Couple Wants to Help Watertown Residents Learn a Foreign Language

A Watertown couple has launched an online program to help people learn a foreign language and they want to share it with town residents.

Peter and Ulrike Rettig have desks facing each other in the second floor of their Watertown home, overlooking the Oakley Country Club. That is where they work on GamesforLanguage.com, a website where people can learn French, Spanish, German or Italian.

With a variety of language-learning programs from which people can choose the Rettigs wanted to set themselves apart. They focused on fun and authenticity.

Each of the 36 lessons includes games like Word Invader – similar to Space Invaders where you must use your ship to shoot to right word in the phrase. Others include the memory game, where one card is in English and the other in the foreign language.

The lessons include a story of a man traveling overseas. The stories and lessons were developed with the help of native speakers of the four languages. The Rettigs both grew up in German-speaking nations and they found people who are native speakers the other three languages to assist them.

“Rather than learning words or phrases out of context you have it in the context of a story, a travel story about a man who travels to the four countries,” said Peter, who was a consultant Bristol Group Health Care Consulting.

The couple wants to teach people language that is useful for travelers, said Ulrike, who worked for 20 years with Pimsleur Language Programs and also taught at Harvard and Vasser.

“The language that we are teaching is they language would encounter when go to another country,” Ulrike said.

The business began after both Peter and Ulrike had retired. It is a family under taking, with their son Pascal Rettig writing the software behind the site and his wife Martha does the graphic design.

The Rettigs want to give back to the town they have lived in since 1977 by offering free access to GamesforLanguage.com to any Watertown resident who sign up for the program during the month of March. The program normally costs $29.95 per language.

The Rettigs encourage people to make the program a part of their daily routine.

“We want people to do it every day," Peter said. "One of the keys to leaning a language is you need to do it regularly.”