Elements of a chinese language game

In this paper, we elaborate on work presented at the Dutch crossmedia PICNIC festival, in a special symposium entitled: the China Language Bridge. We will discuss a number of online resources, including games, for learning the chinese language, including chinese characters which are also used in japanese. After a brief digression on potential pitfalls in using online translation services, we will present some ideas, and indicate in what way these ideas might be realized using the XIMPEL interactive video platform, developed on top of the open source flex/as3 SDK. Such an approach would cover both the need to introduce appropriate context to stimulate language learning, as well as the unaviodable repetitions, which often proves to be one of the main obstacles for effective language learning.