Learning English Through Video Games

In a recent survey we’ve conducted, we’ve verified that the overwhelming majority of users on these forums do not speak English as their mother tongue, only speaking it as a secondary language, thus unifying at least a semblance of a language barrier we all share. So a lot of us will be on the same page here.

The data is quite interesting, as the number of native English users hardly scratches the two digits, however don’t misunderstand this being evidence that you won’t find people who have English as their native tongue. Not only did we get a submission from hilarious forum regular, @Boo Man , an NZ resident, but other famous and renowned forum regulars such as @Gorse and @Octopus both speak it natively as they hail from the land of the funny leaf.

Now there’s nothing wrong a lack of fluency, as this author is not shy to display their terrible Spanish. But It’s quite tricky to break down this language barrier a lot of us share, including the author of this piece, as there’s a lot of nuances to it that go beyond simple language differences.

For example, countries like India, Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia do have English as a spoken language, I’m even friends with a few monolingual English speakers from India (though they do have some fluency in Hindi), but often these places have a more unique English that’s harder to find in the big boy English speaking regions like USA, Canada, Britain and the funny bandicoot country.

English is a bizarre language…​

A lot of us also do learn English in school, albeit it’s somewhat rudimentary English. You might be familiar with the two famous memes from Azumanga Daioh and Sakigake Otokojuku. “Hello everynyan” rings a bell? While it’s easy to misinterpret these jokes as funny random engrish, there’s a somewhat deeper context behind them. These are actually some of the phrases taught to us in school. Not verbatim, but super close. Now, the absurdity did make the jokes go over my head but once it clicked, it really clicked.

Now, where does all of this lead us? It seemed like a lot of us had it rough, but how did we get to the point where we’re conversing on this very platform? To answer this, now would be a great time for this writer to drop the formalities and explain my tragic anime backstory.

Middle school was rough. Yes, middle school. As laughable as that sentence may sound, getting held-back in public Kuwaiti middle schools was a real fear for a lot of us silly country bumpkins who were only interested in cars, football and whether or not Undertaker or Triple H would win at Wrestlemania XXVII and XXVIII. They were simpler times. But a lot of us really hated math and English. Not me, I loved math! I vaguely still do, but English was my nightmare when I was 11. Never was able to utter so much as a basic sentence like “I like playing football”, to me, that was peak writing.

MBC Was King!​

But naturally every obstacle can be overcome. It’s a matter of will. In summer after 6th grade, I made it my mission to actually learn English. One problem though… where the heck do I even start?
Luckily, this wasn’t an impossible answer. Here in the gulf, we’ve had a network of tv channels called “MBC”. Stands for Middle-east Broadcasting Channel… probably. It was a series of channels. “MBC2” was the “first ‘foreign movie channel’”, only American movies. There were also a different foreign movie channel for Bollywood films called “MBC Bollywood”, yeah… we’re not really creative with our names. But that wasn’t necessary. What’s helpful is that I’ve had means to actually be exposed to the language.

Some native English speakers might hear this and be wary, as “movie” speech isn’t exactly “natural” speech but rest assured, I wasn’t going around the streets saying “wassup, mother******!!” or anything psychotic like that. I did actually recognize certain phrases as being local. What I really needed was vocab. Lots, and lots of vocab! Context is how you learn languages, not grammar. Context is really hard to verbalize. It’s “experienced” not “taught”. Movies exposed me to an insane number of contexts and that’s what I needed most.

In a speeding 4 months, movies got me to where I am today. But where do games fit in here, I hear you ask! Oh, we’re getting there alright…

I introduce you to… my “follow the damn train”, but for non-English speakers.
You really thought the big smoke mission and plane missions were hard? That’s adorable, because at least you could play those.

Woozie, the prick!​

If this image does not send chills down your spine, you and I are not the same.​

Woozie, my absolute beloathed at the time was solely responsible for implanting this tinfoiled theory in my head that English devs were “out to get us”. I refuse to believe this wasn’t some elaborate troll to trick non English players. Like, at one point do you go “hmmm, today I’ll increase my lung capacity!”, if that is a real thought you have while playing a game, you deserve a medal. Not sure which medal, but probably with something a nerd emoji on it.

This is all hyperbolic of course, but after rewatching the same cutscene over and over, a cutscene which I’m sure some people never even encountered in their lives (I would know, I somehow didn’t trigger it on my replays. Guess I got wiser), you start getting a little schizo.

To my 12 years old, this was my Bible. ​

By the time I was 12 however, this was well behind me. Not just that, but I uncovered the glorious world of cheat codes too.
Now it may seem as if this story was even before it even begun but let me reassure you, this was barely the start. Movies and Pro-Wrestling are where I got my feet wet, but games are where I truly begun swimming like a butterfly! Or, some other American idiom, I dunno. (Unrelated, but did you know “Supercalifragalisticexpealidocous” is a real word? What a funky language!)

Throughout the years, my knowledge only kept piling up. We all know language proficiency has levels. Now am I claiming GTA will take your language proficiency from A0 to D1? Maybe, but it is worth highlighting this ten year timeline. Yes, ten years.

