I have been using video games as a mean of learning German and it works pretty well. I just wanted to share a few titles that work nicely for me.

  • Epistory (typing game) great to get used to writing simple words but the story can only be listen to in English.
  • Knights of honor (a grand strategy game), nice to expand vocabulary and seeing over and over again the same words, can be easily paused to translate stuff
  • the curse of monkey Island (point and click), the vocabulary is much harder here, but the voices and text are really well made.
  • I have not tried it, but I also saw Wonderlang which is a RPG specifically dedicated to language learning.

Does anyone have other recommendations, for German or for other languages?

  • zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.dev
    7·
    13 days ago

    I’m not sure about games specifically made for language learning, but plenty of games have language settings.

    I was looking to brush up on my Japanese and decided to replay Trails from Zero with the language set to Japanese. Its exposition was very complex with a ton of economic and political terms and just overwhelming. So pick something that suits your level if you can.

    As for German, on Steam you can look for games that have German language support with something like this:

    https://store.steampowered.com/search/?supportedlang=german&ndl=1

    Good luck with your learning!

    • bzah@discuss.tchncs.deOP
      3·
      13 days ago

      Thanks fir the tip for filtering games on steams, unfortunately it also displays games where the audio is only in English but subtitles are available in German, which is not the best for learning purposes.

      Good luck with your learning too!

    • megane-kun@lemm.ee
      2·
      13 days ago

      Reminded me of that time I tried playing JRPGs in Japanese to shore up my target language input. In between the pixelized kanji and lots of uncommon vocabulary, I gave up thinking I was just too early for that kind of thing.

      I suppose playing Chrono Trigger and FF8 in JP was not a very good idea. I also have my doubts since some of the earlier consoles had JRPGs using kana exclusively (due to the state of character encoding at the time), and reading all-kana text is just a headache I am not prepared for.

      EDIT:

      Reworded some stuff for clarification.

      • zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.dev
        2·
        13 days ago

        Back when I was trying to use SNES games for learning, the kanji were often incomprehensible and there weren’t all the phone apps that make looking stuff up easier. Trying to figure out what something was and then looking it up in a huge kanji dictionary was a huge barrier to it being useful. I can go a lot faster these days with being able to draw a kanji and usually getting a hit even if it’s not perfect.

        • megane-kun@lemm.ee
          3·
          13 days ago

          That comment about phone apps is so true! One time my SO tried playing Outer Wilds in JP, I had my phone out ready to to decipher kanji via JP handwriting support. We competed on who can get to a definition of the kanji or word the fastest, and I won almost everytime. Whereas I tried to do it via handwriting, my SO tries to sound out the word first, and then search it via romaji.

          A huge difficulty with those JP SNES games is that

          • if a word (or a part of one) is presented as kanji, I have no idea which stroke or strokes a bunch of pixels is supposed to represent!
          • if a word is presented as kana, I have no idea where the word starts or ends, especially if it is part of a sentence I can barely recognize any words in.