Learning Languages
No, not programming languages. Human languages.
Growing up as an immigrant in the Philippines, I was exposed to a variety of cultures along the way. Since English is taught as a main subject in K-12, you would think that I would naturally become fluent in it. But that wasn’t the case, as the locals mainly converse in Filipino; while English is the country’s second official language, it’s actually uncommon to come across people who can speak fluent English.
This lack of practical use was the reason why, despite having spent a decade studying the language in school by the time I was sixteen, I still couldn’t use English in any meaningful capacity then.
I didn’t really notice this constraint at the time, because there was never an occasion when I had other choice but to use English — until I started playing an online game and had to interact with foreign players. That’s when it struck me that I didn’t have a proper language environment to immerse myself in and that hindered the development of my language skills.
Game & Learn
Around early 2000s, I started playing this online game called Ragnarok Online. This title was so popular at the time that the company expanded its operation all across Asia, with each country having their own local servers to support the tens of thousands of concurrent players.
The game contents were set in English, presumably it was easier than to translate everything into Filipino. Still, the players communicated in the local tongue because barely anyone knew how to speak English. This meant that most players, including myself, couldn’t understand much of the scripted dialogues and lore; we just clicked the buttons to skip through the texts as fast as possible so we could continue on our adventure.
For the first two years in this virtual world, I did pick up a few advanced words here and there — “quagmire” and “doppelganger” are two of such examples — but in terms of fluency, I gained nothing in return of spending 90% of my allowances to pay for the game membership fees.
One day, a friend handed me a suspicious-looking CD and claimed that he had found a “hacked” version of the game. I was concerned that the files might contain malware, but I couldn’t resist the idea of what a “hacked” game would look like. As it turned out, it was an installer for a custom version of the game, and there were players from all over the world playing in that private server.
Getting hold of that disc would prove to be one of the early turning points in my life. (Thanks, Kevin.)
As I mentioned earlier: I had already been studying English in school for a long time then. But it wasn’t until I joined that international server that I realized I didn’t really know English.
(Our school curriculum was setup to make sure that students would master the rote mechanics of the grammar and vocabularies to score well in tests; it wasn’t uncommon that a student who scored A+ in English and could recite the definition of many thousand words, yet still unable to carry a simple conversation.
Just like it’s impossible to reconstruct the flavor of a dish by just consuming the individual ingredients, nobody can really learn to speak a language by picking up parts and pieces in random intervals.)
A German player would try to chat with me, but it would take me triple the amount of time to muster up anything coherent in response. As you can imagine, this handicap proved quite detrimental to my ability to befriend other players and take part in activities.
I really wanted to succeed in the game, and there’s just no way around the language barrier. I needed to communicate with other players to negotiate during trades, team up for missions, and follow quest instructions — I had to improve my English to be able to do all those things.
In the next two years, while my grades and in-person social skills plummeted, my English fluency instead grew in an astonishing pace. I was spending dozens of hours every week in game as I was getting scolded by my dad for dropping my studies; neither of us know that I was actually setting myself up for success.
The story above was the biggest reason why I could quickly assimilate after I moved to the US — being able to strike up casual conversations was an advantage that many Asian students didn’t have in the beginning.
So yeah, dad, I guess indulging in video games has its upside after all.
Immersion and Language Learning
All things considered, I’m sure that playing an online game is not the most efficient way to acquire a language. But for a teenager, it was the most effective way to develop a strong interest in learning rather than being bogged down by a structured curriculum; the continuing immersion and the social mechanisms of a MMORPG were the perfect combination for me at the time.
(Note the particular reference to the MMORPG genre. Video games in general provide an immersive experience, but different genres seem to lend themselves to different effects when it comes to linguistic development. For instance: A person who likes action fighting games isn’t going to consume as much texts as another who enjoys the mystery adventure genre.
In my experience, MMORPG tops that pyramid for all the factors I brought up earlier, especially with regards to building conversational fluency as the players continue to socialize with others in the game world.)
It was natural to branch out to additional things once I had a better handle of the language: I began reading the in-game lore, then moved onto consuming other media in English, so on and so forth. The rest is history.
Years later, when I started learning Spanish and Japanese, I chose to follow the more conventional approaches of classroom instructions and self-learning. Their effect was mediocre at best:
Since I minored in Spanish, I mastered many of the standard components such as vocabularies and grammars, but I struggle to use the language in any meaningful capacity outside of the classroom. Unless I go out of my way to engage with Spanish speakers, there just aren’t many casual opportunities that I get to practice the language.
Despite having consumed a large quantity of Japanese media growing up, I picked up very little of the language along the way. And self-teaching is doubly more challenging than learning it in a classroom — whereas it takes only a minute for an instructor to explain the use of a quirky grammatical rule, you could spend ten minutes searching online and still can’t find a definite answer.
The biggest roadblock, however, is that I no longer have a convenient and immersive environment to use a foreign language on a daily basis. In the online game, there was no discomfort of communicating with strangers in person; we couldn’t see each other and didn’t know about each other’s identity. We had more urgent agendas of “advancing in game” than to waste time to pick on each other’s linguistic flaws. All in all, it didn’t matter if other people were native speakers or not: Most of us didn’t come from an English speaking society anyway, so we didn’t have any choice but to communicate in this common tongue.
