Influent Language Learning Game

If you want to buy this game for Japanese - don't. There are only ~400 words and at least half if not most of them are english loanwords . The story, humor and art design are very "Reddit" and the controls are confusing.

Good game for learning by absorbing rather than translating. It's basically how we learn when we're toddlers. We SEE the thing, then we HEAR the word (from parents or other caregivers). There's no preexisting word for the THING when you're first learning language. The textual portions of the game help to clarify when the intent of the game isn't perfectly clear but don't get caught in the "THIS equals THIS" trap (translation); just absorb. One word of warning to new users, though: the reverse lookups are a bit confusing. If you have trouble, just know that there are five (5) floating stars, find the one that matches the prompt and double-click it. If that doesn't help, do what I did: start a game in your native language and play it. When you get a vocabulary list, choose one of the reverse games and it should become clear. By the way, I don't think this game is intended to make a user conversant in the selected language. The game is for learning vocabulary. Useful but not a substitute for verbal practice with other people. That isn't a knock against the game, I just want people to understand the nature of the thing. Enjoy!

I purchased this game to attempt to learn Japanese. Was excited and wanted very much to like this game. However, the game was not "fun to play" and felt very limited. The vocabulary had many borrowed words while the game test/challenges had (too) many errors. Personally, this game did not work well for me (for the Japanese DLC). I was avoiding it more than using it to learn the language until I got a refund. I do not have any experience with any of the other many DLC's available.

Influent is a language learning game where you try to explore an apartment to learn words related to the stuff inside. Most of these are nouns for household objects, but there are some verbs and adjectives included as well. I mostly used it for Russian (I'm upper beginner) but I also tried it in Spanish (I'm upper intermediate). To play the game, you walk around the apartment to find vocab words. When you click on the objects, you can add the words to your vocabulary list. You can add nouns just by finding them, but you'll need to earn stars to unlock the adjectives and verbs. To earn a star, you can either add 10 words to your list or master one of your words. To master a word, you have to pass all five star challenges, which each give you a different prompt and have you find the object or choose the vocabulary word. It takes a little while to get the hang of the controls, but once you do the game is pretty easy to play. Some of the words are a bit hard to find, as some of them are inside of cupboards or are parts of a larger object. Long sessions tended to get kind of boring, but I enjoyed short sessions of 10-20 minutes each. Influent is like a more dynamic version of a flashcard app, and does have some strengths. All of the words have native speaker audio recordings, and if your target language has a different script than your native language, you can toggle between the actual script or a transliteration. The words taught correspond to normal household items, but aren't limited to the most common ones. As an upper intermediate learner, some of the words were not yet familiar to me, but they are objects I see every day. There are a lot of different languages available, including some languages that are less common languages to learn. The game doesn't let you reorganize your word list, so once you add a word it stays where it is. If you want to review specific words on your list, you have to pick the page they're on, and you can't move words around to drill them in a more customizable way. The adjectives and verbs are each tied to a specific object. You can't just pick any green object, you have to choose the object where the game gave you the word, and some of those were harder to remember than others. Inlfluent is a niche game with a pretty narrow purpose. If you are no longer a total beginner in your target language, but most of the words on the word list are still pretty new to you, I think Influent is an engaging way to learn them. If you're getting into the intermediate stages, it's too limited to be useful, and you'd probably have more fun learning/practicing any words you don't know in a different way. It's also good for getting a taste of a lot of different languages, and you get the best value if you sample a few of them. 6/10

Very boring, lots of bugs, audios and words are incorrect, etc. I bought and played this back in 2020 and stopped because of these reasons, and just decided to try it again to see if it has been improved over the years, but it seems to have gotten worse. Do not recommend. Just get one of the free apps on your phone if you want flash cards like this game basically is.

I bought this game many years ago but never really touched it. In the past few months Ive been aggressively learning Spanish with Duolingo and just remembered I had this so I figured I would play it as a complement to Duolingo. Honestly I think it has a good premise but I cannot recommend it. The controls and just understanding what do is a nightmare. I'm honestly baffled with how infuriating it is to do simple things.

As others may have already said this is more or less a flashcard-like program, and honestly you will get as much out of this game as you put into it. You can continually amp up the difficulty as you go, especially with Japanese as you can progress from Hiragana to Katakana then to Kanji (good for beginners to intermediate learners). What I don't think people appreciate enough is connecting words to visuals (rather than your native language), and associating verbs with objects (both of which this game does). If you're serious about a language and are still learning, I would honestly suggest this game as a fun supplemental word collector. This is an underrated and underappreciated language aid. Cheers to Rob Howland for an awesome game!

This game is my favourite language learning game. The focus on highly tangible vocabulary is great because non-tangible elements, while important, can really interfere with the FUN of learning a language which can feel too pushy or overly punishing. At times when I feel disheartened or bogged down by my learning journey I have found this game to be a haven for continued curiosity and engagement. And it really is great for learning vocab! When I learned Japanese years ago I often thought what if I put vocab stickers on a whole bunch of stuff in my house. Well, now I don't have to and a huge bonus to this is all the words are read aloud by a native speaker. I think hearing the words helps a lot to solidify them in memory as opposed to just reading them - especially early on. In my experience Japanese words tend to sound how they're written, but since I've moved on to Korean I have found a huge benefit to hearing the words as well as reading them. I'm really very impressed by how many words are included in Influent and the number of languages available to learn. There is another game called Shashingo which has a similar concept, but quite limited vocabulary and only for Japanese learners. So, yeah, the game is great! And please be nice to the dev. He's just one person so be patient :)

This game is actually the thing that made me realize I wasn't bad at remembering vocab, I was just learning it the wrong way. I am autistic with ADHD and my brain remembers things a lot better when I play this game. The mechanics and music are quite fun too! It is an excellent game to play late at night when you want to feel productive and proud of yourself. I'm only a few hours into the game but I hope the world is bigger than just the apartment, because I could learn so much German from playing this game. As someone who went to university for linguistics, I have noticed that some aspects of the game mirror actual psychological learning tricks, such as pairing certain nouns with verbs and/or adjectives that are related somehow (like pairing "book" with "read") to remember them better with theme association. It truly is the subtle things like that that help me learn and this game does it really well. I am excited to see what Rob does with it next!