Experdize French Doctor - Applied

How to play: this is a language game wearing a French cabinet médical. You are the médecin, and you are not running the surgery — the surgery runs itself: she walks to the couch, the monitor, the laboratory bench and the medicine cabinet on her own, and files cards at reception and washes her hands when nobody is waiting. What you do is read French and answer two questions for every patient.

Take as long as you like. There is no time limit and nothing to beat the clock to: a session is 10 questions, and it ends the moment you answer the last one. One question is up at a time, and the whole surgery stands still whenever anybody is talking — nobody walks, nobody comes in and no patience bar moves — so you can read every line as slowly as you need. If a row of answers is up, choosing one starts the surgery again; if there is no row — she says she is on it, somebody grumbles, somebody says thank you — tap the play button on the speech bubble when you have finished reading it. The stopwatch at the top counts up rather than down: it is your result, not your deadline, and your fastest run at each session is kept.

1 — What is wrong with them? A patient describes their symptoms: Je sens que ça brûle en avalant. — “it really burns when I swallow.” Pick the diagnosis off the row along the bottom. ⚠ Half the complaints name the illness and half only describe it, so you cannot get through by matching words alone. And the wrong answers are not random, they are the mistakes worth making once: mal à la tête headache, mal au ventre stomach ache, mal au dos back pain and mal aux dents toothache — one word of pain and four parts of the body, so reading only the first word is a one-in-four guess. Pick the wrong one and she is not stopped: she examines for it, finds it is not that, and walks back to look again — which costs her the trip, in front of you.

⚠ And the little word in front is the whole lesson.à la, au, aux — the same preposition three times, changed by the gender and the number of the body part behind it, and English has nothing at all in that slot. la tête is feminine so it stays à la; le ventre and le dos are masculine so à le contracts to au; and les dents is plural, so aux. You cannot learn the noun without learning its gender, because the gender is what you actually say.

2 — What do you prescribe? She examines and asks herself Le patient a mal à la gorge. Qu’est-ce que je prescris ? — “the patient has a sore throat; what shall I prescribe?” Pick the medicine. ⚠ Five of the twelve open with the same prefix — un antipyrétique, un antidouleur, un antihistaminique, un antihypertenseur, des antibiotiques — so anti- and what it is against is the whole of the reading, and the first four letters settle nothing. ⚠ And two of them are the SAME WORD: un pansement is a dressing you put on a cut and un pansement gastrique is something you swallow for your stomach. One adjective is the entire difference between a bandage and a medicine.

⚠ And the plural is silent.la dent and les dents are the same sound; so are le comprimé and les comprimés. Nothing in the pronunciation carries the number — only the little word in front of it does, which is the exact inverse of the Vietnamese original's problem, where the tone was in the sound and could not be written. Here it is on the page and nowhere else.

The sessions are the words, and the waiting room is the session. They climb together. The Difficulty row is how much of each line is written: Débutant writes the say-it-like-this and the English under every line, Intermédiaire the say-it alone, Avancé the French with nothing under it. The Session row is who is in the waiting room and what can be wrong with them: session 1 is Camille and Thomas with fevers, coughs and aches; session 2 brings Lucas, sore throats and flu; session 3 Mme Moreau, cuts, dizziness and toothache; session 4 bébé Léa, food poisoning and allergies; and session 5 M. Dupont, broken bones and blood pressure. From session 3 what was said fades a few seconds later — tap whoever said it to hear it again, free but for the time, which is the one tap left on the floor. And somebody is sent down the corridor for a blood test and comes back with the slip.

You cannot lose a session. Somebody who waits too long gives up and goes to the pharmacy instead — that costs you the care and your streak, and they say so — but nothing ends the session except answering its last question. What varies is your time and how many you got right.