Learning a language? Come share your progress here!

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Started by Legend, Dec 20, 2016, 06:31 AM

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Legend

Language Difficulty Ranking | Effective Language Learning

Dutch seems to be a fairly easy language.  

This is interesting:
Frisian languages - Wikipedia
It's also fun for me since this is my first second second language. Most dutch words are forms like English but the ones that aren't, well they tend to be close enough to spanish.

Language Difficulty Ranking | Effective Language Learning

There are tons of aspects to it, that really would need to be figured out.  

How to teach:
I could imagine some sort of classroom experience.  You have to go somewhere and get taught by a character.  
I could imagine language options in a menu.  Where you could go to the menu and be taught a lesson, and enable/disable grammar lessons.  
Or find books along the way, that you'd read as you go along that would unlock those things.  

I think the second option would probably be optimal for learning curve.  Let the player set the curve, but if they are too aggressive, they might get frustrated.

There's a few function decisions right there, and those don't cover how to handle the game switching over to another language. Vocabulary would also need a functional decision on how to be taken care of.  And those are completely disregarding the rest of the game.  

I just think there's a crazy amount of potential for a game like that.  So much of language software, I think it's very difficult for the average person to sit down for an hour even.  

What other medium do people sit down and consume for hours and hours at a time.  Plus there's no very little comparison for the amount of immersion you could pull off, without actually going to a certain place.  
It's fun to talk about this since I've had to do similar for VizionEck's language  :-X


With your skyrim example I think it'd work well with different cities speaking different languages. IE the closer you get to the capital city, the more common the new language is. Then have the game's quests align with this so that progression is always moving players closer and closer to the capital. Maybe have undercover missions where you're posing as people and if you can't respond correctly in their language, you're found out and forced into a fight. Also could have people talking in the language with you eavesdropping. If you understand what they said, it could lead you to a quest or save you from future danger.


Difficult, but at the same time there just feels like there's a crazy amount of potential there.
Games in general have a crazy amount of untapped potential and I'm shocked no one seems to be working on it. In the past I've posted about how great games can be for education by letting people learn through experience, but Life is Strange made me realise games can even reprogram the way we think.

After a long session of Life is Strange I had a very amusing feeling for about an hour where it still felt like I was mentally in the game. People asked me to do something for example and my brain jumped at the opportunity to increase my standing with them. I also made a joke that no one cared about and instinctively went to rewind time.

It's kinda like a few years ago when I played Sleeping Dogs. I remember driving after that game and for a few miles feeling a strong desire to drive in the left lane since that's how it worked in the game.

This video talks about the brain rewiring itself in general:




To some extent I think we experience things like this with all games, but imagine the potential here. It could be something simple like overwriting an addiction or it could be advanced inception like things that change our values as a person.