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)?