Runesinger: a Demonstration of Coupling Korean Phonics and Spelling to a Videogame

Runesinger is a demo of a PC videogame to practice speaking and spelling Korean. This computer-assisted language learning teaches a few meaningful nouns and verbs through the task of serving food to hungry villagers during the North Korean famine of 1997. Inspired by melodic intonation therapy (MIT), the phrases are embedded in jingles. While the user listens and sings each note, a bouncing ball synchronizes the phonemes and graphemes. The user learns a subset of 한글 (Hangul), the Korean alphabet, through a spelling puzzle. Subsequently, the user sings to same language subtitling (SLS). The three-dimensional (3D) virtual environment, user interface, and story were designed explicitly for the phonetic spelling of the Korean language. Thus, Runesinger harnesses the tropes of videogames to practice a foreign language in a meaningful context.