Being a total gta nutjob meant that, of course, got gta v on release. Now the timeline here adds up. I got it after I had good English, not before. Yet… something was missing. What the heck were they all talking about???

GTA V: The Final Frontier… kinda​

In a bizarre twist of circumstances, I had this absolute horror I may have gone back to step 0. Make no mistake, I understood what they said on a moment-to-moment basis, but if you ask me to relay them back to you, I’d be at a loss of words. It’s actually the gaming of equivalent of a friend discussing a topic you know nothing about and you being able to do nothing except nod along. Not because you didn’t care, but because you couldn’t. Everything felt foreign.

Because see, it WAS foreign. In a strange turn of events, the brainiac writers at Rockstar had this genius to make the most hotly anticipated piece of media of all time (no hyperbole, by the by) to have a story where the context of events is extremely context-sensitive and tied solely to a single city during a single period. In other words, if you have no prior knowledge of what 2013 LA was like, and I do mean SPECIFICALLY 2013 LA, you were likely alienated.

This video is… kinda terrible, actually. The guy is too loud. But it’s what we’re stuck with when it comes to journalistic needs. ​

Now this was both stressful and exciting. The next big step in my English journey, region specific context! Being a language freak will by default make you a culture freak. Language is culture, after all. This was exciting as much as it was intimidating. But I wasn’t afraid, I had to keep strutting along.

This next step into both my gta and English was quite a meaningful one. GTA V is… a complicated game to discuss. Which may sound weird if you like it and that’s great! If you don’t, my words make more sense. However I’ll be very unvague and say I love it to death. Picking between gta games is like picking between my children. You just can’t make me choose. So what’s odd about 5 in particular? Well, let’s just say this journey wasn’t the simplest one.

One might say a story shouldn’t be the sole defining factor of your enjoyment. And this statement should ring true here because we’re not talking about a good or bad story, we’re talking about a story you can understand at all. This is a unique situation that’s extremely tough to replicate naturally. I know I don’t have to LIKE the story to like the game, but I needed an answer. What’s actually going on in GTA V?

Is GTA V even good at all?​

I was absolutely blessed by this gem of a video to pop into my YT recs back in ‘21. I could not be more relieved. A native English relaying the story in layman terms was precisely what I wanted. It didn’t help that this trend of “location-specific” storytelling became more common and more alienating. It actually explains why Japanese games are so popular, they remove themselves from real world context sensitivity.

But to further elaborate on this video’s strengths (and also save you a watch-time), he likes GTA V, but what’s bigger is that he had a history with it that’s near identical to yours truly in how he didn’t really understand the plot at first. And he’s a native English speaker. He’s ahead of me, but had the same struggles! It was quite illuminating finding this particular kinship. I was also happy to not only leave the video with a truer appreciation of gta v, but an opinion that’s much easier to navigate.

One mission left… play the game!​

So naturally after all this, a GTA V replay was clearly in order. So I booted up my Xbox, sat down, sunk in the time and 49 hours later, viola! GTA V solidified its state as one of my favorite games of all time. I understood the entire story for the first and it really did for making me further love the game. A similar thing happened with GTA 4, a game I already held close to my heart but after my replay it became my favorite game… ever!

I have this shirt for real. And I’m willing to reinstall 98 worth of GTA V gigabytes just to prove I do. ​

Now I’m curious, how was your journey with learning English through games? Got any tales? Comment below!

Lastly, some housekeeping…​

Hi there! Did you enjoy this article? Would you like something similarly culture-driven and about personal history? Why not head over to my friend @Waffles piece about Road Rash? Might be up your alley if you enjoy highly-detailed retrospective pieces like this! In other news, how’s everyone this evening? Enjoying some warm tea? @Jusaiki messaged me this afternoon and we’re both ok-ish but we’ll recover soon, hopefully. That’s all for today. Later. ​

 

[Cheela]

Soo fun story, i think is a mix of both videogames and the internet. The culprits for me were three: Online flash games, the NTSC standard for my country and Pokemon Black.

First of all, Online flash games. I absolutely loved Super Mario Crossover and Super Smash Flash. To the point that I abandoned the comfort of the spanish website “minijuegos.com”, a spanish website that reposted most flash games at the time, to seek for updates for the games i loved. I found them, but they were all in English. Soo I started navigating slowly through their websites with the help of a translator and my limited at the time english learned from school. And i think on that phase i learned a lot. I was reading through forums and blog posts in the now defunct “Exploding rabbit” website, the website of the developer of Super Mario Crossover.

Then another thing that helped me was that in Chile we were doomed to play ntsc versions on ps2 and wii consoles. Soo most of our official games were only on English. There was some exceptions of course, the official nintendo games for the wii being one of them. But most of the games that form my interest for videogames were only on english for us.

