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Could MMOs be a substitute for high school spanish class?
Educational games have traditionally occupied that strange territory between "don't know" and "don't care." The very phrase evokes an image of a brightly colored box adorned with the image of Dora the Explorer or perhaps, if you're lucky, Bob the Builder. The idea of an educational MMO is one that has eluded me entirely. That is, until we found out NASA may be working on one. But a more general question, and one that's brought up by the blog A Ding World: would MMOs be a good vehicle for teaching players basic grammar and vocabulary in a foreign language?It's actually sort of an intuitive idea, as A Ding World points out. There are already games out there that have some sort of imbedded language mechanic built into the game. There's the language of the V'rix in Earth & Beyond, or the simple utility of the Logos language in Tabula Rasa. While it's debatable whether most players pay attention to these instructive nuggets within the game, it seems plainly obvious that the work/reward mechanic of an MMO would have some utility that high school Spanish teachers would have a hard time competing with. If studying had the same rewards grinding did, we might all be bi-lingual by now.
World of Warcraft to invade Russia
World of Warcraft is literally taking over the world one country at a time. It turns out Blizzard Entertainment, the Vivendi money-maker see great potential in the Russian market and will be translating and localizing World of Warcraft there next. This will be the sixth official World of Warcraft port to another language that supports official localization. Other localizations include: English, Spanish, French, German, and Korean. I think the next localization should be Barrens chat. Blizzard could build their own country out of money and call it the Barrens, and all the players that don't read quests and like Chuck Norris jokes can live and play WoW there. Translating and localizing the behemoth that is World of Warcraft is no easy undertaking, and Blizzard Europe is looking for new employees based out of their France and Ireland offices. Take your pick of in-game support, offline technical and customer support, localization and quality assurance, community relations and website development. Players will benefit from the same quality of 24/7 native-language support like the other localizations. For further information please see the Blizzard UK employment page. For those in Russia already playing WoW, Blizzard will release language packs to make the transition much more smoothly when the time comes. Which country has the best official World of Warcraft site? If I could actually read and completely load the WoW Korean website I could give you my input. What I can see does look flashy. [via, WoW Insider]
Russian WoW on the way
WoW is a game of many languages, and I'm not talking about Common and Taurahe. You can play the game in English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Korean, and probably some more I'm not even aware of (Japanese?). And in 2008, Russian is going to join that list of official WoW localizations, with a dedicated Russian team in Blizzard Europe's France and Ireland offices. Mike Morhaime, Blizz's president, had this to say: "Considering the scale and enthusiasm of the Russian community, we recognized that offering a dedicated Russian-language version of World of Warcraft was the next important step for the game in Europe." I don't play on the European realms, so I'll just have to take his word for it, I suppose. That and get used to seeing Cyrillic screenshots from time to time.
Are we killing the language, or creating a new one?
As I've said before, we have a rule in our guild prohibiting leet speak and excessive abbreviation in guild chat. That being said, I've thought a lot about the use of abbreviations in WoW and how they are affecting the language. This might come from my days as an English teacher, but I think of the language as a fluid, breathing thing. The formality that people used when speaking 100 years ago doesn't exist now, and I doubt we would ever hear in game "pardon me, good sir, could you wait a moment?" instead of "one sec AFK" unless we were on an RP server or feeling particularly silly.
Ubisoft to assist in the learning of glorious languages
Bonjour! Gamefly is really letting us know what's coming down the pipeline lately. Siliconera reports that they spotted "games" My Spanish Coach and My French Coach for the Nintendo DS on the site with an October release. We're going to guess that the Ubisoft published games are meant to assist the average unilingual American in picking up another language -- although French wouldn't be all that helpful on the North American continent unless you got lost in the wilderness of Quebec.Ubisoft will also release My Word Coach, which would seem like a vocabulary enhancement tool. Wii cüd rly uz dat. We'd like to think that these "games" would be used in schools to teach kids, but dagnabbit, this is America and nobody should speak anything but American. And drink Budweiser, eat Kraft cheese, drive a GM truck ... etc., etc. Can't we just bypass the whole "learning" thing and just get a universal translator up and running already?
