Smartphone application for new language learning

• Main Author: Ling, Mingquan
• Other Authors: Ser Wee
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/68074
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was formed on 8 August 1967 by Indonesia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. Currently, members have been extended to countries such as Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar (Burma), and Vietnam. ASEAN is built on three pillars - ASEAN Political-Security Community (APSC), the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), and the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC). This project experiments with the results that can be derived from language and sentence structure patterns used in ASEAN scaled to the conversational context, such as in business, marketing, healthcare and service sector, which includes tourism to create a mini language puzzle. In acquiring a new language, studies have shown that adults and adolescents process new knowledge in very different ways. Young children who learn a new language since birth are extremely sensitive to hearing the inputs in that respective language. Adults however have developed explicit learning structure in acquiring new knowledge using problem-solving mechanism. A sentence structural paradigm to learning a new language is proposed, mostly derived by analyzing patterns within each language, with the intonation referenced to a standard international Romanization system. Users are given a bank of vocabulary and sentences in the new language as a reference. The gameplay mechanism is implemented with a nodal approach, where a diagram is presented and users are encouraged to solve a short puzzle. This is targeted to break down learning barriers from one language to another.