I'm pretty sure my ability to touch type was influenced by playing Quake 1 and Quake 2. You had to type quickly enough to insult someone and not die.

I've met programmers that don't touch type, but I've never met a PC gamer that doesn't.

And yes, your idea would be awesome. That would actually be a sick WoW add-on. I doubt you can pull different localizations through the API though.

I couldn't touch type and really couldn't force myself not to look, so I bought a Das Keyboard and threw out my old keyboard. It was rough at first, but I doubt I could have learned faster any other way and as a bonus I ended up realizing the joy of typing on a mechanical keyboard.

I credit MUDding with my current typing speed.

ditto!

Yeah same here (it was Counter Strike for me, but still)

One of the project ideas I keep daydreaming about is along these lines. An RPG set in a world with two factions, one speaks English and the other French (or whatever language people want to learn). There are characters who are unilingual, and some who are bilingual. Instead of gating progress the usual artificial way (eg. Snorlax blocking the path), all you have to do is understand what an NPC is asking or telling you to do then do it.

Characters would greet each other and converse in their native language, and the bilingual characters would help smooth this out. For example you could ask a bilingual shopkeeper "What does <word> mean?". If you say "Hi" to somebody and they say "Bonjour" back, it's not hard to figure out what they mean, and conversations would escalate in complexity as you progress through the game.

When I worked as a developer at an EFL / ESL educational software company, I proposed something similar for the Japanese market. Make an RPG (JPRG in style, of course) where the base language was Japanese. Have the usual storyline where characters discover ruins, a lost civilization, hidden secrets and conspiracies, etc. The ancient civilization's language was English. So, to progress through the story, the characters have to learn enough English to decipher the old records, to figure out how to defeat the (English-speaking) bad guy resurrected from the tombs, and even for the use of magic, since all the discovered spells would be in English.

I got this project as far as the very early design stage. I've always been sorry I couldn't convince the execs to let us finish it.

It totally started out as a JRPG in my head. I definitely think there's a market for it, though I would start with two languages that share an alphabet to simplify things.

I think you could get away with almost any language as the base and English as the target since the English alphabet is almost universally understood.

Going the other way around, English - > Japanese or English -> Russian for example, would require additional guidance to explain the new characters.

The idea of having to learn "spells" in another language in order to use them strikes me as a fantastic mechanic.

That's a great idea. It would be perfect for kickstarter, no?

Thanks for the encouragement. Might be worth trying again to make this.

We should chat sometime, I have a lot of ideas in this vein.

I've thought first person games could be useful for self improvement in lots of other ways too. Such as getting comfortable with public speaking, or social anxiety in general.

For language learning, this might sound silly, but I've also thought a first person role playing game where you're a baby and everyone speaks to you like they do to babies in the language you're trying to learn. (My pet theory is that children aren't necessarily way better at learning language, but it's more how people interact with them: speaking slowly, using small words, telling them what they're doing, etc.

I'd welcome a chat / email. I've spent most of my career in educational software, thought frequently of how to improve it, and would be happy to talk with someone of a similar mindset. Added an email to my profile here.

I do like the baby sim idea. I know some language learning systems go with a very gradual immersion in a similar way, and work in children's books and television as part of it, but I don't know how effective it was. Sounds like it should work well.

See also SPARX, a mmorpg game that teaches CBT techniques.

https://www.sparx.org.nz/index.html

Currently has an unuseful page about restrictions for anyone outside NZ.

That's a really great idea!

Thanks! It's something I would love to tackle someday but I have some other things to accomplish first.

…I imagine a dystopian future in which tourists are fluent only in topics relevant to medieval fantasy.

A guy I knew in Japan told me about a friend of his who learned Japanese from playing Final Fantasy. Everyone who met him wondered why he spoke like a thousand year old samurai.

Hahaha, this made my day.

Back to the topic, I do this thing called biking to and from work. It's more pleasant than taking the subway, and when you don't have an unlimited subway card, it's easy to keep up the habit. It may not be as fun as creating an MMO, but it's pretty low threshold.

Is HN picky about going off-topic? I haven't commented much here.

I also bike to and from work and I've seen it have really positive effects on my friends who want to build muscle and lose some weight.

I actually try to structure my life similar to how this guy did his "MMO", with rules and systems that make it easy to live well. When you bike and walk everywhere, it's hard not to be in decent shape.

