Same goes with pretty much any computer game that makes you read a lot of text. Actually, I would say Skyrim is worse for language learning due to all the fictional location / person / item names in the game, and rich lore.
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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I appreciate that feedback; do you have good alternative suggestions? I'd love to branch out to other games too! I do think it's kind of fun to learn the word for "potion" or "necromancy" though :)
One major benefit I'm getting is listening comprehension.
I tried doing this with Japanese. It was.... not a success.
For one, the Japanese version isn't translated greatly, and while there are some mods that rewrite some stuff to sound more native it's far from perfect as they can't change spoken dialogue that much.
Then, many words are just the English ones in katakana. Now technically that's fine. But when the whole game is full of words like "furosuto baito supaidaa" (written in katakana ofc) it just doesn't sound too well, nor does it teach you a lot of new words per se. I guess it at least gives you a feeling how katakana is used to write foreign (loan)words.
But then, I walked into the in Whiterun and heard the bard sing Ragnar the Red in Japanese. The lyrics to some sentences are twice as long in Japanese, smashed into the same melody, causing it to sound like a synthesizer going over the sounds quicker than humans ever would.
I just gave up. I can play the game for the most part without understanding anything, so I thought it would be a good practice as not understanding something wouldn't get me stuck per se. But in the end, it wasn't very handy.
Oh yikes! I feel very lucky that the German translation is competent. German has a pretty robust dubbing industry. And the German translation of Ragnar the Red is perfectly singable and I actually like listening to it to practice singing along! :)
I just looked up the video of the Japanese VA singing Ragnar the Red in Japanese and I feel so bad for that poor voice actor having to shove so many syllables into such short time.
I’ve been teaching myself German lately
"Früher war ich auch ein Abenteurer. Aber dann habe ich einen Pfeil ins Knie bekommen."
(I haven't actually played Skyrim, I just know this line from the memes.)