Comment by thenomad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thenomad | Hacker News Reader

Well, here's an idea for Skyrim: languages.

It's actually very simple: translate all the voice acting into your language of choice - let's say Norwegian. (Probably dumb the vocabulary down a bit.) Now add subtitles.

You're done. Go play the game. You'll absorb the language as you play, and because (unlike a film) you'll hear the same phrases multiple times, it'll actually sink in to a useful extent. I've only played about 20 hours of Skyrim so far, but I'm pretty sure if I was playing the subtitled version I'd already be able to say "Are you looking to defend yourself, or do some damage?" in Norwegian.

(Of course, I'd still have to add modern language to my knowledge after 200 hours, but hey, it's easier than learning the entire grammatical structure and all verbs.)

For a much more effective but much more offputting version - don't have subtitles. Have a few characters who can speak a bit of English, but have most of them only talk in Norwegian. You'll need to customise the dialogue a fair bit too so that the player doesn't miss important bits (essentially, have the NPCs periodically stop and say "WTF? Are you stupid? THERE'S THE GODDAMN DRAGON!"), and probably have the usual range of dialogue options - in Norwegian - plus a standard "I'm sorry, I don't speak Nord" which will get you all the really essential stuff.

That would be very, very hard to play - although surprisingly immersive if you're playing a non-Nord character, particularly if the other non-Nords were the characters who were likely to speak your language - but would definitely teach you the language.

This is already happening, though unintentionally and in the other direction. A recent study found a correlation between time spent playing computer and console games and good English grades among Finnish high school kids. The effect is surprisingly large: the grades of students who play more than 15 hours a week are on average 1.5 points higher on a six-point scale than those of students who don't play at all.

On an anecdotal level, I can attest that some of the first English words my brothers learned were "load" and "save", for obvious reasons.

http://yle.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/2011/11/pojat_kiilaavat_tyttoj...

Alelo deveoped a multiplayer online language learning role-playing game (Mission to Senegal) that uses speech recognition for conversations with NPCs. There's no combat, but there are skills, intrigue, leveling-up, exploration, etc. Practicing your language skills through interactions with NPCs is a big component of gaining levels. Unity 3D was used and the game will be demonstrated at I/ITSEC later this month.

It's not an open world, but it's not entirely linear - the game is a 4-5 hour story-driven role-playing game in an immersive world designed to help teach French and the culture of Senegal. The game is intergrated with an online and social curriculum to learn French and is a supplement to the online course, not a complete replacement.

Mission to Senegal isn't Skyrim by any means. =) But it is fun and it does utilize gameplay.

Its actual effectiveness in helping players learning French is still being evaluated - the game is part of a research project - the Integrated System for Language Education and Training (ISLET) funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and performed by the Academic Consortium for Global Education (ACGE).

ISLET is being used in an active study with U.S. Navy and Marines to assess how they learn through the system. A goal of the research project was to assess learner behavior and how the game component might impact the learning process and motivation.

A brief article about the study's announcement is here: http://www.navy.mil/search/display.asp?story_id=60581

This approach might be very useful once you've done some classroom work to give you a running start. But seriously, without knowing any of grammar, word order, pronunciation rules, verb conjugation or vocabulary, you simply cannot learn a language this way.

Why not? I've learned several languages to varying degrees as an adult, and only had classroom instruction for three of them. I haven't used this method, but I have gotten a great deal out of Chinese video games and I do know a Finnish girl who has learned Japanese to a functional level almost entirely through watching TV. She did some self study on the writing, but nothing beyond what can be (and in fact is!) done in some children's edu games in Japan.

Similarly, I have multiple friends who have learned Cantonese with no classroom time at all.

Well, there's a bunch of mitigating circumstances there. You mentioned classroom instruction for yourself. Many languages are similar so you could have picked up one language quite easily because of its similarity to one you knew already. You mentioned self study. A child (if that's what you mean by "girl") is obviously going to pick up new languages faster than an adult. A children's education game is obviously going to use slower, clearer, simpler language specifically for the purposes of teaching the child. And without more information, for all I know your Cantonese-speaking friends are actually Chinese.

The main reason why I maintain that you do need some classroom time or tutoring or book-learning is that we are adults now.

>A child (if that's what you mean by "girl")

I think she got into anime in high school. It was definitely well after the critical period for language learning (which btw, many linguists believe is only a critical period for learning a first language).

>for all I know your Cantonese-speaking friends are actually Chinese

None of the Cantonese learners I mentioned were Chinese nationals (though 2 are ethnically Chinese). Even if they were Chinese nationals, it's still far from easy. Cantonese is more different from Mandarin than romance languages are from each other in terms of mutual intelligibility.

My own study history has been French classes with little effect in high school, Japanese classes with much better results in college, Spanish through immersion with mediocre results, many years of living in a bilingual Mandarin environment as well as some classes, and more recently, a bit of Taiwanese, Cantonese and Swedish almost entirely via media until learning enough to try some of it out on people. Taiwanese and Cantonese both have features that are totally alien to me, despite have some distant relationship to Mandarin via classical Chinese. Swedish is totally out there.

I'm 100% sure you can learn languages to a fluent level as an adult through large amounts of exposure to the target language. I've seen it first hand many times and I've essentially abandoned classes for any reason other than visas in foreign countries. That said, reading is great! It's probably the fastest way to build up your vocabulary, even in your native language. After getting enough listening input to have some handle on phonics, I'm all for reading as much as possible. Actually I think not doing that is why my Mandarin progressed fairly slowly until I got into... some video games!

Back to the topic of the article, I would be amongst the first in line to by a Skyrim-style game for learning Swedish or Korean or any other language I want to learn! Anything that's both a source of L2 input and fun is gold.

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