Absolutely. I love that it's so low threshold, you just have to do it and it doesn't take any extra time, such as going to the gym. It's also a lot of fun.

This doesn't seem too off-topic, we're just discussing alternatives to the topic in question. : )

Whatever gets you started ;) I assume enough hours exposure to non old samurai speech would get them the rest of the way.

I've heard a lot of stories of children learning english from playing multi-player xbox games. The quality of their english I'm not sure about though.

When I was a kid, I tried this with imported Zelda/Final Fantasy games. As an American, I was lucky enough to study Japanese as an elementary schooler, and back then, there was a pretty significant lag between Japanese and American releases.

Consequently, I had some pretty massive incentives to try out these RPGs and muddle through the language (play the game months before my friends!). Unfortuantely most of the kanji was beyond my ability to divine, and I didn't know how to use a kanji dictionary effectively back then...so I often didn't really know what I was doing, and wound up getting the English versions too.

Still, if I had a bit more support (slash knew how to use a kanji dictionary), I could have imagined it really working to improve my Japanese ability. Now that the lag doesn't exist for game releases there's not as much incentive, but it would be interesting to see someone design a game with these sorts of things in mind.

kanji is such an awful roadblock. I think just about every Japanese student has gone through what you did, myself included. I almost wonder if basic Japanese curriculum should teach kanji before a lot of grammar, to try and get you ready to consume print media ASAP.

Not sure if I'll ever get to an MMO but I'd like to create small games where you play a character and take actions in the language that you want to learn. I was thinking more of a scavenger hunt.

I've got about 1000 images for my next release. I'll try to do some animations in the following release to clarify some of the verbs. Then hopefully make a SpriteKit game from there... Make Oscar 'pick up', 'carry' , 'pour'...

I put up 3 pictures on my FB page: https://www.facebook.com/h4labs

>Somebody needs to create an MMO for language learning.

Duolingo is a language-learning website where you can gain experience points.

I don't think he means gamify language learning I think he means adding useful language learning subtly as a component of a real game

Not quite the same thing, but I'm sure a lot of people here could and maybe even still can read the Ultima rune font...

So is memrise.

I think this is a really awesome idea, the only thing I could see going very wrong is sustaining an active user base large enough to afford the server and development costs. The reason I say this is because you'd be looking for a relatively niche audience, a gamer who wants to learn a second language, which I don't think is necessarily a big portion of gamers out there. A lot of gamers like to just enjoy a game and grind. I think it would maybe work better as a single player RPG, or something a long those lines. I would definitely play an RPG to learn another language if it was done in the ways described. But, maybe that's just because I'm a fairly solo gamer.

I haven't played an MMO in a long time, but when I played Final Fantasy XI, a large majority of the players were Japanese. The developers included an auto-translate function so you could have something like "Let's go kill [boss name]" and [boss name] would be translated to either English or Japanese depending on the player settings. Once you got familiar with the game and what you did in it, seeing just [stuff] in the brackets got you the gist of what they were saying.

Unless you were trying to learn Japanese though, that's as far as you got -- you couldn't have the seamless "mata a 12 [green dragons]" unless you knew your hiragana/katakana.

I did relatively little reading when I was playing WoW hardcore. Although quests had a load of flavor text, I would just key in on the how many and what I had to kill.

I've been dreaming of doing this for years and I've been considering doing something quite similar to what you're talking about for my next project. The only problem, as another poster said, was investment. I was planning on doing a web-based text-based game, which would obviously turn a lot of people off ("that's not a real game!") but open it up to greater variation and modularity.

I think it's a great idea (well, see my above comment :)! Keep the scope small - this doesn't need an MMO to be successful, make it single player. Start with text and find an artist along the way.

On my walk home between posting my initial comment above and this one, I started thinking about how to make it happen as a side project and the conclusion I came to was writing the entire script/story out first as that would be the hardest part.

The only reason I haven't done this myself is MMOs are very expensive to produce, at least the WoW-clone type I envision. WildStar took 7 years to build. I don't have the cachet to ask for 10s of millions for a crazy project and get it. But, please, somebody that does, make this. :)

Once upon a time I was an English teacher in Berlin. The student I had who had the best intuitive feel for English and the best pronunciation was a massive boy band fan and had learned the bulk of her English though translating and signing along to N'Sync and the like.

Wouldn't your language learning MMO just be an MMO with the language switched?

