At a time so long ago that long distance calls were expensive, I was in Europe, my parents were in America, and we had to coordinate our plans. At some point while doing so it occurred to me that this was a problem that I had spent many hours learning to deal with.
I think games like World of Warcraft already work as language-learning tools, but the language they teach is English and it's through full immersion instead of gradually. I think that that type of exposure, through games and other media, is the primary way people in non-dubbing countries learn English – at least I feel it was for me, with US sitcoms as the main teacher. So I think that for the purpose of learning a language, it might be better to simply give kids access to existing games (et cetera) in the target language and let them dive in at the deep end.
Friend of mine from Romania says all the non-elite there learned English by watching Dallas and Dynasty, which for some reason the authorities thought were okay.
As a long time on again off again WoW addict, I love the language immersion idea. It could probably be implemented as a mod; the full UI and all the text in quests and etc are accessible to addons such as https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/immersion (which completely replaces the default quest/dialog frames). Someone would have to come up with some sort of algorithm or database of lines to translate to French or whichever other language; probably start with a "guided leveling experience" where you go through specific zones which have good questlines that the addon authors have tailored for the immersive language experience (off the cuff as a Horde main: a lot of the Cataclysm revamped zone-wide storylines would be excellent - Mulgore > Silverpine > Stonetalon > Val'Sharah > etc. For Alliance, the Gilneas starting zone would work well, and you could even make the narrative thrust of the zone, which is very much about a way of life changing as you move through it, match up with the slowly shifting language.)
The only thing you can't do is replace voice acting; Blizzard has shut down mods in the past that attempted to fully voice every questline in the game. So on a WoW substrate, it would have to be text-only immersion learning, but that could be very useful regardless.
A similar concept comes to mind: has nobody ever built a visual novel that starts off in English and shifts slowly into Japanese a bit at a time in order to teach the player some of the language?
Ha! I started playing bridge at age 7, and found it was good when I started taking symbolic logic and set theory courses in college.
And I'll always remember when a long-time contract bridge partner of mine pulled off a very tricky contract and one of the opponents said something like, "Beautifully played. I thought we had you down 2 at least. You read that incredibly well." My partner pointed at me and said, "Blame him. He's always putting me in contracts where I'm one trick short. I've had to learn to play that way because I can't get him to quit doing it."
Considering a logical way to get to where I wanted to be on a proof from where I started I think. I loved symbolic logic because I enjoyed trying to find the shortest true proof. With set theory I think it was the progressive nature considering possibilities.
A cool addition would be adding the ability to reply to a game via voice (VUI). This would help even further by increasing the last and most difficult part of learning a language - speaking. This wouldn’t be a trivial task nor would implementing a language learning game. The mod idea would make things a bit easier. Using the new LLM in AI would probably be a great way to do this since there a tools for text to speech and could more easily map the English to “Language X”.
This idea is very good. The question is how to develop and acquire appropriate resources to implement it. 🤔
It would be good if there were more mutual-advantage games instead of defeating the other. But what would be even better is something that helped us understand and empathize with each other.
"One reason I wanted Hansa was to promote the idea of mutual advantage over conquest, market over hierarchy. "
There are some games where players can form a team to fight against an NPC. I guess that's the closest we can get to a non-zero sum game. My impression is that most games are zero-sum games and players can get really intense (and sometimes toxic) about it. That makes me wonder if some part of our brains are hard-wired for zero-sum games.
Maybe not zero-sum, but I would say competition. We see that resources are (or may become) scarce, and take steps to secure our position. That's how life has been, and to a lesser extent still is.
Cooperative games still make sense as emulating real life as well, since we typically fight wars and such cooperatively with our tribe or nation.
I think games like World of Warcraft already work as language-learning tools, but the language they teach is English and it's through full immersion instead of gradually. I think that that type of exposure, through games and other media, is the primary way people in non-dubbing countries learn English – at least I feel it was for me, with US sitcoms as the main teacher. So I think that for the purpose of learning a language, it might be better to simply give kids access to existing games (et cetera) in the target language and let them dive in at the deep end.
Friend of mine from Romania says all the non-elite there learned English by watching Dallas and Dynasty, which for some reason the authorities thought were okay.
As a long time on again off again WoW addict, I love the language immersion idea. It could probably be implemented as a mod; the full UI and all the text in quests and etc are accessible to addons such as https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/immersion (which completely replaces the default quest/dialog frames). Someone would have to come up with some sort of algorithm or database of lines to translate to French or whichever other language; probably start with a "guided leveling experience" where you go through specific zones which have good questlines that the addon authors have tailored for the immersive language experience (off the cuff as a Horde main: a lot of the Cataclysm revamped zone-wide storylines would be excellent - Mulgore > Silverpine > Stonetalon > Val'Sharah > etc. For Alliance, the Gilneas starting zone would work well, and you could even make the narrative thrust of the zone, which is very much about a way of life changing as you move through it, match up with the slowly shifting language.)
The only thing you can't do is replace voice acting; Blizzard has shut down mods in the past that attempted to fully voice every questline in the game. So on a WoW substrate, it would have to be text-only immersion learning, but that could be very useful regardless.
A similar concept comes to mind: has nobody ever built a visual novel that starts off in English and shifts slowly into Japanese a bit at a time in order to teach the player some of the language?
Interesting. Thanks.
It would still be a lot of work.
This is an obligatory mention of Paradox Interactive's Victoria 2 (haven't checked 3) as a good econ simulation game.
Ha! I started playing bridge at age 7, and found it was good when I started taking symbolic logic and set theory courses in college.
And I'll always remember when a long-time contract bridge partner of mine pulled off a very tricky contract and one of the opponents said something like, "Beautifully played. I thought we had you down 2 at least. You read that incredibly well." My partner pointed at me and said, "Blame him. He's always putting me in contracts where I'm one trick short. I've had to learn to play that way because I can't get him to quit doing it."
Why symbolic logic and set theory?
Considering a logical way to get to where I wanted to be on a proof from where I started I think. I loved symbolic logic because I enjoyed trying to find the shortest true proof. With set theory I think it was the progressive nature considering possibilities.
A cool addition would be adding the ability to reply to a game via voice (VUI). This would help even further by increasing the last and most difficult part of learning a language - speaking. This wouldn’t be a trivial task nor would implementing a language learning game. The mod idea would make things a bit easier. Using the new LLM in AI would probably be a great way to do this since there a tools for text to speech and could more easily map the English to “Language X”.
This idea is very good. The question is how to develop and acquire appropriate resources to implement it. 🤔
It would be good if there were more mutual-advantage games instead of defeating the other. But what would be even better is something that helped us understand and empathize with each other.
"One reason I wanted Hansa was to promote the idea of mutual advantage over conquest, market over hierarchy. "
There are some games where players can form a team to fight against an NPC. I guess that's the closest we can get to a non-zero sum game. My impression is that most games are zero-sum games and players can get really intense (and sometimes toxic) about it. That makes me wonder if some part of our brains are hard-wired for zero-sum games.
Maybe not zero-sum, but I would say competition. We see that resources are (or may become) scarce, and take steps to secure our position. That's how life has been, and to a lesser extent still is.
Cooperative games still make sense as emulating real life as well, since we typically fight wars and such cooperatively with our tribe or nation.