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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsBreakfast Topic: Does WoW help you learn a foreign language?
by Lesley Smith 
Jul 6th 2009 at 8:00AM
When I joined my current guild I suddenly found out about this hidden multi-cultural and multi-lingual side to the game and as a result three of my best in-game friends are from Norway, Russia and the Netherlands. All have fantastic English skills but it's still common for them to go back to their native languages in group chat or over voice. They know I can't understand them but that doesn't stop me being able to guess what they're saying. Indeed the language barrier exists but it doesn't hamper the game one bit.
So I wonder, readers, do you regularly play with people from around the world? Have you learnt another language or improved your linguistic skills using the game? Do you play on a realm which doesn't speak your mother tongue? Do you enjoy playing with people from other cultures and countries? Has it inspired you to take up learning a second or third language?
Filed under: Guilds, Blizzard, Breakfast Topics, Quests, Raiding, Forums, Europe
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 5)
JustinScott Jul 6th 2009 8:45AM
"I play most regularly with people from other countries, Duisters, Danes, everything really.
Through WoW, I do better at English. Get better rates in the English first. I play now a British Realm, where I is a Dutch guild with more than 500 members. Playing with other players, I find it fun, but it does make it different. You might not say things you against someone else from the same country can say.
'm German, French and English learning, and it is pretty good to me."
Translation, complete :)
Kimyas Jul 6th 2009 8:51AM
hehe aye..but there's no google translate ingame :D
JustinScott Jul 6th 2009 9:03AM
@ Kimyas
Shhhhhhh! =P
JKWood Jul 6th 2009 1:04PM
Not too suprisingly, most of those words are pretty easy to translate without any help, just by guessing. Of course, I'm a natural linguist, so I'm aware of the history of different languages and the similar roots they come from.
Then again, I'm an American, so we just steal the best words and features from other languages anyway.
Katerana Jul 6th 2009 8:39AM
Playing on EU english server and beïng from Belgium has improved my english alot!
And in my guild half is from great britain and the other half is from countries all over europe.
It's fun to hear ppl's accents, hear theyr toughts and vieuws on world related issues and so on..
It really expands one's mind :D
dgarmat2 Jul 18th 2009 3:12PM
I am originally from Russia playing on U.S. server. My old GM in my previous guild thought it was funny to make fun of people's accents. He was the cause why I rarely spoke on vent because of his rude behavior.
Kimyas Jul 6th 2009 8:45AM
My English writing hasn't improved much, but my GL is Scottish, try to understand that on vent :D
Muse Jul 6th 2009 10:24AM
No kidding. I was supposed to sheep tzerkel.
Orrine Jul 6th 2009 8:50AM
Yes, definately. Although I understanding English quite well, the conversation was always a problem for me. I learned to talk, swear and type fast because of WoW :)
Palmar Jul 6th 2009 8:51AM
English is my second language. Been playing World of Warcraft since the game launched in Europe (februray 2005). I play in a multinational European guild, so yes, I have indeed been exposed to an unhealthy dose of foreign languages. I am, along with my girlfriend, the only Icelandic person in the guild I play in, so I've not gotten much use out of my native language.
But I guess that's mostly a good thing, since my ability to communicate in English has increased dramatically since I started playing the game, to the point that I've been mistaken for a local while I was traveling in England. Due to similarity, my ability to understand the Scandinavian languages (Norwegian, Danish and Swedish) has also increased a bit, although I still can't maintain a logical conversation using any of those.
And then we have all the other European languages, off the top of my head I can remember people from the following countries: Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Holland, England, Scotland, Germany, Czech Republic, Serbia, Greece, Italy, Poland, Russia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Hungary and The Faroe Isles... so it's a bit of a meltpot of languages.
It's perfectly fine though, since Europeans tend to speak 2-3 languages (the Dutch speak like 4, and yet they're always stoned!)
Cady Jul 6th 2009 8:55AM
When I played Star Wars Galaxies, the fact that I could play with people of all nationalities was a real plus. Many of my guildmates there followed me to WoW and I mailed the US version of the game to three of my Dutch friends. I've learned a lot of Dutch from them. It's a shame that WoW won't allow server transfers from US to EU servers or vice versa. Perhaps in the future they will.
Jamison Jul 6th 2009 8:54AM
This is a pretty common thing actually. Whenever people are passionate about something, and that 'thing' crosses language boundaries it can often be a way for people to learn the language 'in-context'. I know a lot of people who learned to speak English from reading the Bible. It was a story that was already familiar to them, and so the Bible in a sense became a Rosetta Stone. WoW can be the same way. You know the phrases and text already. If you see them in a different language often enough you'll start to associate meaning.
Nari Jul 6th 2009 8:56AM
Playing on an EU server here. My guild breaks down into three main country groups - British, Dutch and Danish. I have the British racial ability "Being useless at learning additional languages", but a couple of our Dutch officers are learning Danish, and we do wind up with the occasional Danish conversation class on /guild. My guild's also part of a larger raiding alliance, with a goodly number of Scandinavians, and a Russian guild.