No. An ideal implementation would train you into the new language, such that, for example, part of the quest is figuring out what the quest actually says. Instead of needing a language dictionary next to you, you have NPCs teaching it to you within the context of the game.

"part of the quest is figuring out what the quest actually says"

I'm getting flashbacks to learning Latin from "Lingua Latina - Familia Romana". Here's a book in Latin with a couple pictures. A pity you can't read Latin, not yet. There's a couple footnotes in English. Also there's enough Latin borrowed into English that you can figure some of it out. If you can puzzle out what the heck is going on, you'll learn Latin. Or you'll get very frustrated. Likely both.

Every couple years I put in an effort until I get annoyed and quit.

All I really remember is the first chapter was a discourse on the geography of the classical era Mediterranean world, so if you know anything about history and/or geography it was pretty easy to puzzle out, and the second (or so) chapter introduced you to your large host family. Later chapters discussed the concepts of time and money, if I recall correctly.

It doesn't really ebook well because of a lot of annotation to "help".

A modern analogy completely in the English language would be the "Diary of a wimpy kid" series. My son read those, and I occasionally wondered if the author of those books knew about or was inspired by "Familia Romana". I'm not implying Familia Romana was a comedy, the funniest part was probably some sibling rivalry in the host family. But it was a mix of pictures and words I haven't seen in a book since early grade school.

I think a videogame has several advantages over the book format as you can offer different contexts to learn the same thing in a rote way, and let the user ask questions.

Also, Latin just has too many weird tenses and stuff to pick up that way, I would imagine. At least English to French or Spanish, there's shared grammar.

I wonder what the world would be like today if Blizzard had partnered with Lifetime fitness, and you could only play World of Warcraft while you were on a treadmill, or other fitness device.

I'm guessing it'd look really similar, except with far, far less hours logged in WoW.

ycombinator: Pitch

Hi, I see you guys are interested in making an MMORPG language learning game. It's a great idea. In fact, it's an idea that my brother, myself and a few other guys have been working on the past four years, ever since I graduated from Ohio State with my Master's in Foreign Language Education. We have already seen it work in our very alpha, alpha testing of some rough prototypes with high school Spanish students in our area.

To test the concept, we focused on just a few language concepts (teaching personal, descriptive adjective pairs, e.g. "tall/short; old/young", etc.) and set up an ambush scenario of the player by some orcs fitting the description. Then, we paired the player with a helper avatar. The avatar and the player each shot a different orc in every attacking pair. The avatar told the player which to target.

Second, we set up a castle maze, through which the player has to navigate as a spy, picking up needed ingredients for a weaponized spell along the way. The avatar helper already knows the lay of the castle. He instructs the player where he has to go to avoid detection.

We tested these two and a third game in a few area high schools last spring just before school let out. The response was overwhelmingly positive. The kids dubbed our one game the "Spanish flappy bird", because of how addictive it was.

While we'd like to develop more apps, eventually putting together an entire year's worth of curriculum for teachers, we need to redirect our focus to building an extensible framework and community to step up the development from what only a handful of people could otherwise produce.

I'm a teacher. I know state standards, which do work. I also know that a lot of the textbooks, etc. we use in schools to teach are not effective and, quite frankly, boring. Standards are good for accountability. Games are good for engagement.

So we're linking the two. We are building a framework which tracks a language learner's (not just high school; anyone's) progress through a given game and determines where he is in mastering all of the standards and, by extension, the language. The framework plots out his game experience, directing him to this or that "mission"/app targeting the concomitant standard based on his strengths and weaknesses.

The framework itself is open-sourced and built by a community of developers. This is where we need your help. Once it's fully operational, we open up the game development to both for and not-for-profit groups who are willing to create their games in accordance with state standards. That way our framework acts as a kind of clearinghouse. Teachers and the general public know that what is published in our community actually educates in addition to entertaining. Developers can work on a project as small-scale as just a particular vocabulary set or grammar concept. Or they can go whole hog and make a full-scale, MMORPG for an entire, say, year's worth of language instruction. Or anywhere in between. What unifies them is a common set of standards and a common performance database so that users, regardless of where they start or what they do, know a.) where they are in acquiring the language and b.) what games/missions, etc. will take them to the next level.

Another way of thinking about this framework from the user's experience is like Marvel's comics universe of characters and worlds.

We would like to kick this off with a forum and see where to go from there, who wants to develop what. You can find us at http://www.parthalan.com/forums/forum/parthalan-development-...