A lot of those conditions are reversed in the classroom. The awkward sense of speaking with a foreign language is heightened, especially if the other person isn’t at the same level as you do, and some students are bound to be much further ahead or behind than the average. The shared context is also much weaker in comparison to the former scenario: The students only gathered together because they are taking the same class to learn a target language, and there’s often not a lot of common interests to keep the conversations engaging and flow naturally. But the biggest shortcoming? Rather than pushing themselves to get their ideas across through creative phrasing, students could always fall back to their original language as an easy way out.
(I could always try to find another online game filled with players that speak the target language I’m learning. But I’m well past the age of being able to play games for several hours everyday — because there’s this tedious adult thing called “job” that gets in the way of everything else — and, frankly, I’m just not that interested in modern MMORPGs anymore, given the litany of ways that they are designed to manipulate player behaviors.)
Ironically, I still can’t use those two languages well enough, even though I have spent thousands of hours studying them — it’s nowhere close to the English skills I picked up many years ago.
Finding an Environment
The following seems to be the factors that contributed to my fluency building:
Rather than using translation, I’m using the language itself as the primary means of understanding the communication and the media.
The activities are available at any time, and there are always new contents or recurring incentives to keep me coming back for more.
There are strong motivators to partake in the activities besides language learning, whether it’s entertainment, socialization, or anything else.
After all these years, unfortunately, I have yet to find anything that come close to replicating the full spectrum immersion of playing an online game with an international community — short of living in a foreign society, that is.
You might be wondering — “Why don’t you just focus on studying the language itself, rather than worrying about other things on the side?”
That is a perfectly valid question, and here’s my rationale:
I only have so much time and motivation on any given day — and with work and errands in the mix — it’s just hard to dedicate time for studying. And if I’m overexerting myself day after day, I wouldn’t be able to maintain a positive attitude towards it, considering that mastering a language is a multiyear pursuit. It’s my best bet to find ways to combine this activity with with long term hobbies, so I can keep up with it for years to come.
That said, a major advantage of living in today’s world is having access to smartphones, along with their large variety of apps and fast mobile networks. These technological advancements only reached consumers a little over a decade ago. With some tweaks and adapting new habits, a smartphone can bridge many of the immersion gaps that I have described earlier.
To give an example: Thanks to a web browser dictionary plug-in that adds pronunciation guides, I have enjoyed two hundred chapters of a Japanese web novel over the past year. I started out by having to check the definition for almost every word, but these days I only have to do it when I need to review a handful of words and phrases.
(That said, a smartphone can only do so much. There are some parts of language learning that do require direct interactions with other native speakers, and experiencing the local culture in person will help clarify certain nuances — for instance, knowing the usage of the phrase “how do you do” is different from knowing that this greeting isn’t as commonly used in modern day America.
Virtual reality devices may soon become the medium that can check all those boxes, but portability and convenience remain challenging at the moment, not to speak of the severe privacy issues that come with many of those products.)
Unfortunately, grammar and conjugation are still challenging to integrate into this approach — even back then in the online game world, advanced grammar was the one thing that I never managed to get right. While simulating an immersive setup do a great job of maintaining the inertia of language use, there are no good alternatives for learning the structures and rules; they just have to be memorized.
(I have never had any 1-on-1 lessons, so I can’t speak for them either. My guess is that they can be a worthwhile investment since you’d be communicating with a native speaker, provided that you have the means to take them regularly anyway.)
Steve Kaufmann, a polyglot who understands over 20 languages, has something to say about the importance of repeated exposure:
The best way to learn a language is to massively ingest it, by listening and reading. Listening and reading are so powerful. If you can read the books, you know the language. To get to know a language takes a lot of time and a lot of interacting with it – and a lot of that time has to be on your own. I think it’s better to work on comprehension and vocabulary without pressure to reproduce the language (by speaking).
Allow me to go off a tangent a little bit and also tell you a story.
While the world has become more interconnected over the past two decades, the access to various kinds of information is still very much gated by the lack of quality localization. Despite that translation technologies have matured significantly over the years, the output is still spotty when it comes to handling colloquial texts that contain slang, abbreviations, and homophones — that’s not even considering that the original source may be littered with misspelling and made-up words.
And with multimedia, automated closed-captioning can only translate from concrete sources of input, such as enunciated speeches or spelled out texts. If those input sources aren’t clear or aren’t suitable for the tool — such as an OCR scanner trying to capture ancient scripts engraved in a wall — then disappointment is to be expected.
(An important dimension that the audience could miss is the cultural understanding and nuances. This is quite common when watching a foreign show or film: It often takes more than being able to comprehend the spoken words to know what’s going on in some scenes, especially with non-verbal communications. If that scenario isn’t explicitly described in caption, this context may be entirely lost to the viewer.)
In other words, there are still plenty of good reasons to learn new languages. While the technologies are advanced enough to take care of many inconveniences, they are still far from perfect.
This reminds me of a conversation from some years ago: My friend insisted that there’s not much value in learning languages nowadays because we all have a universal translation machine in our pocket. Rather than investing our effort into something that yields diminishing return — “it would be better if we just focus on improving the underlying technologies of artificial intelligence”, he said.
(By the way: That’s such an software engineer’s mindset. Software engineers tend to view every situation as a problem that can be solved with better technology, as if programming is a magic wand.)
I think he forgot to take into the account that smartphones don’t have an infinite battery and that there are more reasons to learn a language other than for communication. If nothing else, I’m doing it just because it’s a rewarding pursuit — with the added benefit of broadening my worldview.