RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes

DAISHI · **07-26-2010, 02:53 PM**

Iroh Wrote:
DAISHI Wrote:Yes but I'm not going to try and RP with a French speaker. Language barrier is too high, I'd rather roleplay with someone with lower language barriers.

You don't have to worry. Most people in Europe nowadays speak English if not a few other languages. ESPECIALLY people who are on the internet a lot. They are taught it at young ages, in school.

America though? They try to begin teaching us other languages when we're teenagers. Yet another reason why our school system is full of fail...

The school system isn't as bad as you think. There is a lot of alarmism though.

I can speak other stuff I just prefer not to. I don't like having to think through what I'm going to say before I say it (in terms of making sure I'm correct).

Iroh · **07-26-2010, 03:00 PM**

DAISHI Wrote:The school system isn't as bad as you think. There is a lot of alarmism though.

I can speak other stuff I just prefer not to. I don't like having to think through what I'm going to say before I say it (in terms of making sure I'm correct).

Having been through our school system, and over the years having seen the majority of results in others from our school system, I believe we're just going to need to agree to disagree here. Wink

And that's the benefit, also, of teaching children to speak other languages at an early age. Later in life, they don't need to go slow and think what they want to say before they say it. They can literally just 'switch' how they think, and speak at least two languages (often more) fluently. It is something I envy.

DAISHI · **07-26-2010, 03:03 PM**

There's often no pressure for fluency in the U.S. though. I live in Texas so Spanish is something I don't have to worry about, because we speak it all the time at stores here and with neighbors. But there's no pressure on me to be fluent in, say, French.

ArmachiA · **07-26-2010, 03:13 PM**

Pfft, being fluent in anything but English in America? Perish the thought!

Asyria · **07-26-2010, 03:21 PM**

Hehe yeah us French Canadians -need- to be fluent in English... or live far from the big cities. Montreal is almost 100% bilingual and there's even people that barely speak French or not at all in there.
As was mentioned, most internet-savvy people speak English, but I'm not 100% sure about European's willingness to use it for RP. As I said, I've seen France-based guilds in other games and they RP'd in French all the time.
That said, they remained a minority.
I'm glad to be bilingual but if your first language is English and you're in a mmo, there's really no need to know other languages.

Iroh · **07-26-2010, 03:22 PM**

ArmachiA Wrote:Pfft, being fluent in anything but English in America? Perish the thought!

Well as you can see above, the exception to that is sometimes Spanish. Wink

DAISHI Wrote:There's often no pressure for fluency in the U.S. though. I live in Texas so Spanish is something I don't have to worry about, because we speak it all the time at stores here and with neighbors. But there's no pressure on me to be fluent in, say, French.

And you are correct, there is no pressure here to speak, say, French or German or Japanese or something. I just wish that younger children were given the option, I suppose. I feel it would broaden young minds to realize America isn't the only country on the earth at a young age.

Just a wish of mine!

But back on topic, I don't think we'll have to worry about running into people who speak another language and having to incorporate that into game lore. I just don't see it happening a lot, and when it does, I just don't really see myself interacting with them... unless they TRY to interact with me... then I might attempt to see what they want.

Faust · **07-26-2010, 05:58 PM**

http://xkcd.com/771/#

The new xkcd comic seems relevant to some of the earlier discussion.

As for being bilingual, you learn languages differently when you're younger versus when you're older. Learning at an early age, you can learn the language nonnatively as if it were a native language. When you're older, the parts of your brain that allow this are no longer elastic enough to achieve that kind of learning, and you almost have to learn new languages by translating from your native one.

An amusing phenomenon is that some children who are raised bilingually can't even translate from one language to the other effectively. They're housed in the brain without any significant connection at all. Compare this to people who learn in secondary school, and they can barely learn a new language at all without knowing what words and phrases mean in their original language.

But this is far from the most ineffective aspect of the US education system.

Midaja · **07-26-2010, 06:58 PM**

I had French classes for 9 years, English 8 years, and Im sooooo much better in talking English than French Big Grin

And dont be so sure about every European speaking English... Im always surprised how many german people just dont care about English and as a result how many of them are hardly able to communicate on a higher level then "hello, my name is xyz, how are you?".

Iroh · **07-26-2010, 07:05 PM**

Midaja Wrote:And dont be so sure about every European speaking English... Im always surprised how many german people just dont care about English and as a result how many of them are hardly able to communicate on a higher level then "hello, my name is xyz, how are you?".

It's definitely a cultural thing that doesn't spread ALL over Europe, yes. I've been told by a couple European friends that both France and Germany have a more 'proud' culture (overall, not everyone obviously believes this) in that they don't really believe any language but their own is 'required.' Like American culture in that respect, where instead of hearing that why someone doesn't know anything except English is "because they have no need for it," instead you hear things like "everyone should speak our language because we're so influential in the world."

I wish that I spoke like... an insane number of languages though... like, 30 languages. Maybe one day I'll try and start working on that. Wink

It's very cool to me though how much you can learn about a culture though by learning it's language. For example, in Danish the term "Hygge" means... well, it's really HARD to translate. It's like, a cozy feeling... at home... with family... or just comfortable, warm, content, and... tranquil. But even with me explaining it like that, it's still hard to translate, because it's just a word that NO other language has to describe a specific feeling/occurrence. It says a lot about their culture that they have such a word.

All different countries have stuff like that. It's cool to me, and it's also interesting when I try to find certain American terms that no other country seems to have words for. Big Grin

ArmachiA · **07-26-2010, 07:08 PM**

I'm pretty fluent in Japanese and have problems reading their Kanji/Katakana/Hiragana. I really wish I would have learned it earlier so I could read it better.

Tyme · **07-26-2010, 07:25 PM**

I dunno, I think knowing Chinese is pretty important when you're playing an MMO...

How else am I supposed to harass the RMTs?

Ã¤Â½Â Ã¥Â¦ÂˆÃ¥Â¦ÂˆÃ©Â‚Â£Ã¤Â¹ÂˆÃ¨ÂƒÂ–: Ã¥ÂÂƒÃ¥Â¤Â§Ã©Â”Â…Ã©Â¥ÂÃ§ÂšÂ„Ã¦Â—Â¶Ã¯Â¼ÂŒÃ¥Â¥Â¹Ã¥ÂÂƒÃ¥Â®ÂŒÃ¤ÂºÂ†Ã¯Â¼Â

Sorry... that's a really lame your mother joke I came up with when I started learning Chinese. It basically says that your mom is so fat that she ate out communism. In China, the communistic belief that everyone gets the same as everyone else is called 'everyone eating out of a big pot'. So it says, your mom is so fat when everyone ate from the big pot, she ate it all! ... it works better in Chinese... =X

Tadrith · **07-28-2010, 02:49 PM**

I've said this before, but I guess with the influx of additions to the community I should repeat this here.

While German, Japanese, Spanish and the like may not exist in Eorzea, other languages do exist, as noted in the Hyur race description:

Quote:One of the HyurÃ¢Â€Â™s strengths is the staggering variety of languages and social institutions they exhibit.

What my group of roleplayers did in FFXI was act it out as though different languages were just different dialects, and autotranslate (PLEASE let there be autotranslate in FFXIV) were "commontonuge" or "trade language" terms that anyone speaking any dialect could understand.

Even if there aren't any other cannon languages in FFXIV, it's not hard to bend lore and add them by stating that different dialects of a language exist. To not do so could create racist divides among the RP community, and I don't want to see that. I like to think we have a little more depth than our "1337 or f41lz" uber no-life players.

« Next Oldest \| Next Newest »
Pages (3): « Previous 1 2 3

Languages

RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes