English A-Game

[jankows]

Is it possible to learn a language playing video games? What do you think?

[HikariLight]

There are some games that are outright designed to help someone learn a language.

[Pierce Dalton]

Sure, that's how I started learning English.

[O'knee]

try something with both subtitles and voice acting, should help you with knowing both the spelling and the pronunciation of the words, the elderscrolls (oblivion+skyrim) are my go to, but a more modern entry or modern setting (fallout nv+fallout 4) are also not a bad choice, though these are rpgs, so check for what games you might actually like that has subs and enough voice acting.

[Bee🐝]

Totally, a language is always easier to learn when the person is engaged. Many language programs fail because they rely on rote memorisation instead of active participation.

The old text parser Sierra games were a proper crash course in the English language and at some point reading the walkthrough became essential.

[sePL80]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/274980/Influent/

Another good way to learn or improve your English is by reading comics.

[Bee🐝]

sePL80님이 먼저 게시:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/274980/Influent/

Another good way to learn or improve your English is by reading comics.

I'll second this. Comics great way to get children especially interested in reading in general.

I learned loads from reading X-Men comics in the 90s; so wonderfully text-heavy. I also picked up an odd amount of random french words...thanks Gambit...

[Hammer Of Evil]

jankows님이 먼저 게시:

Is it possible to learn a language playing video games? What do you think?

yes. i often use this to practice french and german.

half my games that support it are set to french, the other half to german. and i try to translate the menus.

some rpg's that have language support will also change the names of the npc's and locations/items.

[peppermint hollows]

Absolutely. Just ask people online who speak English as a second language. Many of them learned a lot of their English from being online on forums and playing games that are only available in English or not translated to their language.

[cinedine]

Depends on what your native tongue is, really. If it's close enough, yeah. If it's entirely different, absolutely not, at least not without already having a grasp on basic grammar and a stock vocabulary.
Else you are running danger of sitting in the Chinese Room[en.wikipedia.org].

"Thank you, father" is not always the correct answer to "bless you". ;)

They are great to improve your language skill, however.
Do take care however that the game uses actual English. You probably don't want to learn with Dragon's Dogma or a game full of fantasy slang.

[Zefar]

jankows님이 먼저 게시:

Is it possible to learn a language playing video games? What do you think?

If you are learning English in school or by a third party course then yes it will help a bit.

But otherwise just trying to learn it only through games? That's gonna be hard.

You can just compare it to all of the kids who watch Anime in Japanese. These people will not be able to speak it but they will know a couple of words. Nothing wrong with that though. I know some Russian words because of the things I've heard in CSS and DOTA.

[Tsubame ⭐]

Just through video games alone no, especially the speaking aspect of it, unless the games are actually geared towards this, but like other media it is a great tool to greatly help you get used to the language.

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

Yes it is possible with some games, though the effectiveness depends on the game and also depends on the extent of your prior knowledge of English.

For example:
* Super Metroid is a poor choice because there's so little text.
* Unless there's an option for captions that I don't know about, Portal may be an okay choice if you're trying to practice to recognize speech without captions, but only just okay because it doesn't have much speech, and it'd be bad if you don't know much spoken English to begin with.
* Trails in the Sky has tons of text (and no voice), and might be good if you're already pretty fluent in reading English and want to get some ideas about grammar and usage, but might cause burnout if you need to look up the translation of one word every few lines.
* Games with both voice acting and on-screen text are probably useful for learning how words sound and relating them to their spellings, though still beware of accents affecting the pronunciations of words. Furthermore, acted voice lines are often spoken with much clearer enunciation than real-life speech, so imitating the style of talking in videogames could result in problems.

[sePL80]

jankows님이 먼저 게시:

Is it possible to learn a language playing video games? What do you think?

I think I have also seen you creating this thread in polish language so a very big recommendation would be the witcher games, where you can set the language of the voices and the language of the written words seperately.

I understand some polish, so I set my Witcher to polish spoken and english (or german) written.

Consuming media like games, movies and videoas in general is by no means a proper way to learn a language, but it can definetly support you in learning a language the traditional way.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/20900

[Pieshaman]

yes I already was 5 years ahead before I even got english at school thanks to games.

[TWPanda77]

Yes, I believe it can and does. I learnt a lot of words and pronunciations before English classes at school.