SharD woke me up to an idea this morning that I've never properly considered, and it's a real elephant in the room for me (a graduate in French & Italian): how useful will MMOs and online games in general be for people wanting to learn languages? He rightly points out that in games like Guild Wars (no shards!), the mix of players in Europe means a babble of languages present at any moment in time .. maybe 20+, who knows?
(My copy arrived yesterday. w00t!)
World of Warcraft has servers for language based play, so French, German, English, etc. The English servers have a large Scandinavian population (who are always mightily entertained at my extensive repertoire of rude Swedish words) and the odd smattering of adventurous Italians. I used to play a lot of Capture The Flag Q3 with the French, partially because I speak French, partially because I like the French and partially because French leetspeak is hilarious. Also, their CTF style was elegant as hell. Seeing French - usually very precise in its spelling and accents - being used in sms-style shorthand ("keski di ca? Kel con" etc) is an eyeopener. Go check out ctfpickup.fr on Quakenet and you'll see what I mean.
Clans and guilds were and still are often multilingual - DC.Danold (Demonic Core, my ole Quake clan) was French, and my WoW guild is half Dutch. Hanging out online with Europeans will teach you languages as fast as any exchange visit, at least in the written language. With voicecomms added - how better to listen and learn?
Just watch your spelling: leetspeak will not get you any certificates, unfortunately.
I actually picked up a lot of French whilst playing online games.
I moved to Paris in '97, not speaking a word of French. Despite the best efforts of many people around me to educate me in the basics of la langue de l'amour , it was mostly playing Half Life and Quake all day against exclusively French players that helped me get to grips with the subtleties of cursing.
As everyone knows, the first thing anyone ever learns in a language is how to swear. The rest is just finesse :)
I still play HL2DM regularly against some old French friends, and the style of play is definitely different, especially compared to the style of American players.
Talking French to other players in Teamspeak is also great fun. If you thought the Merilvingian in the Matrix enjoyed swearing in French, I suggest you eavesdrop on a French team losing a CS game...
Posted by: Seb | May 13, 2005 at 10:44
As another take-away, this multi-language consideration has also made the ability to draw paths and "ping" the shared party mini-map a very useful communication tool!
Posted by: SharD | May 13, 2005 at 11:33
I used to work with a guy on a mod team who was German and had picked up English largely via IRC chats and websites. His wasn't the best English, but it sure was better than my German.
Posted by: Josh | May 13, 2005 at 13:41
Even in Habbo, about half of the players have visited another country's hotel.
And somewhat related... a lot of people got excited about the idea of using Skype to learn languages: http://education.guardian.co.uk/elearning/story/0,10577,1083575,00.html
Posted by: Foe | May 13, 2005 at 15:14
I've met so many foreign peeps who learned English through music, the net, movies and TV but hadn't heard about it in games until today. I shouldn't be surprised really. I think with most of these things though it mostly works one way - most other countries are subject to so much English, whereas we have very little exposure to foreign language outside the horribly rigid teaching structures of school.
Learning a foreign language playing WoW certainly beats learning past participles and so on at GCSE though. ;)
Posted by: Pete | May 13, 2005 at 20:57