But what about the PAL versions? They were options through piracy of course but they had problems too. One that was mentioned in the forums “the black and white incompatible tv thing” that was the case for most games without an unofficial patch(i remember having a patched version of Crash nitro kart that fixed the black and white and was the pal version) But, there was a second problem. Not all PAL versions offered spanish and it was the Spanish from Spain. Yeah, Spanish is spanish at the end of the day. But Spain and Latam speak spanish very differently. And (with no offense to my Spanish bros) here in latam we don’t generally enjoy the localization made from our european bro. I can enter in more detail why (i studied linguistics in college soo i know some historic and phonetics reasons too) but to be short: Yes, even me as kid preferred playing some games in english, even if it wasn’t my native language, that playing the Spanish version of a game.

The last game that really sealed the deal for me was Pokemon Black, because it is to this day my favorite Pokemon game. And i had an official copy as a Christmas gift. It wasn’t the first official Pokemon game that i own. But it was the first that i remember enjoying because of the story and not only for being a Pokemon game. And of course, it was all in English.

I have more stories about my process of learning English, but i will keep them for another time.

Really cool post!

 

[YuriSukiSan]

For me it was a mixture of video games (mostly MMORPGs), my grandmother shouting at us, novels, school and MTV!

 

[Roy00125]

Playing JRPG games like persona 5 Royal (which is 100 hour game)

and visual novel games for example Doki Doki literature club etc

are best source learning English because most of times you read dialogue in order to progress the story,
In Visual Novel games, you have to read dialogue in order to get best route ending, I took Doki Doki as example because it was first visual when I played from start to finish, there is lots of other visual novel you can play on market

 

[The Almighty Hamster]

I'm a native English speaker, but video games helped me learn German with English subtitles. Very useful and engaging way to learn.

 

[Raidou Kuzunoha]

I'm actually surprised by how many people learned and improved their english through text heavy games like rpg's and visual novels - those were my basis, too. Had a sibling that was also a big fan of visual novels; as a kid, I watched them play. We'd often play together, too, and they would help me out with translation and comprehension when I got stuck. Those were special times, and I'm still very fond of visual novels today. From what I remember, Jisei, Kansei and Yousei was the first trilogy that first introduced me to the genre. Afterwards there's Ace Attorney, 999, Hotel Dusk, Ghost Trick... all of which I still adore today.

 

[Bakuma1997]

I learned more from a Famiclone called PC Kid, that had a "OS" with edutainment minigames that with my actual teachers

 

[xczxc]

I remember when I was a little boy, I used to play a LOT of FlatOut 2. Around that time I didn't know any English, just pressing random buttons and guessing/remembering what was what. One day I got my hands on a dictionary and started searching for every single word… good days.

 

[LeoTCK]

Honestly my first ever exposure to English language was through an adventure called Goblins back in 1995. I entered a course in English year later before it was compulsory in school even. But my english only got good once I started to play online on Unreal co-op and engage in forums slowly, circa 2003....

 

[Rocket2049]

i can't even imagine playing GTA without english knowledge, with how many times they tell you in text what you need to do and i STILL screw up lol.

this is more me learning japanese, cause god damn do i play a lot of games that are STILL NOT TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH
I was into all that stuff, anime, JRPGs, hell i'm surprised i've never once went to a anime con, my friend group loved it.
but here's the thing, everytime i watched an anime it was english subbed, course i can follow along it's in text on the bottom.
so eventually just watching and playing a bunch of japanese media, you learn some japanese, we all know what kawaii means, i'm sure, and the basic words greetings, etc.
but now load up a fully japanese game, something text HEAVY like a JRPG, well, first off, you see japanese LETTERS, hiragana, katakana, now there's no way you'd just KNOW the kana offhand, that's stuff you have to LEARN, and learn i did (took some classes in college learned the basic letters and basic dialog)

now... then i got introduced to the large world of KANJI... and being blunt i gave up learning japanese to THAT extent. i learned some of the kanji letters though, if you dunno what kanji is, it's a character that basically can be an entire word or phrase, unlike hira/katagana which are "alphabet" letters,
but to an extent i can PLAY a Japanese game, long its not super full of kanji letters (thankfully most games are NOT even visual novels usually stick to hira/kata)
i got through a few dragon quest games entirely in japanese, you know what the worst part of playing a JAPANESE version of a dragon quest game, ALL THE MOVES ARE NAMED DIFFERENTLY!!!
you got pretty dumb names in english DQ games, kacrackle, kaswoosh, zammle, in japanese its like, freezeair, burning, Thordain (that last one sounds so good, dragon quest 3 remake does NOT use that)
i've read a few visual novels entirely in japanese. (though they are usually voiced alongside the text)
i play quite a few japanese mobile games (RIP tales of the Rays T_T)
now here we are in the FUTURE!! you can literally grab your smart phone, open google translate, POINT AT THE TEXT, and there you go, a instant translation. I use it a few time when i don't understand whats happening (japanese mobile games you can screenshot and load it into google translate)
so if there's one thing about the FUTURE that is great, it's having a instant translation, i mean with AI technology you can basically fully translate anything!!
....still waiting on that tales of destiny 2 english patch