FFXIV to learn a language

[Paladinleeds]

So, I'm considering getting a friend into FFXIV. They don't have time for gaming since they're practicing the English language atm, and I wanted to ask, how good a tool do people think FFXIV (and other multiplayer, or maybe even single player games) is for practicing and mastering a language? I'm hoping I can convince them, be nice to get them on Odin and able to help them out and stuff.

[Lunavi]

I would say it is pretty good practice as there is quite literally a lot of reading in the game (and reading and speaking/writing in a "real" environmnt are imo the best ways to learn a language). Just sure be to help correct them on the English as no one else likely will as they are used too people who do not speak it as their first language.

(see what I did there? )

[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.)

[Atoli]

The English used in the game's text is pretty old-timey, if it is also littered with "flavour" like the pirate dialect in Limsa, it can be really hard to understand anything at all, especially to someone who is still learning (I know at least I dropped my attempt to play in English because of that..).
The English the players speak is often very faulty, either because they also aren't native speakers or ARE native speakers but - because it's the internet - appearently don't know how English works anymore ^^°

Overall, I wouldn't call the game a good place to learn the language. But people learn the fastest when they do something they enjoy, so...yeah.

[Paladinleeds]

snip

Funny ya should mention that actually, I was talking with her today and said "brolly" (slang for umbrella), she thought I'd said bra by accident, I said I was gonna hold her brolly for her, so that misinterpretation caused all manner of awkwardness for the both of us. But yeah, when I'm speaking to her about it, I'd make sure I explain things in solid English. I've already learned I need to be careful with my Yorkshire slang. But yeah, I'm a bit worried about that now that I think about it. I thought it'd be a good tool, but it seems I was wrong. That said, I wouldn't know as I've never played my game in anything other than English of which I am a native speaker.

[Fortified]

Honestly I'm a native English speaker and I can have trouble understanding the psudo-Shakespearean at times, especially with the Limsa NPCs.