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Video Games in Other Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| jean-luc Senior Member France Joined 4959 days ago 100 posts - 150 votes  Speaks: French* Studies: German | Message 9 of 30 17 August 2011 at 2:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
It's  Edited by jean-luc on 17 August 2011 at 3:00pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6010 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 10 of 30 17 August 2011 at 3:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
Seconded. A good adventure -- particularly the point-and-click type -- has lots of dialogue*, and a lot of it is repeated. Your character will end up asking lots of people the same questions, so the words come up enough to learn them quite well. Also, adventure games tend to wait for you rather than making you do things quickly, so you often have time to stop and use a dictionary when needed. The one downside is that the cover doesn't always make it clear what's translated. I've got Lucasarts' The Dig dubbed and subtitled in Italian, but when I bought Sam and Max Hit The Road and Full Throttle marked with "completamente en castellano", it only had subtitles. I bought a recent game, A Vampyre Story, in France last year. I asked in the shop, and rather than saying he didn't know, the shop assistant said it was completely in French. Nope, subtitles only, again, and this game was from a German software house, too. So be careful when buying from Crimson Cow (specialists in adventure games). Pendulo Studios in Spain do their games in Spanish and English at least -- I'm not sure which other languages (if any) they dub to. I've got their Runaway series (hmmm... should finish that at some point) which is probably available as a triple-pack in Spain by now (when I got the first two, it was a double-pack, back in 2007). * NB: dialogue (or "dialog" in the US) is generally uncountable. "Dialogues" in plural is something I call "teacherese" -- it's something only used in the classroom. See also "texts" (teacherese, countable) vs "text" (English, uncountable). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5008 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 11 of 30 17 August 2011 at 4:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It's a great way to practice a language. I have learnt most of my writen English in a text game. It's not hard to find games in popular languages and it is not that hard to find games even in the less popular ones but you might need to buy the game abroad. Adventure and RPG games are the best. Age of Empires in French was fun for me but didn't bring me that much of language practice.
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| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6010 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 12 of 30 17 August 2011 at 8:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Maybe people here would be interested in joining open-source game translation teams?
Freeciv isn't very new, but it's available
Translations are done using gettext, which is fairly straightforward to learn and not overly technical. * English, Arabic, Catalan, Czech, Danish, German and Scottish Gaelic. Yeah, I know -- a very ecclectic selection. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5319 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 13 of 30 17 August 2011 at 10:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
Not according to the Oxford dictionary: dialogue a conversation between two or more people as a feature of a book, play, or film: the book consisted of a series of dialogues and not according to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English : di‧a‧logue also dialog American English [uncountable and countable] 1 a conversation in a book, play, or film: [American English] a boring movie full of bad dialog [British English] Students were asked to read simple dialogues out loud. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6010 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 14 of 30 18 August 2011 at 2:07am | IP Logged | |||||
Both of the quotes there fall into the same technical category as teacherese. Games certainly have "dialogue", not "dialogues". 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Dr. POW Groupie Canada Joined 4964 days ago 48 posts - 58 votes Studies: German, English* Studies: French | Message 15 of 30 18 August 2011 at 4:59am | IP Logged | |||||
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I downloaded Pokémon Emeraude, and I've started playing it already. Up until now, I've
been focusing mainly on verbs, prepositions, adverbs, and other grammar, but not very many nouns, so a lot of these are new to me. Also, I remember there being over 1000 NPCs in the game, meaning tons of different things to learn, and battling often means I get to practice numbers to the point where they come to mind immediately. (it always takes me 5 seconds to remember how to say 70, 80, 90, etc) I don't usually get bored of video games that have multiple ways of ending and progressing. I remember playing this 4 years ago, and I ended up playing the game 3 times with each starter pokémon. There's a lot I've learned just from the opening speech from the professor. I didn't know that "là" and "où" could be put next to each other, nor have I ever heard "croire savoir" or "faire cadeau" before. I also downloaded Pokémon Smaragd for German, but it freezes and doesn't work when I try and play it. I guess I'll have to find another rom, or an entirely different game so I don't end up playing the same thing twice. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4908 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 16 of 30 18 August 2011 at 3:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@Dr Pow:
Downloaded from where and for what system? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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