Experdize Mandarin Airport - Applied

How to play: you are the ground agent at the Experdize Air check-in at Beijing, and every passenger speaks Chinese — this game teaches the language of boarding a flight and flying on a plane. Passengers file through the stanchion ropes to the one desk, and every check comes up on the panel as a question in Mandarin. 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 in characters against the pinyin passport — 张伟 against SARA COLE. Approve a match, turn a mismatch away; the mismatches are near misses built from the confusions a Chinese name really suffers (a homophone, a look-alike, or a stray dakuten), so the read is the transliteration. Then they ask for a seat — 靠窗kào chuāng the window, 靠走廊kào zǒuláng the aisle, 都可以 either — and answering is picking what they said. From level 2 the checked bags go on the scale in kanji numerals: 二十三公斤 against the 二十公斤 limit, and 斤 is HALF a kilo where 公斤 is a whole one, the counters do — ikkiro, rokkiro, hakkiro, jukkiro. Level 3 turns the body scanner on and it names what it sees in Chinese — 刀, 打火机, 剪刀, but also 钥匙 (keys) and 零钱 (coins), which are legal; knowing the word is the answer. Level 4 puts the carry-ons through the X-ray — 一瓶水 and 喷雾罐 do not fly. Level 5 adds the gate podium: passengers ask 几号登机口 and the departures board reads 飞往上海, 飞往首尔 — city names written in characters with 飞往 "bound for", answered with 1号, 2号, 3号. 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: Beginner adds pinyin and English, Intermediate pinyin alone, Advanced the characters by themselves. What is spoken out loud is always the Mandarin.