Wanna add the internet onto the list.
I learned a great deal from English and Language Arts in my education. I think it’s a matter of interest and perseverance.
Enligsh
For my English skills I would like to thank early 2000’s XBOX LiveThis user has been removed for violating content policy
So true… Exposure to English (plus being forced to speak it during my PhD) is what helped me learn, even without never taking a course.
Having text only team chats in Age of Empires was how I learned to type so quickly an accurately when I was 12. Can’t coordinate troop movements if it takes 45 sec to type a plan.
I have the ungrateful job of teaching English. I have two types of students. Screenies and non-screenies. The former are like this meme, they pick up a lot from popular culture, games, etc, and are often bored with classes. Then you have the latter group, they have very little exposure to English and usually very little interest as well. A third group exists, and they’re the kids that are in between and do the work in class.
Now one would think that getting everyone into the first group would make my job easy, however, those kids are usually a special subset of kids who will learn independently just from their interests. The other two groups could do hour for hour exactly the same as the Screenies, but they would never reach that proficiency level without other instruction. On the other hand, a lot of screenies do poorly at formal English, like grammar, spelling and word choice, because much of their learning is casual.
So long story short, to the meme, yeah, I know.
Fkn skibidi screenies, fr fr.
On the other hand, a lot of screenies do poorly at formal English, like grammar, spelling and word choice, because much of their learning is casual.
Gotta read actual books, not just listen to movie/game dialogue. (Short-form news articles and textual social media probably don’t cut it either, just because news is written to be understood even by people with poor reading skills and social media discussions are too casual.)
Thank you for your service 🫡
One of my best friends learned English with her mom watching Scooby Doo 🥹
So Scooby Doo is understandably sentimental to her, I’ve always thought it was really cute
Nice. I bet it prepared her for a world where greedy old white are usually the real cultprit while they try to distract everyone with theatrics.
MMOs (especially runescape) for me, nothing like trading in falador park to hone those typing skills
WoW for me. Interacting with other people helped me learn a lot faster.
King’s Quest and Space Quest with an English dictionary next to me. Text-parser games so no way around it. But I was so stoked on the games that I learned English with glee.
Thine story is similar to mine, except thou didst learn with Kings Quest, whereas I learned with Ultima VII.
This reminds me of a story someone posted about learning Japanese while playing the Yakuza games, only to be told by a native speaker that while their pronunciation was great, they spoke like a thug/delinquent.
It makes me wonder if any foreign speakers learned English from Mafia movies and speak with a stereotypical mob accent as a result.
Any game recommendations for a person working on Mandarin?
This is kinda how I’ve been learning Spanish (minus the parents thing)
It was Gunbound for me. Before there was regional servers I was that kid that could speak English, Spanish and Portuguese.
