Silver Tongue

You arrive speaking pidgin; you leave with a silver tongue.

A language-learning life game. Your phone is dead, your wallet is gone, and you're standing on a street in a Chinese city with ¥20 in your pocket. You start by telling the game your name. An old man on a bench teaches you your first words, and later explains how the language works when you ask; after that you earn your living by understanding people. Every job, purchase and conversation happens in the language you're learning.

The first course is Mandarin (HSK 1), in a Chinese city, explained in English.

Play in the browser

https://jamil314.github.io/silver-tongue/ — the same game, with an on-screen key bar on phones. Games save in the browser; Export and Import move a game between the browser and the terminal.

Play in the terminal

npx silver-tongue            # continue the game you played last
npx silver-tongue --new      # start a new game (your other games are kept)
npx silver-tongue --resume   # choose one of your saved games
npx silver-tongue --export   # print the game you played last as one line of text
npx silver-tongue --import <line>   # add a game exported elsewhere (nothing is overwritten)
npx silver-tongue --import - < game.txt   # the same, reading the line from a file or a paste

| Key | Does | |---|---| | 1–9 | choose from the menu, or pick a reply | | w | word help: look up a word from the last line or the replies; s explains the whole sentence | | enter / ⌫ | say / undo, when building a reply from tiles | | n | notebook: every word you've heard, where you first heard it, and Old Wang's notes | | esc | back | | q | save and quit (from the menu) |

Progress saves automatically. Each game is one file in ~/.config/silver-tongue/sessions/<course>/ (or under $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, or %APPDATA% on Windows); a save from 0.2.0 or earlier is moved there on first run. If a save can't be read, it is kept next to it as <name>.json.invalid-backup and a new game starts. If saving fails, the game says so and plays on without saving.

Needs Node 22 or newer. Source, issues and other ways to play: https://github.com/jamil314/silver-tongue

License

MIT. See LICENSE.