Nice Story! I learned japanese through playing games as well. I did some reading about how to pronounce japanese, and how to write kanji i don't know, and I was able to start learning very rapidly through replaying games from my childhood in Japanese, and it's a blast.
Reviews for "Videogames Taught Me English"
olbengc responds:
thanks!
Thats actually quite impressive, at least with english i could recognize the letters used (same alphabet), with japanese i could only see a bunch of symbols. Thats why i never understood how my friend could finish japanese rpgs.
Can i ask how old were you when u learned japanese?
Amazing story! It get close to home for me because I have a rather similar story, although mine also involves the internet halfway into learning English from video games.
I particularly remember playing RPGs like Chrono Cross on PS1 and trying to figure out what the characters were saying with my incredibly limited English vocabulary. And it was really great to slowly but surely build up to playing games without any problem understanding it.
I just hope that kind of learning experience is not gone in today's world where games in several languages are more common.
olbengc responds:
Thank you very much :)
Its hard to say but i hope that rather than disappear, that way of learning just transformed. Nowadays with the popularity of smartphones and with how easy it is to just talk to people across the world if someone wants to learn a new language they have an easier time now.
as the saying goes: where there's will there's a way
I don't speak any other languages but I found this interesting nonetheless, I kind of like the multilingual options they got in Europe for many games. Making that connection with anything is the hardest thing, "Eureka". :D
olbengc responds:
Glad you liked the video :)
Yeah, making a connection between something you like and something you have to do (or would like to do) might be hard, but if you manage to do it, things get sooo much easy and fun
Very nice!
Same story for me... I live in Italy, and when I was 7-8 years old, every month at the newsstand there was a new issue of "PC Subito", some sort of PC course. Together with it, there were floppy disks with free software. In particular, the only games were the shareware versions of Apogee's and Epic Megagames'... obviously in english. I started learning english that way: if I wanted to understand the plot of a game, I had to grab a dictionary and start translating by myself. Glad I'm not the only one!!
olbengc responds:
hahaha thanks for sharing :p
ironically, as a kid i didnt care much about not knowing the plot of the games i played, i just made them up in my mind. For me Chrono Trigger was about a son of Goku (from dragon ball) in the future saving someone.
The fact that i didnt know anything story-wise of those games adds an extra level of enjoyment when i re-play them nowadays :p
I totally understand what you mean, I learned to read from video games because I wanted to play I started to lean.. and pokemon taught me pronunciation..
olbengc responds:
Thanks for the comment :)
It's so cool to see the lengths one goes through just to better enjoy a hobby.
Now i guess you mean you learnt pronunciation from Pokemon the cartoons right? cus the only sounds i remember from the games are the screams and screeches from the pokemon :p