Let’s face it: foreign languages are stupid. Masculine? Feminine? Accents? Umlauts? It’s a minefield of complication. If that’s your attitude, you need Talkman. Not so much a dictionary as a friendly-faced translator, it’s the shy person/idiot’s answer to parlezing in Francais, Deutsch, Italiano, Espagnol and Japenese.
It’ll take your english words and spit them out in flawless Euro-speak, then let your newfound friend reply via the magic of PSP.
That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, although the attached mic works reasonably well, the hassle and embarassment factor of whispering into a handheld means you’ll quickly abandon speech in favour of simply prodding the buttons. The layout of the menus, combined with the lengthy loading pauses, mean you’ll have to find a patient baguette-botherer, and the ‘emotional content’ option’s simply bizzare. What works much better is the learning aspect of Talkman – with more than 3,000 phrases to practice via pronunciation and listening games, a few days of dedicated practice should give you the skills to leave your Psp at home while you go out and talk proper foreign.
The gameplay is alright; the pronunciation games are weirdly compulsive, but the interface is fiddly. The lifespan of Talkman is great – with several languages to learn, it’s exhausting enough. But couldn’t they have found a cuter mascot? Like a talking prawn?
RATING: 61%
If you liked this, get a proper phrasebook!
