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?
Not sure it still exists anymore, but I remember using “slime forest” to learn Japanese words.
Found it, looks like it might no longer be updated: https://lrnj.com/
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!
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!
use steamdb instead.
Thanks so much for that!
Amazing, thanks!
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.
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.
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.
If you like point and click, I heard the Deponia games are good. “Edna bricht aus” und “Harveys neue Augen”
I’m adding this to the list, thanks !
I know that if I let myself play my usual games just in German then I’d ignore all the dialogue and skip to the gameplay and it’d just be an excuse to play video games lol.
However I have thought about playing something like Phoenix Wright in German. A visual novel where you can’t ignore the dialogue because the game is the dialogue.
I think it really depends. If you’re replacing your language study times with video games where you barely read the text, probably not helpful.
If you’re replacing time you would have spent playing games in English with games in your target language? That’s a win. Even if you barely need to read anything, games can get repetitive and expose you to the same words over and again in a way that builds up.
Well, it would be a lie to say this never happens to me, especially with knights of honor. I still find it better than slacking in my mother tongue though, as I could start practising at any moment while playing.
Little Big Adventure 2 helped me with English.
I am mostly playing “broken sword series” in french. They seem to have German too. It is point and click.
Would be cool if someone made a game or mod a game like skyrim. where player start of as a kid and learn about things in the world, words and etc, do chores, run errands for your parents go to school, play games with other kids, solve mysteries around the neighborhood, grow older until the game eventually leads to the main quest of skyrim. The childhood stage should teach enough of language (at least the min vocab required) to be able to play the main game.
Thanks for the suggestion, I will certainly try the reforged version. Btw it seems Skyrim itself is a good contender as it has both audio and subtitles available in 9 languages.
Yup I am working up to be able to eventually play Skyrim and Kingdom Come : deliverance.
Dedicated games just for language are interesting. I think they can be too heavy handed about teaching, where they should be about using simple language and creating context that makes words obvious. Still, they make me curious and I’ll try out some examples from the comments here.
I just tried the Wagotabi demo since @[email protected] mentioned it here a week or two ago. It’s a game to learn Japanese specifically. Only the demo is on Steam, but it seems like a pretty cool thing. It’s like a top-down RPG where you travel to Japan and learn a few words at a time. The demo has you going through an airport and talking to people, and you need to understand a few words to do some tasks. The beginning is maybe too basic (since I’m not quite a beginner), but I’m sure it gets more involved in the full game.
I also tried out Influent this week. I couldn’t really figure out how to add words or show mastery. But it has you run around your small apartment and point at things to read/hear how to say them. So far I’m not a big fan, but maybe I’m missing something.
I also mentioned this in the weekly thread, but slightly off-topic shoutouts to Chants of Sennaar. Deals a lot with translating a made up language, and is super fun.
I also recently stumbled upon Chants of Sennaar and the atmosphere looks really interesting. Not sure Influent would be my vibe but thanks for sharing!
More useful IMO will be regular good games that you want to play anyway, just set to your target language. Can be tough to find just the right level, but the more you learn the better your options will be.
