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
    2·
    8 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·
      8 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.