Learning Chinese can be tedious. Students get bored with endless drills and practicing. Learners have limited opportunities to use the language in an authentic context. Teaching Chinese in schools suffers from lack of high quality content materials and teachers. What about learning Chinese through playing an online game? For learners who want to have fun while learning the language, for teachers who want to keep their students motivated in Chinese class, for schools who are looking for high quality and diverse Chinese language teaching materials, and for Chinese learners who want to communicate with other learners and Chinese native speakers, Zon is the solution.

 

What is Zon?

Zon is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). It provides an immersive game environment of a virtual modern China to stimulate and sustain players' interest in Chinese language, to enhance their understanding of Chinese culture, and to help them grasp basic communicative Chinese.

 

What can you do in Zon?

As a Zon player, you arrive in China as a foreign tourist. To survive and fare well in this virtual world of China, you need to interact with both game environment and other players. You can exchange currency, check in hotel room, watch television, visit a teahouse, chat and trade with other players as if in real life.

Every quest you encounter in Zon creates needs of learning the language and understanding the culture. Through the interactions, you are exposed to rich and diverse resources for language and culture learning. Equipped with the language and culture knowledge, you are able to accomplish the tasks, participate in various social activities.

As you progress through the game, your character advances from "tourists" to "residents" and finally to "citizens". At the different stages, you are exposed to different quests, have access to different learning materials, and are able to participate in and organize different social activities.

 

How to access Zon?

As an MMORPG, Zon is a highly accessible language learning platform for learners from all over the world. Particularly, Zon is completely browser based without any requirement of client application. So you can log in and play from school, work or home.

Zon in School

Although Zon is an open platform for general players, it can be customized according to user's needs. Zon can be integrated into schools in various ways. Institutional servers of Zon are available for schools. Teachers can design their Chinese class around Zon, or use Zon as a supplementary source for after-class activity.

Where to start?

http://EnterZon.com is the portal for Zon, which makes it the ideal place to start your journey in Zon. Through the EnterZon portal you can get the latest news and updates of Zon. From the Zon Community Forum on EnterZon, you can get help from other players and Zon staff on any problem in the game.

So sign up, log in, and enjoy the experience of Zon! In a matter of minutes you'll feel ready to visit the real China!