This page is a silly thing, I won't lie to you. But it's a very, very fun silly thing that has let me discover not only languages from around the world, but also — much more importantly — music from super exotic places I wouldn't have had access to otherwise. That's Language Guesser, a language-guessing game based on music videos hosted on YouTube.
How does it work?
Can you tell Bosnian from Armenian, Croatian from Czech, or what about Bengali from Hindi? Put your doubts to rest with Language Guesser! “Language Guesser is a game in which you must recognize the languages of random music videos.” That's how simple the premise is, and that's how simple it is to discover popular music from around the world. The site isn't complicated: it shows you a music clip and gives you a few language options to choose from.
Getting it right on the first try earns you more points than getting it right on the second, and so on. The site, for even more fun, offers two game modes: Classic and Infinite. Classic mode shows you a configurable number of music videos. The infinite mode is, clearly, infinite; it goes on until you get bored (or until you lose). Also, before starting the game, you can choose between two music genres: pop or hip hop.
Language Guesser has songs in fifty different languages and three difficulty levels for the challenge. Hundreds and hundreds of music videos from all over the world, one after another, in random order. At the end of the challenge, you'll get your score and access to your game statistics. This is, clearly, not a good way to learn languages. As I already said, it's a fun silly thing whose greatest use is discovering popular music from exotic places, letting yourself be impressed by whatever the system wants to show you next. In other words, one of the many ways to waste time on the web.
About the creator
Language Guesser is a site developed by Emanuel Ruckstuhl, a teacher of the “Historical Linguistics” chair at a Swiss high school. The idea came to him in 2015, while teaching his students, and this is the result.
Language Guesser
