The new Candy Crush

By JENNIFER O’MAHONYJOURNALIST PHILLIP Mattheis knew his gaming app was addictive when he realised he kept checking his phone – hooked by the brightly-coloured reminders telling him to play again or risk falling from the triple-figure level he had reached.Yet gripping the German newsman’s attention was not Candy Crush, but one of a new generation of Chinese language apps that are using tricks traditionally employed by online games to get users hooked on learning.For years the thrill of studying a new language has been tempered by the tedium of rote learning and repetition required to be truly accomplished – particularly the case for memorising a character-based system – but now language apps are increasingly turning to the same praise, reward and challenge format that games such as Candy Crush use to such devastating success. Shanghai-based Mattheis is an avid user of the app Memrise, which offers courses in standard Mandarin Chinese and several dialects, and has 25 million users. “We’ve turned learning

Chinese language apps make learning a game.

JOURNALIST PHILLIP Mattheis knew his gaming app was addictive when he realised he kept checking his phone – hooked by the brightly-coloured reminders telling him to play again or risk falling from the triple-figure level he had reached.