your high score here if you'd like. Also feel free to discuss what you think of the game or of languages in general.

So far my high score is 1350. The overall high score is 42,100 which is insane.

 

[Mercedes]

I was doing fine till languages I'd never even heard of came up. The hell is Yiddish? Some languages I recognised pretty easily, other ones it was more to do with the accent than actually having heard the language before. But bloomin 'eck there's a lot of languages out there!

 

[Kybyrian]

I was doing fine till languages I'd never even heard of came up. The hell is Yiddish? Some languages I recognised pretty easily, other ones it was more to do with the accent than actually having heard the language before. But bloomin 'eck there's a lot of languages out there!

?! There are things like Fijian and Tagalog in there and you get Yiddish and don't know it? Ashamed =( Yiddish is high German written in the Hebrew language, essentially. Lots of similarities to the modern German language. If you couldn't tell, it's predominantly used by Jews.

In other news, Tagalog hits me every time. It's concerting knowing that when a language like Lao, Vietnamese, Mandarin, or Cantonese come up, I can discern it based on sound though. I only hit 750 =(

 

[Justac00lguy]

I got 550.

I'm not big on languages (word wise), but I do have a decent knowledge of what country a dialect refers to and I'm also ok with accents. The questions that caught me out were those that had two (or three) countries which had a similar dialect.

 

[Mercedes]

?! There are things like Fijian and Tagalog in there and you get Yiddish and don't know it? Ashamed =( Yiddish is high German written in the Hebrew language, essentially. Lots of similarities to the modern German language. If you couldn't tell, it's predominantly used by Jews.

Never heard of it before now. German was the one language I never studied back in the school days so I have no idea about it at all. But now I know!

 

[misskitten]

I got as far as hearing Danish and Icelandic, but not far enough to hear Norwegian *pout* lol

 

[Heroine of Time]

Today I learned that I'm absolutely terrible at telling languages apart. My first score was 0, haha. I did a little bit better the second time, fortunately.

I need to go with my instinct while playing this. I'm still mad at missing that question about Vietnamese... I was PRETTY sure it was Vietnamese, but there was Dari, which I'd never heard of, and I took a chance thinking that might be it. XD I'm planning on studying Linguistics, though, so that was certainly interesting!

 

[Fig]

I have played this game several times, and I must say I am terrible when it comes to languages. Some of these languages sound very similar (especially those like the Romance languages) and most of theses are those that I have never heard or seen in my entire life until now. Despite being bad in the game, this will actually encourage to continue playing until I now the distinct differences between each and every language so that I can better myself as an individual and somewhat learn the many languages that the world has. Very interesting game nonetheless. ^^

 

[Violet Link]

My best score was like 350, but that's because they gave me the ones that sound like Arabic and Chinese.

 

[Sydney]

Final: 250

Probably because there were languages I never new existed, haha.

 

[Akuhime-sama]

I can't get past 250.
I think it's because some of the language choices they give you sound too close to each other. (well, to an outsider anyway)
Though I can recognize Japanese the instant I hear it.
(Since I understand a bit of it and have been learning)

--
Edit: I made it to 400
It would help if I actively heard more languages.... or heard OF more languages.

The only ones I know (besides English and the romance languages) that I hear a lot are Japanese, German, Russian, Korean, Hebrew, Swedish, and Romanian. I can't think of any others. But Japanese, I know because of learning it and watching Anime/Playing video games, and the rest of the languages I listed are mostly from my current and/or past Music choices.

Spoiler

Here's where I've most heard the other languages:
------------------------------------------------
German: E-Nomine and Mono Inc. primarily.
Russian: I like Russian pop. Tatu, Kraski, Virus, Sveta, and a few random Russian songs I have floating around my iPod. OH! Origa and Slot too.
Korean: I don't know if this is sad, but the only reason I can pick out Korean more easily now is because of Adventure Time. Lady Rainicorn speaks Korean. I also have heard a few Korean songs. Obviously, one of them being the viral "Gangnam Style."
Hebrew: INFECTED MUSHROOM!! The best Psytrance group ever. (They're from Israel) They have only two songs completely in Hebrew (the rest is in English, given it HAS lyrics), but I listen to both songs quite often.
Swedish: Basshunter mostly
Romainian: Ozone. Specifically the world-famous song "Dragostea Din Tei" ...(commonly known as the incorrect name "Numa Numa")

 

[Sheik]

My highest score was 350.

(First try I got 150, though. I'm not the best with languages ;p)

 

[ZeldaDungeon]

I got 350.
Wow, I suck.

 

[CynicalSquid]

150

Why does everything but English, Spanish, and German sound the same to me xD

 

[Sir Quaffler]

So far my final score is 500.

Some of the big languages I can discern pretty easily like German or Japanese, and I can tell if it's French almost immediately, having studied it back in high school. I'm also getting good at discerning the difference between certain languages if they're not right next to each other geographically-speaking.

But frankly, some of them are just too hard to tell from one another, or I've never even heard of the languages before. I mean how am I supposed to tell the difference between Dinka and Kannada, what the heck are those even?

I flip-flop between thinking "Wow, all these languages sound really cool and they give everyone their own uniqueness in this wonderful world, and I want to learn as many as I can" and "Dagnabbit why dunt they all learn some dern English already?! Dey terk ma jerb!"