Mind your language

Chatting up a cute foreign student, looking for the bus station in some distant capital city, or finding yourself in a hostage situation with non-English speaking terrorists - most pocket gamers are more likely to have their PSP within reach than half a dozen language guides.

Hence the potential appeal of TalkMan, Sony's just-announced multilingual phrase book and language teacher.

Featuring Max, an endearing bird (we're assured) with a way with languages, TalkMan puts some 3,000 phrases at your twitchy fingertips in six languages: French, English, German, Spanish, Italian and, this being Sony, Japanese.

TalkMan comes with its own microphone, because unlike a phrase book, you (or your potential new friend) can speak those phrases into your PSP and TalkMan's Max will do his best to translate. You can also select phrases from drop-down menus and, to make things more manageable, you can tell your PSP where you are, choosing from one of 28 common locations (hotel foyer, nightclub and ski slope and so on) to home in on the most applicable words.

Max's translations are visible on-screen, so if you're feeling tongue-tied you could just point your PSP at your waiter or bar tender and hope they don't laugh. Alternatively, you could sweat it out before you fly with the two game modes designed to help you fine-tune your understanding and pronunciation of the foreign lingo.

Rounding off TalkMan are extras such as a voice memo recorder (so you can record those station directions), a multilingual unit converter and alarm mode, and a sort of audio scrap book called the Friend Map that enables you to store clips of speech from your international pals and store them via a map of the world.

TalkMan is due to out in Europe this May; Sony says it's already proved a big hit in Japan and Australia. If you're off to the World Cup, it might just be worth packing alongside your UMD of Pro Evolution Soccer! You'll find out in our review, ASAP. Or should we say, 'tout de suite'?