Experdize French Airport - Applied

How to play: you are the ground agent at the Experdize Air check-in at Roissy, and every passenger speaks French — this game teaches the language of checking in for a flight. Passengers file through the stanchion ropes to the one desk, and every check comes up on the panel as a question in French. The terminal stands still while a question is up, so read at your own pace: the level is ten reads, there is no clock to beat, and the record is how long they take you and how many you got right first time. Every check-in opens with the booking against the passport — Michèle Lefèvre against MICHELE LEFEVRE. ⚠ The mismatches are homophones: Michèle against Michelle, Dupont against Dupond, Renaud against Renault against Renaut, Lefèvre against Lefebvre — the same name said aloud, spelled another way, and the difference is always a letter nobody pronounces. That is why French speakers spell a surname out loud («Dupont, avec un T») as a matter of course. ⚠ And the passport cannot help you with accents: the machine-readable strip along the bottom is plain A–Z, so LEFÈVRE goes in as LEFEVRE. The LETTERS are what you check. Then they ask for a seat — côté hublot the window, côté couloir the aisle, n'importe either. From level 2 the checked bags go on the scale in words: vingt-trois kilos against the vingt kilos limit, and the plural s goes on the kilos and never on the vingt. Level 3 turns the body scanner on and it names what it sees in French — un briquet, des ciseaux, un cutter, but also les clés and de la monnaie, which are legal; the article is part of every word. Level 4 puts the carry-ons through the X-ray — une bouteille d'eau and un aérosol do not fly, while un ordinateur portable does (⚠ and «un portable» on its own is a telephone). Level 5 adds the gate podium: passengers ask quelle porte and the board reads à destination de Londres, de Séville, du Caire — ⚠ French does not spell foreign cities the English way. Wrong answers are taken or answered back, never refused — they cost patience, the streak or a fine, and the read settles as wrong. The Difficulty row on the setup card decides how much help is written under each line: Débutant adds the say-it-like-this and English, Intermédiaire the say-it-like-this alone, Avancé the French by itself. What is spoken out loud is always the French.