To speak with other people in a land with a foreign tongue takes courage. Now, Sony's latest innovation and entertainment solves this problem and makes your overseas trip more fun.
Accompanied by your very own translator, "Max" helps out while sightseeing at tourist attractions, taking public transport, or even in emergency situations. And apart from that, a game has been included that lets you learn languages while playing.
Max is well versed in 4 languages (English, simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean). You just have to set any of them as your mother tongue and use PSP™'s custom microphone to pose your question. Max will understand you and translate it into the language you desire! Talkman is also prepared with many preset situations for you to choose, so whether you encounter amny problems of miscommunication at the hotel, while shopping, dining, at the airport or else, you can let Max take over.
Average This game is fun, but it's loading time is long. The communication part is not very exciting since it's vocab library is not very rich in content.
Good tool with fun practice! I bought this for my wife since she doesn't speak English very well yet. It works pretty well for a lot of basic translations, but don't expect to translate long sentences or anything like that. The tool for showing a list of possible sentences to translate per setting (eg. hotel) is VERY convenient.
The pronunciation and listening mini-games are entertaining and pretty good practice. I question how strict it is on pronunciation (I did well in my Japanese classes in college but it is hard to get an "A" for some of the pronunciations), but it is still worthwhile.
Max isn't the first character design you'd think of when imagining a translator, but actually he grows on you pretty quickly. The Chinese, Korean, and Japanese voice acting is likeable, but the American English speaker is a bit overdone.
I would definitely recommend this to my Taiwanese or Japanese coworkers/friends for use in travel or just for fun. It's a great tool for casual use.
If you really want a full-featured translator/dictionary for ENG-CHN-JPN-KOR, get a BESTA dictionary with pronuciation tool for around $100-250 (out of Taiwan).
For around $60, this is a very reasonable deal; hopefully Sony will release more titles that take advantage of the mic on the PSP in the future (Rainbow Six, anyone?)
