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When I was playing around in Scratch yesterday, I couldn't help but think (again) that it's possible to develop a visual approach to learning a second language. When working on BBC Jam Irish, I developed a visual sentence builder to help a learner build he/she/me/they sentences that involved like/love/hate and an object (pizza/school/hairy caterpillar). Using lego people and objects (what else?) the learner could select any subject, object and emotion and then generate a text and audio sentence.

But this was a Flash-based game with a limited number of objects and possible sentences. What would be really interesting is taking a language and categorising its components much like Scratch has done, so that a learner can snap together blocks of language to create sentences that are visually rendered. If I've created a sentence that says I am riding a bike in the rain, then a visual animation of me, riding a bike in the rain, is played out.

A site called lingualgamers.com briefly touches upon the idea of language learning using blocks in this article, having taken inspiration from MIT's StarLogo TNG - another visual programming application.

I've another, stranger idea for visual language learning that's currently bubbling away in my head...I'll try and get around to it next week.