Skip to content

Tiny Death Star – Learn Chinese and Be a Geek, for Free

The opening for this post probably deserves some more epic music, something maybe like this?

Anyway, leave that on in the background as we go into the latest offering by the people behind Tiny Tower–Star Wars: Tiny Death Star! The best part: it’s also in Chinese! Set the OS’s language to Chinese and the game will automatically load the Chinese translation.

Please note–if you switch back to English, the game will also switch back to English as well. You need to keep your phone set on Chinese to play it in Chinese.

So let’s talk about 星際大戰:小小死星計畫!

Vocab

星際大戰 [xīng​ jì dà​ zhàn] Star Wars (literally ‘interstellar”星際 ‘great war’ 大戰 )

小小 [xiǎo​ xiǎo] very small (repeating the same character emphasizes it)

死星 [sǐ xīng​] Death Star (literally ‘dead/dead’ 死 ‘star’ 星)

計畫 [jì​ huà] project (can also mean ‘plan’ but in this context it’s more of a project)

This blog post from PlayPCEsor, a Taiwanese blogger who often writes about apps, programs, and other technology related bits, goes in depth into the game.You can check out that post by heading here.

One thing the author is quick to point out is the game has a “complete Chinese interface”:

完整 (wán​zhěng) : complete

中文 (Zhōng​wén) : Chinese

版 (bǎn) : version/edition

介面 (iè​miàn) : interface

The game does a great job pairing together Star Wars and Tiny Tower, so if you’re familiar with both you can check out the article and the game!

Mini Review

The game is good for a quick time waster on the bus or train, but as with all “freemium” games, it can get a bit boring as extensions to your Tiny Death Star increase in cost and the wait times for completing stocking items and building levels also get longer. That being said, it’s a great free game to play while practicing your Chinese! It’s available for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone.

2 thoughts on “Tiny Death Star – Learn Chinese and Be a Geek, for Free”

    1. Hi Dave!

      Sorry I should clarify that in the post (updated now), but you need to switch you phone’s language into Chinese otherwise the game will just default to English :/

Leave a Reply to DaveCancel reply