This post is partly inspired on Jake's excellent writeup about Pokémon. Actually, it's sort of the flip side - instead of talking about how outside knowledge can make you appreciate a game more, I'm going to cover how games can bring you outside knowledge.
So you've managed to reach basic proficiency in a language, and you want to get better. You also don't really live in an area where your target language is spoken. Reading books and watching foreign films are popular ways of expanding proficiency, but it turns out that quite a few highly regarded games come with built-in translations. Beyond Good and Evil, for instance, allows you to select English, Spanish, French, or Italian each time you play. Evil Genius is available in English, French, Spanish, and German. The original Command & Conquer has a fan made patch which not only expands the resolution to 1024x768 but allows you to select English, French, Spanish, or German as the installed language (plus, it's free!) Stalker and its sequel feature Russian writing and dialogue from all the ambient characters, though all the plot and game dialogue is in English. It would be unacceptable for me to leave out X-Com: UFO and X-Com: Terror from the Deep, classics which are playable in English, French, and German (TFTD also allows Spanish.) Finally, Valve and shows off an overlooked advantage of Steam by allowing you to download any Steam game in any language it was released in. Half-Life 2 has English, French, Spanish, German, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Portugese, and Italian. Left 4 Dead even allows you to switch languages on the fly.
While there are translations available for almost every game out there that sees an international release, the previously mentioned titles have it built right in (and are usually much higher quality.) I managed to get my hands on a copy of Rouge Alert II, for instance. Good times.
In my experience, videogames are actually superior to other forms of media for learning languages. First, there's a lot of repetition involved in a game. In X-Com, every time one of your soldiers fires a gun, you have to click on the icon and be presented with the options "Aimed, Snapshot, Auto, Throw." Over the course of the game, you will see those words hundreds of times. Same instance with C&C, where your units say little confirmation messages when you click on them, give them orders, etc. Memorizing words requires repetition, and most games are all about repeating tasks over and over again.
Second, animated games, especially those with in-engine cutscenes, don't suffer from dubbing issues. Beyond Good & Evil, for instance, doesn't match lip movement to dialogue that well in any language, but it doesn't matter, because we're not pulling all the insane detail out of the low-poly models that we normally do out of a real-life, nuanced, human face.
Third, the vocabulary and speech you are exposed to in a game is specialized towards your interest area. If you like science fiction things, and play alot of games in a science fiction setting, you're going to be picking up sci-fi vocab, which you probably won't find in a traditional textbook. More importantly, you're hearing it in context, something you can't get out of a dictionary. Also, since you're interested in the subject area, you're more likely to absorb it and use it.
Finally, Valve wins again with the Source engine - not only can you turn on closed captioning (which is incredibly thorough - it was designed to allow deaf players to enjoy the game - but the Source Engine's lip-syncing capabilities are pretty damn impressive.
Of course, the best games to play would be those produced by and for your target language/culture. Jake's lucky in this regard, as he is a fan of JRPG's, which are (obviously) written in Japanese first for a Japanese audience and then translated, so the Japanese versions contain all the subtlety and cultural identity that tends to be lost in translation. I'm a bit out of luck, since the Arab gaming is pretty much nonexistent, as are Arabic translations of games.
Best of all, every game mentioned in this writeup is of outstanding quality, so even if you don't understand exactly what's going on, you're still having a blast. So if you're serious about learning a language, turn some of that down time into study time by playing an awesome game in a foreign language.
Cool Thing Of The Week: Jade Speaks French (and Spanish and Italian)
This post is partly inspired on Jake's excellent writeup about Pokémon. Actually, it's sort of the flip side - instead of talking about how outside knowledge can make you appreciate a game more, I'm going to cover how games can bring you outside knowledge.
So you've managed to reach basic proficiency in a language, and you want to get better. You also don't really live in an area where your target language is spoken. Reading books and watching foreign films are popular ways of expanding proficiency, but it turns out that quite a few highly regarded games come with built-in translations. Beyond Good and Evil, for instance, allows you to select English, Spanish, French, or Italian each time you play. Evil Genius is available in English, French, Spanish, and German. The original Command & Conquer has a fan made patch which not only expands the resolution to 1024x768 but allows you to select English, French, Spanish, or German as the installed language (plus, it's free!) Stalker and its sequel feature Russian writing and dialogue from all the ambient characters, though all the plot and game dialogue is in English. It would be unacceptable for me to leave out X-Com: UFO and X-Com: Terror from the Deep, classics which are playable in English, French, and German (TFTD also allows Spanish.) Finally, Valve and shows off an overlooked advantage of Steam by allowing you to download any Steam game in any language it was released in. Half-Life 2 has English, French, Spanish, German, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Portugese, and Italian. Left 4 Dead even allows you to switch languages on the fly.
