Learning Languages While Playing Games

In a month and a half I'll be going to Paris for a week thanks to a trip that my wife won at last year's company Christmas party, and we'll be staying in a hotel that's apparently almost in the shadow of Notre Dame. As a former graduate student in European history with about three years of dedicated French under my belt (not to mention a partly Cajun background), I would seem like the perfect person to take along on this trip. I aced the University of Chicago's French qualification exam for Ph.D. studies, and I have read entire books in French, such as Voltaire's Candide.

Granted, I'm out of practice since I've been out of school for about three years, but what worries me is that my knowledge of French has always been textual--that is, I've had virtually zero spoken immersion. And for me, spoken French often sounds like people are talking with their mouths full of éclairs. How, I asked myself, can I fix this?

Surprisingly, I hoped the answer could come from gaming, and from one of my favorite games at that. There's a little-known option in Assassin's Creed II to play the game with the spoken dialogue completely in French, Spanish, or Italian (save for the splashes of Italian that you get in the English version as well). Since I'm currently just running down the last feathers I need for my platinum trophy, I figured I'd switch it over for French in the process as an attempt at immersion since I knew that the guards and town criers were always speaking.

Alas, at first all this did was prove how far I had to go. Listening to the guards shouting around me, I could barely make out a word. Occasionally I heard expressions and words like "avec vous," "lâche," "échapper," or "soigner," but by and large I realized that although my French vocabulary might technically be sizable, I have a long way to go before I can understand the language in quickly spoken sentences. Years of articles and books had not prepared me for this. (Ironically, having spent two months in Italy, I can understand most of the Italian rather easily.)

Fortunately, all those years of French aren't completely down the drain: I found that by restarting the game I could mostly understand the first conversations between Lucy, Shaun, Desmond, and the rest of the Scooby gang, probably because these are spoken using normal rhythms and without the noises of a large and crowded environment. This was doubly helped by the English subtitles, as it helped me know what I was hearing. In addition, it helped me learn (or relearn) idiomatic expressions. I may decide to replay the game using only the French dialogue before heading off my our trip, or play the first one in French if the option's available.

Unfortunately, this method of immersion in another language through video games requires an already deep knowledge of a certain language's vocabulary. In short, you can only use this method to brush up what you already know. The D.N.A. sequences, however, are quite useful forreviewing or repeating what the characters have said without restarting the game.

It's a small thing, and I know the inclusion of other spoken languages is really an attempt to make this game more easily accessible to our Canadian and Mexican friends (along with the Italian aficionados), but there are a lot of possibilities here for providing immersion in commonly spoken world languages for we Americans who have few opportunities to be among entire cultures who speak a certain language. It is, in other words, a rare opportunity to be genuinely entertained and learn in the process. Best of all, this can merely be an option and not something that's forced on the player as it is in so many games that seek to educate the player. (Assassin's Creed II excels intentionally in this regard in other areas as well, which I plan to discuss in a future post.)

Off the top of my head, I can think of few other games that provide this feature, but I'd like to know: has anyone else here ever tried something similar? At the very least, are there other modern games that can be played in a different language (obviously without localization)? 

In a month and a half I'll be going to Paris for a week thanks to a trip that my wife won at last year's company Christmas party, and we'll be staying in a hotel that's apparently almost in the shadow of Notre Dame. As a former graduate student in European history with about three years of dedicated French under my belt (not to mention a partly Cajun background), I would seem like the perfect person to take along on this trip. I aced the University of Chicago's French qualification exam for Ph.D. studies, and I have read entire books in French, such as Voltaire's Candide.

Granted, I'm out of practice since I've been out of school for about three years, but what worries me is that my knowledge of French has always been textual--that is, I've had virtually zero spoken immersion. And for me, spoken French often sounds like people are talking with their mouths full of éclairs. How, I asked myself, can I fix this?

Surprisingly, I hoped the answer could come from gaming, and from one of my favorite games at that. There's a little-known option in Assassin's Creed II to play the game with the spoken dialogue completely in French, Spanish, or Italian (save for the splashes of Italian that you get in the English version as well). Since I'm currently just running down the last feathers I need for my platinum trophy, I figured I'd switch it over for French in the process as an attempt at immersion since I knew that the guards and town criers were always speaking.

Alas, at first all this did was prove how far I had to go. Listening to the guards shouting around me, I could barely make out a word. Occasionally I heard expressions and words like "avec vous," "lâche," "échapper," or "soigner," but by and large I realized that although my French vocabulary might technically be sizable, I have a long way to go before I can understand the language in quickly spoken sentences. Years of articles and books had not prepared me for this. (Ironically, having spent two months in Italy, I can understand most of the Italian rather easily.)

Fortunately, all those years of French aren't completely down the drain: I found that by restarting the game I could mostly understand the first conversations between Lucy, Shaun, Desmond, and the rest of the Scooby gang, probably because these are spoken using normal rhythms and without the noises of a large and crowded environment. This was doubly helped by the English subtitles, as it helped me know what I was hearing. In addition, it helped me learn (or relearn) idiomatic expressions. I may decide to replay the game using only the French dialogue before heading off my our trip, or play the first one in French if the option's available.

Unfortunately, this method of immersion in another language through video games requires an already deep knowledge of a certain language's vocabulary. In short, you can only use this method to brush up what you already know. The D.N.A. sequences, however, are quite useful forreviewing or repeating what the characters have said without restarting the game.

It's a small thing, and I know the inclusion of other spoken languages is really an attempt to make this game more easily accessible to our Canadian and Mexican friends (along with the Italian aficionados), but there are a lot of possibilities here for providing immersion in commonly spoken world languages for we Americans who have few opportunities to be among entire cultures who speak a certain language. It is, in other words, a rare opportunity to be genuinely entertained and learn in the process. Best of all, this can merely be an option and not something that's forced on the player as it is in so many games that seek to educate the player. (Assassin's Creed II excels intentionally in this regard in other areas as well, which I plan to discuss in a future post.)

Off the top of my head, I can think of few other games that provide this feature, but I'd like to know: has anyone else here ever tried something similar? At the very least, are there other modern games that can be played in a different language (obviously without localization)? 

I actually tried the exact same thing when I was playing AC2. Although I have only ever taken a couple of years of high school French, so it wasn't quite the same. I was hardly able to understand anything.
 
That's awesome you get to go to Paris. Have a great trip.

I, like all good Ontario citizens do in highschool, dropped French after grade 9. It's amazing how much French you can pick up on by just being around people who speak the language though.
 
Anyway, thanks for the interesting read! :)

" @JJWeatherman: Sorry for the late response. I guess I missed it!    As for just a couple of years of French, even so--it's amazing how much disconnect there is between what we learn in the classrooms and what the spoken language is actually like. I don't know whether this says something about our education system, or--more likely--how necessary immersion truly is for understanding the language. I noticed that spoken contractions (like toute de suite) are sometimes lost on me if I've never heard them before.  And thanks for the wishes for the trip. "

One thing you should do is get some online gaming friends from France and speak with them while you play.

The most important thing is not to be shy of your accent. Remember, accent is not a defect. In Latin accentus meant "song added to speech".

I remember playing Space Quest 6 with a dictionary when I was 8 or 9 and had very limited knowledge of the English language. 
Two or three years later I worked my way through English QBasic tutorials and help files. 
 
But yeah, since English is not my native language, learning it and being exposed to it is an essential part of gaming (and movies) for me - always has been.