WoW as a second language
I found myself in a rather interesting pickup group for Steamvaults this weekend. I found a hunter through the LFG system, and he invited a warrior, a priest, and a warlock who were his guildies. I breathed a sigh of relief -- an easy run to the Karazhan key fragment was assured. Until I noticed that I could only understand one out of every five words they said. The guild I had grouped with was largely French-speaking, and my high school French IV lessons weren't going to get me out of this one. I explained that I didn't speak French well enough to communicate with them on Vent, and in return, they set up a macro system so that I could be informed of my role while they did the actual strategizing. Anything with an X over its head would be sapped by me, and they spoke English well enough to type out simple directions for a rogue ("left!" "resap!" "wait!") The first couple of pulls were rough, but it went smoothly after the first boss. In fact, it went better than most English-speaking groups, possibly because there wasn't annoying chatter or loot arguments. There are many Quebecois in my guild and on my server, and from that, much of Magtheridon seems to have gained some command of French, or at least some horrible hybrid of French, English and WoWspeak. ("Vous, uh, feignez le mort?") Does your server have a lot of diversity when it comes to languages, or does everyone mostly speak one? How do you deal with multilingual guilds or instance groups?
TUAW Resolutions: Learn a new language
Buon Giorno. ¡Hola!. Guten tag. Of course, the best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in the country where the language is spoken. But that's not always a possibility, especially if you're working your way towards a trip or preparing for a move. If you're trying to learn a language in the new year, here are a few ways that Apple technology can help you work towards your goal. Subscribe to a Language-learning Podcast. iTunes offers any number of podcasts that will help you learn new languages. A quick search on "language" turned up lessons for French, Japanese, Italian, Latin, Tibetan, Turkish, Gaelic and more. On the down side, clearly some of these podcasts are home brew. On the up side, the podcasts are free. You may want to try out several podcast providers before settling on your subscriptions. Buy a learning audio book. The iTunes store offers a wide range of language courses in their audio book section. These courses are typically of a higher quality than the podcast ones, but they also cost quite a bit more. If your local library lets you, you may want to borrow language audio materials from their collections and use them with your iPod. Ripping policy varies by library, so make sure you know the rules before you rip. Use OS X-compatible language-learning software. Many top-brand language packages like Berlitz now run on OS X as well as Windows. Interactive software can really help you master certain language skills like grammar via interactive lessons. Take advantage of OS X's internationalization. OS X is particularly multi-language, multi-alphabet aware. If you're trying to learn new languages, take a few minutes to explore the International system settings pane with it's "input menu" virtual keyboards that will help you type in the language of your choice. Sign up for a class. The success of iTunes U has made it possible to sign up any number of university and college courses. The use of iPods and podcasts are now so prevalent that Duke now offers an iPod-orientation course for all its language instructors. Unfortunately, some iTunes U courses require that you have an actual student ID for sign-up. (Stanford is one such university.) Some do not. Also unfortunately, you need to perform quite a lot of googling to find public iTunes U classes for any particular language, so be persistent. iTunes does not yet offer a specific iTunes U search engine.
Ruby + AppleScript = RubyOSA
Our friends at Download Squad have discovered a melding of two scripting worlds: AppleScript and Ruby. RubyOSA is the darling scriptenstein of these two languages, and while I don't know a lick of either, I'm willing to bet this could be a popular amongst the code ninjas in the audience. Ruby is a popular language (the 13th most popular, by their numbers), and it's the foundation of the Ruby on Rails framework which has given us such handy web 2.0 apps as Backpack, Odeo, Strongspace and many more.This is about the line, however, that I reach where I would need to start pretending I know more about any of these languages, so I'll let you check out RubyOSA for yourself to see if it gets your coding gears turning.
Monolingual
One of our readers recently wrote in and asked us how he could slim down his install of OS X. One simple way is to get rid of all those languages that you don't use which are installed by default with OS X (if you hit 'Customize' while installing OS X you can really cut down on the bloat by only installing the languages and print drivers that you will use).Monolingual is a freeware app that deletes all those other pesky languages from your Mac (just be careful not to delete the language you use because the only way to get them back is to reinstall OS X).I just ran it on my Macbook and it freed up 2.4 gigs of space, though it did take about 30 minutes to run.Update: Be careful to only remove the extraneous languages from your Mac using this program (as I did). Uncheck all the 'Architecture' options, otherwise you'll break Rosetta and blame me (and no one wants that).