While there are translations available for almost every game out there that sees an international release, the previously mentioned titles have it built right in (and are usually much higher quality.) I managed to get my hands on a copy of Rouge Alert II, for instance. Good times.
In my experience, videogames are actually superior to other forms of media for learning languages. First, there's a lot of repetition involved in a game. In X-Com, every time one of your soldiers fires a gun, you have to click on the icon and be presented with the options "Aimed, Snapshot, Auto, Throw." Over the course of the game, you will see those words hundreds of times. Same instance with C&C, where your units say little confirmation messages when you click on them, give them orders, etc. Memorizing words requires repetition, and most games are all about repeating tasks over and over again.
Second, animated games, especially those with in-engine cutscenes, don't suffer from dubbing issues. Beyond Good & Evil, for instance, doesn't match lip movement to dialogue that well in any language, but it doesn't matter, because we're not pulling all the insane detail out of the low-poly models that we normally do out of a real-life, nuanced, human face.
Third, the vocabulary and speech you are exposed to in a game is specialized towards your interest area. If you like science fiction things, and play alot of games in a science fiction setting, you're going to be picking up sci-fi vocab, which you probably won't find in a traditional textbook. More importantly, you're hearing it in context, something you can't get out of a dictionary. Also, since you're interested in the subject area, you're more likely to absorb it and use it.
Finally, Valve wins again with the Source engine - not only can you turn on closed captioning (which is incredibly thorough - it was designed to allow deaf players to enjoy the game - but the Source Engine's lip-syncing capabilities are pretty damn impressive.
Of course, the best games to play would be those produced by and for your target language/culture. Jake's lucky in this regard, as he is a fan of JRPG's, which are (obviously) written in Japanese first for a Japanese audience and then translated, so the Japanese versions contain all the subtlety and cultural identity that tends to be lost in translation. I'm a bit out of luck, since the Arab gaming is pretty much nonexistent, as are Arabic translations of games.
Best of all, every game mentioned in this writeup is of outstanding quality, so even if you don't understand exactly what's going on, you're still having a blast. So if you're serious about learning a language, turn some of that down time into study time by playing an awesome game in a foreign language.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Playing JRPGs is a great way to practice Japanese, especially grammar, but surprisingly not vocabulary or reading. This is pretty much because JRPGs have a lot of made-up words. So all the vocab is completely game-specific, since it literally can't be used in any situation. Plus, all the made-up words are spelled phonetically, so you can't practice reading Kanji either. That said, you do get some really specific vocab words, such as "adventure," occasionally. Plus, this means they're great for people like me who aren't really good at reading kanji, or for people like one of my friends, who is so good at reading kanji that he wants to practice other elements of Japanese instead. And the other good thing is that you have as much time as you want to look up new kanji in a dictionary, and when there's spoken tracks involved you get practice listening too. Basically, I've played Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles in Japanese, and my friend has done the same with Pokemon Yellow, and they've both been really helpful.
Jake
July 25, 2009 at 2:41 AMI played X-Com in French for a year or so before college, just for kicks. Since that game is X-Files themed, most of the vocabulary is '90s conspiracy theory-esque. Real words, just without much application in day-to-day usage.
Then my first year of college I had that research project (for Salman) that involved going through France's declassified UFO sightings, and all of the sudden all that seemingly useless vocab became incredibly useful.
So I suppose it varies by genre - fantasy would probably be the least helpful, a simulator the most. Still, any game with dialogue will have most of the words that people commonly use in speaking.
Plus, it also makes those long-winded JRPG angst-o-logues useful! Who knew?
Bobbicus
July 25, 2009 at 10:41 AMWhen Starfox first came out I went to blockbuster to rent it - and the only version they had was the Japanese one. I played the shit out of it. Then a few weeks later, I went to visit my cousin, who had bought the American version.
To this day, the only thing I can say in Japanese is, "You've got a bogey on your tail!"
BackDoorAngel
July 25, 2009 at 12:01 PMAfter spending time in Japan, I can honestly say, that's all you need to know.
Jake
July 26, 2009 at 1:26 PM