Fluenz

What works

Running the application directly from the disc works. Audio/Video segments work. All of the interactive learning exercises seem to work. The Help section works. Entering accented characters works. The background music works, as does turning it off and on. General navigation of menus and between different workouts works.

What does not

Attempting to pause or scroll forward in a video causes it to start over from the beginning of the clip. (This might be resolvable with an install/update of some particular driver/codec/etc. that I haven't found yet). During the exercise for practicing your accent, after choosing "standard mic", pressing the record button (red dot) causes a "Program Error", crashing the app.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Installing to hard drive was not tested. It requires 4GB of free drive space, which I did not have available. Recording with a "standard mic" was not tested (see "what does not work" section). Recording with a "USB mic" was not tested (I don't have one).

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

It requires the gstreamer-plugins-ugly package to allow the audio/video segments to display (it needs the libgstmpeg*.so files from that package). Audio is delayed if using the ESD sound drivers (EsounD Driver). It syncs fine though if you pick another sound driver, such as PulseAudio or JACK using winecfg. I tested "Fluenz Italian 1", but it uses the same engine for each of the different languages and levels available (so this should be applicable to any of the "Fluenz" products). I believe only the actual "versions" (e.g. f2) will require separate testing/listing. Note, there is an updater available for download that patches/fixes some things (I think it's considered "version f2.5"), but I was unable to test that in wine as I was unable to use the "install to disk" option due to a lack of drive space on my laptop.