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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Learning Russian just to save money on videogames is a pretty bad strategy when you account for opportunity costs - though I accept people sometimes find great amounts of motivation in silly things.

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Another, somewhat depressing, way of looking at it is that we all could have learned half a dozen languages in the time we spend browsing and posting to no real end on forums and various other media such as this. And e.g. learning Russian would make you feel good at the end of it. Whereas when you look back at the years of social media (which, again I would include sites such as this) it all seems like quite a tremendous waste of time. Yeah, we're totally changing the world by expressing and sharing our views, values, and opinions. /s

I read HN for the articles.

Well, it has the added benefit of "still knowing the language" after you finish the game.

That's why I said just. The "knowing the language" part can be leveraged in other ways for great benefit, both spiritual and financial.

It's how I mostly learned English! Tho local versions often being censored [0] was a major motivating factor for that.

There are a couple of Russian games out there with supposedly very good Russian VO, like the Stalker or Metro series.

[0] http://www.dorkly.com/post/80945/germany-censorship

New startup idea: learn foreign languages by playing pirated copies of foreign language games.

Would you guess how I learned English?

(Well, OK, the copies of Fallout and StarCraft I had were both legit.)

You joke, but there are thousands of thousands people learn language this way.

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