FFXIV to learn a language

[Elim]

The nearly unintelligible FAKE old english that the orginal FFXIV:ARR has(or had, if they fixed it) would NOT be helpful for your friend to read. The expansion dialogue is fine.

[Inori-Yuzuriha]

The nearly intelligible FAKE old english that the orginal FFXIV:ARR has(or had, if they fixed it) would NOT be helpful for your friend to read. The expansion dialogue is fine.

Agree

FFXIV:ARR english is like an alien language

[Berethos]

The nearly intelligible FAKE old english that the orginal FFXIV:ARR has(or had, if they fixed it) would NOT be helpful for your friend to read. The expansion dialogue is fine.

Most of the ARR dialogue is hardly unintelligible for native English speakers (intelligible means it's able to be understood) outside of the more extreme versions spoken by characters like Ramuh, Urianger, and Jacke of the Rogue's Guild (which, like other Limsa NPCs, is meant to model an accent) unless - and I don't mean this as an insult, but it is true - you have a somewhat limited vocabulary, or your only exposure to literature is solely modern works.

Also, to be pedantic, it's not "Old English" at all (which might look something like this "Is hēr ǣnig þe Englisce spricþ?")...it's not even Shakespearean English (which might look a bit like this "To the king god hath his offyce lent / of dread of Iustyce, power and Comaund / hath bid him rule, and willd you to obay,"). You have to get all the way to around the era of Tolkien and CS Lewis (so the 1940s and 50s for the most part) to find English that more closely matches what you see in this game, and even then it is modernized.

Just throwing in a "Mayhap" here and there, the occasional "eth" (for Ramuh) and using an older and more formal sentence structure (again, outside of extremes like Jacke's dialect) should hardly make it hard to read for native English speakers, and certainly doesn't turn it into a nearly unintelligible mess.

[Kurogaea]

The nearly intelligible FAKE old english that the orginal FFXIV:ARR has(or had, if they fixed it) would NOT be helpful for your friend to read. The expansion dialogue is fine.

Read my mind. If your friend started talking like this outside of 14 even English teachers will cringe. I think maybe Wakfu, Elsword, NeverWinter or any game with modern basic lingo will help more. Though you could translate the game as your friend plays, but thats up to you. :/

[Niwashi]

The nearly unintelligible FAKE old english that the orginal FFXIV:ARR has

A couple quibbles about this (apart from the fact that it's not old English at all, just a slightly archaic dialect of modern English). The biggest is that there's nothing fake about it. The writers of this game are quite good at what they're doing, and any time they do incorporate any archaic terms, they're always used correctly. (If they actually were fake, then I'd agree with you. There's nothing more grating than seeing archaic forms thrown around haphazardly and not even conjugated correctly, but I've never seen any trace of that in this game.)

The other is that it only very rarely comes up. Sure, you'll see it in Urianger's poetry, and some very localized bits like Ramuh's dialect, but it's pretty rare otherwise. I'd be more concerned about some of the other dialects. Jacke's dialect can in some places be hard to follow even for native English speakers, and some of the other Lominsans drop vowels in a way that would frustrate learners of the language who still have to occasionally look up words. (It's pretty hard to look something up when its spelling has been adapted to indicate the speaker's accent.)