Les Trois Petits Cochons (Chocolapps)

Les Trois Petits Cochons, par Chocolapps, $3.99

One thing I liked about his app right away is that with your purchase, you get the book in seven different languages.

To find the book in different languages, you need to click the globe tab on the top of the book.  You also want to make sure that the animation feature is on (the middle tab, the left film should have a red circle around it). On the third tab, make sure that the knapsack is blue (not grey). This turns the special features on. Touch "Start" to start the story.

I really like how the words are highlighted as the story is read out loud. I also like how the pictures are animated, kind of like a cartoon-movie-within-a-book (can't tell in these screenshots, though). Note: You need to click on the lock at the top of the page to allow you to freely turn the pages. To pause the story, you need to click on the arrow on the bottom left hand corner (it is on "Pause" in the above image).

Once you hit the "Pause" button as in above, you see some tabs on the bottom right of the book. These are very cool. Here is the "Silent letters" option:

It's a bit hard to see but the silent letters are in grey. Here is the syllables option:

Notice how the "liaisons" are marked: cool! If you click on the "Explain to me" tab, words will appear underlined. If you click on them, you get an explanation of what the words mean in French:

This feature would be so much better if it provided a translation in English!
The "Show me" tab shows images to go with the words, which I really like:

(Note: If you want to fast forward to a different page, click on the house icon on the bottom of each page.)

I noted that the story is written in the past tense, using l'imparfait et le passé simple which are tenses some beginner French students may not be familiar with. However, the images and animations make the story very understandable. This would have been a 5-star app for me if there were some interactive exercises for users to practice the French words they learned in the book.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this app and I highly recommend it. I suspect that all apps produced by Chocolapps are of a similar high quality.

Below is a short video clip of this app in action:

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars.