Dialogue-rich Computer Games in Second Languages?

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Re: Dialogue-rich Computer Games in Second Languages?

Postby Serpent » Tue Aug 18, 2015 2:11 pm

emk wrote:
Serpent wrote:I love Criminal Case. Millions of people play that in L1.

Very interesting!

This reminds me a somewhat similar genre of games, which includes games like Clockwork Tales and Abyss. These games do not generally have much audio! But they feature beautiful images, and lots of little puzzles, many of which involve finding a long list of named household objects somewhere in an image. I've seen occasional translation errors in these games, but overall, they're a reasonable source of vocabulary practice for things like "frying pan" and "cane" and "lamp" and "salt shaker" and hundreds of other concrete nouns.

Yeah it's also a hidden object game. There's no audio other than music, but there are written dialogues with in-game characters.
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Re: Dialogue-rich Computer Games in Second Languages?

Postby t123 » Tue Aug 18, 2015 5:56 pm

Not adventure, I was going to mention the enhanced edition of Baldur's Gate 1 and two, but they don't have audio for most of the languages. But there is Icewind Dale which has text and audio for:

  1. English
  2. French
  3. Italian
  4. German
  5. Spanish
  6. Polish
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Re: Dialogue-rich Computer Games in Second Languages?

Postby Spoonary » Tue Aug 18, 2015 6:02 pm

kyukumber wrote:Well, there's an idea. I could watch a Let's Play of something I'm already familiar with in a foreign language. Could work. But I digress...

Watching LPs in foreign languages has been my main source of listening practise for years. I would definitely recommend it.

steyyan wrote:Personally, I prefer "let's play" videos because most video games have large sections without any dialogue, but LPers often speak continuously when there are no dialogue. Also, most of them read text dialogue aloud. Also, you can just rewind the video if you didn't get something.

This! I have found Minecraft videos invaluable in the past because the lack of plot means the LPer tends to talk about all kinds of things. Besides, ninja skeletons + creeper explosions = native expressions galore :lol:
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Re: Dialogue-rich Computer Games in Second Languages?

Postby Cavesa » Tue Aug 18, 2015 10:48 pm

My copy of Broken Sword 1 was totally ok with other languages. I got it from gog.com

The Broken Sword and the Longest Journey have already been mentioned. Most adventure games fall into the category, many rpgs do as well, such as the Witcher (and Czech learners: Mafia is originally a Czech game, tons of dialogue and the dubbing is great)

I wholeheartedly recommend gog.com, you can search the games by language as well and there are games in quite a lot of languages, including Russian and Norwegian. I wish they were adding more languages to more games though.

I can as well second the MUD suggestion. One such game taught me 95% of all the English and got me the CAE :-) Unfortunately, there are not that many in other languages than English, at least not that many with large enough community. Muds are constantly struggling with dying out playerbase, in general. Very few attract dozens of newbies every day.
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Re: Dialogue-rich Computer Games in Second Languages?

Postby Teango » Wed Aug 19, 2015 1:37 am

Ah...happy times! The carnage of Baldur's Gate, the enigmas of Abyss, the perils of Pliskin Snake, and the voodoo-reggae riffs of Monkey Island that still haunt me in the shower to this very day! I was also trying to recall another adventure game I'd seen in French ages ago and always wanted to try, and just as I was about to give up, Doitsujin came swiftly to the rescue: "The Longest Journey"! Thanks for all your excellent suggestions and advice so far guys; I've added these to the end of the first post of our thread for quick and easy reference.
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Re: Dialogue-rich Computer Games in Second Languages?

Postby Teango » Wed Aug 19, 2015 2:11 am

I particularly like the suggestion (Spoonary, steyyan, kyukumber) of watching "Let's Play" gameplay videos in other languages, especially when there's more than one person involved and there's plenty of humour and interaction. I started doing this a couple of weeks ago after someone recommended I watch Gronkh (Germany's top LP), and then went on to check out a few more videos by other people on YouTube for games like the GTA series.

The beauty of this type of resource is that, as pointed out earlier, the players offer hours of colloquial monologue/dialogue during action sequences, and I can also easily follow the visuals in the ongoing story and listen to the accompanying English dialogue in the game/cut scenes to help me understand what they're saying. Funnily enough, I wouldn't be able to endure English-speaking LPs like Pewdiepie for too long, but if it's in another language (and I know this is not for everyone), I can actually pick up quite a lot in terms of listening immersion and watch for much longer...
Last edited by Teango on Wed Aug 19, 2015 11:31 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Dialogue-rich Computer Games in Second Languages?

Postby daegga » Wed Aug 19, 2015 2:18 am

Doitsujin wrote:There's even a free fan-made German-only game: Baphomets Fluch 2.5 that you could check out, if you have a Windows machine.


With the multilingual patch you also get audio in English and subtitles in English, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Croatian, Portuguese and Russian.
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Re: Dialogue-rich Computer Games in Second Languages?

Postby steyyan » Wed Aug 19, 2015 10:22 am

Teango wrote:The beauty of this type of resource is that, as pointed out earlier, the players offer hours of colloquial monologue/dialogue during action sequences, and I can also easily follow the visuals in the ongoing story and listen to the accompanying English dialogue in the game/cut scenes to help me understand what they're saying. Funnily enough, I wouldn't be able to endure English-speaking LPs like Pewdiepie for too long, but if it's in another language (and I know this is not for everyone), I can actually pick up quite a lot in terms of listening immersion and watch for much longer...

Gronkh is a good one, but my favourite Minecraft LPers have to be Herr Bergmann, Unge and Zombey, although it's been a while since I watched those regularly. A good way to get to known German LP channels is to follow those huge projects such as Hero (2013), Mega-Projekt (2013) and Varo (2014, 2014, 2015), where a lot of the more well known German LPers participate.

Shame I haven't found such a "unified" Minecraft youtuber community in the Spanish speaking world...

EDIT: To avoid this post being entirely off-topic, I'd suggest the Witcher series (or at least, Witcher 3), which has audio in Japanese, German, Portuguese, Russian, English, French and Polish (the developers, as well as the author of the source material, are Polish).
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Re: Dialogue-rich Computer Games in Second Languages?

Postby Spoonary » Wed Aug 19, 2015 10:31 am

steyyan wrote:Shame I haven't found such a "unified" Minecraft youtuber community in the Spanish speaking world...

Have you tried L3TCraft? I mainly just watch Tonacho who sometimes makes videos with Chincheto but I have heard good things about their group effort.

I also watch a lot of Sarinha who makes Minecraft PvP videos with Luh, Macundra and Exo (which I don't watch often but are usually good for a laugh).

There are probably others I am just unaware of but these few satisfy my Spanish Minecraft needs. :mrgreen:
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Re: Dialogue-rich Computer Games in Second Languages?

Postby pir » Wed Aug 19, 2015 11:47 am

Spoonary wrote:This! I have found Minecraft videos invaluable in the past because the lack of plot means the LPer tends to talk about all kinds of things. Besides, ninja skeletons + creeper explosions = native expressions galore :lol:


Why, oh why did this never even occur to me? Brilliant. Thanks! My Spanish isn't quite ready for it, but if anyone could recommend French Minecraft LPers I'd be a very happy Stéphane.
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