Just about everyone speaks extremely good English - reading our forums and in-game channels, you'd be hard-pressed to spot the English-as-a-second-language players. Easier to spot who's who on Vent, we have a great range of accents
Verakum Jul 6th 2009 8:58AM
I play in US server, and my mother language isn't english it is spanish and portuguese :P
so with this server i am improving my skills in english, specially in grammar and pronunciation lol...
also in my guild there is someone from the Philippines so... it help us all lol
nethack47 Jul 6th 2009 9:07AM
I have repeatedly found that I am truly blessed for speaking both Swedish, Dutch and English. These three languages make at least 75% of the player base on English language realms understandable.
What I have some trouble with is the abysmal spelling some have and the fact that English native sometimes write less coherent than my little children do.
Kittens Jul 6th 2009 11:07AM
Hah, same here ^_^
My realm largely consist of Dutch, Danish and British people, and in general everybody keeps to speaking English. Occasionally you see some people talking Dutch or Danish in /s or /y, generally those are the somewhat younger players. In guild chat we usually switch to Dutch, and I even enrolled one of my alts in a Danish guild because I like keeping up my languages (Danish is very similar to Swedish).
Not really learning anything new or wanting to learn new languages because of WoW, but I will take any opportunity to speak some Swedish hehe, just because I miss it :)
Agerath Jul 6th 2009 9:11AM
You cannot learn a foreign language from a game. Rosetta Stone software will not allow you fluency in any language.
The biggest challenge of any language is grammar, and (especially for English speakers) tenses, moods and cases. None of these can be learned by memorizing phrases like 'jeg er engelsk' etc.
You can augment your knowledge, yes, and if you are already aware of the grammar then WoW is an excellent way to extend your vocab (especially in casual speech) but to suggest that merely playing with Europeans is a guaranteed way to pick up a foreign language is both misleading and insulting to those of us who have put a lot of effort into doing so.
(Hope that made sense--Blackberry not ideal for posting)
Farfalla Jul 7th 2009 6:18AM
Now, I am fluent in English, French and Spanish, the former being my native tongue and the latter two learned through traditional methods. I don't find it insulting to say that you can learn languages via WoW, I think it's fantastic if it gets more people learning and interested. Perhaps this is because I'm English and our language provision in school is fairly dire, so I'll take whatever I can get.
Secondly, '...the biggest challenge of any language is grammar, and (especially for English speakers) tenses, moods and cases. None of these can be learned by memorizing phrases like 'jeg er engelsk' etc.' While I agree that this is the case - you don't learn by parroting - people are not neccessarily doing it that way. I didn't pick up Norwegian through memorising phrases, I learned it by reading conversations between people and listening to them on Vent. Once you learn to pick out the verbs from the vocab, you can recognise the different conjugations. Perhaps this is more advanced than what some people do, because I am naturally gifted with language, but I'd like to think that when people say 'Jeg er engelsk' they deduce that jeg is the personal pronoun and er is the correct conjugation of the verb. In fact I'd go so far as to say that most people do think that way, since the second question is usually 'How do you say 'you are'? Something er?' And then you add in the aural element, on Vent or Skype or whatever, and you realise that in Norwegian (at least in the accent used in Trondheim) 'Jeg kommer fra' is pronounced like 'Y-eye kommerr frar' (failing at writing that phonetically 'cos you don't quite pronounce that last R) and it starts to make sense.
So, although I partially agree with you, I don't think you can assume people are memorising rather than learning.
Neyssa Jul 6th 2009 9:23AM
One of the reasons why I rerolled to another server was that on my previous server (bloodscalp EU) is considered as "Hungarian" server (officialy English server). Everyone speaks Hungarian on trade channel, you can get kicked from a group for not speaking Hungarian - I dont like it, even though I am also Hungarian :)
Currently I am on a different server. There are many Hungarians here too, but not to that extent. Our guild is about half Hungarian - the other half is scattered around Europe. The guild channel is strictly English, and we use the officer chanel as the Hungarian chat room. Every rank has a Hungarian and an English version, the only difference is seeing or not the 'officer' (=hungarian) chat. It works perfectly well! I prefer choosing people for their playstyle, not where they come from.
Related to the topic, I was recently thinking about private English teaching through wow, how cool would that be? I mean, teaching Grammar and everything, but the reading / writing would be related to wow lore, playstyle, write a quest text, and homework could be to write an essay about this and that questline :). I think it would add a nice extra to school-learned english and make kids (like my nephew) want to come to private lesson.
shaddam Jul 6th 2009 10:42AM
Yeah that is why I dont play on Bloodscalp and Ragnaros(I am hungarian).These two server is full of with hungarian hunlegolashun and hunpistike.I suggest everybody avoid these 2 server.And yes I think playing Wow on english EU server is improve my english.I usually read english websites like wow.com and mmo-champion,and I think the 90%of the sites is easy to understand without dictionary.