Trilderberg

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Posts posted by Trilderberg

  3. Posted

    I read a lot of speculative fiction, and every year, the new Hugo award winner for best novel gets inserted somewhere near the top of my list. The 2017 winner was The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin. The first two installments of Jemisin's Broken Earth series won best novel (the third installment is nominated at the moment). As far as I know, Jemisin is the first writer to win two Hugos for Best Novel consecutively. I hadn't gotten around to reading The Fifth Season, the first in the series, so I decided it was time to check it out.

     

    The book was ambitious, evocative, and unique, and looking back, I really disliked it. Generally I'm not picky about fiction. I enjoy pulp at least as much as more philosophically rich science fiction. Reading this book, I realized that the reason I disliked it so much wasn't something reasonable like weak characters, or pacing (objectively every aspect of Jemisin's storytelling seemed pretty solid). I think it was because when I imagined the setting in my head, It looked stupid to me. That's it.

     

    I found this story largely uninteresting, even though I enjoy stories which are much less high-brow, but aesthetically more appealing to me, such as The Expanse series. As far as I can tell, the only thing that unifies my favorite Sci-fi is a vaguely hard or sleek look (even if the look is just in my head). As a result, I often find very interesting classics by Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, or Kurt Vonnegut largely inaccessible, whereas less ambitious books, and books which I can imagine well, like the Culture series are totally enjoyable to me.

     

    Has anyone else had a similar problem enjoying a book which is totally interesting, but aesthetically unappealing?

    Have you found a way to overcome this?

  4. Posted

    On 5/9/2018 at 12:31 PM, brkl said:

    I teach English in Finland. I think it's easy to start thinking there's something special about games that helps people learn languages. However, I think that's largely bias that comes from our personal history as gamers. Games have a few qualities that are good for language learning, but it's mostly social interaction that you can thank for the excellent language skills some kids have. So it's not playing, usually, but participating in different communities related to gaming. 

     

     

     

    I think you're right. Like I was saying, these kids prefer online multiplayer games that you can imagine Russian, preteen shitlords playing. They are not primarily playing immersive, narrative-driven games. So presumably the social aspects of the games could be what's helping them. That said, many of my students that age are involved in some English speaking community online, but they aren't all as proficient as the kids that are focused on games. To me that indicates that something more is happening with the gamer kids.

  5. Posted

    2 hours ago, Saltimbanco said:

    I think it's a matter of instant gratification. Taking classes and learning a second language can often be enriching, and pay off in the future. Learning what the hell this item you just picked up does, pays off right now. It doesn't feel like studying, it's a challenge like any other in the game. With each thing learned you're adding tools to your repertoire with which you can tackle future challenges. It has a high barrier of entry, to be sure. It's like a cumulative distribution, there's a lot to learn in the beginning, but then it plateaus and you only run into words you don't know every once in a while. If you can get past that initial daunting period where you don't know anything, then it gets really easy. Half the time you won't even need a dictionary and you'll pick up what is being said through context alone. However, in this generations, and the tail-end of the last one, subtitles in Brazilian Portuguese, and even voice acting at times have become far more common. I can't if kids now would feel the same impetus to learn English that I did, or if they do, whether it would take the same form for them that it did for me.

     

     

    I think that's true. Games are not only designed to be immersive, they're also designed to be addictive, which is more than I can say about my Russian textbook.

     

    I'm curious what games you played, other than Chrono Cross. Did you play a lot of JRPGs? Games from that era were obviously less reliant on audio dialogue, so the learning experience would be more reading oriented, which could be better practice depending on the type of game.

     

    How do you think your pronunciation is?

  6. Posted

    1 hour ago, Dosed said:

    I'm an EFL teacher currently teaching in Vietnam, with 3 years of experience in Madrid, and I've noticed the same thing. It tends to be the teenage boys who pick up those kinds of things I guess due to the stereotypical idea of teenage boys spending far too much online. However, depending on the age  I think it's common for boys to be the brasher, louder ones even when the girls are often capable of producing really good language too. They often say super specific things to games such as "get wrecked" or "pentakill" in often kind of ridiculous situations, which I think is really funny, but probably not all that useful for them in general. 

     

    When you say proficient do you mean in the sense of the CEFR like completely fluent C2 level or just much better than their classmates and more competent? Coz I'm not sure about Poland but the level of English in Spain (don't know much about Vietnam just yet), particularly in terms of speaking, for younger people isn't crazy good yet. But I do think it helps them. It certainly exposes them more to the spoken language and it's even better since it's something they're clearly interested in. 

     

    When I was learning Spanish I found video games to be pretty useful in terms of listening to the language, but my level of Spanish at the time was good enough that anything I was learning was a bonus rather than it being confusing. I learned a lot of random stuff  that way. I also almost exclusively played games I'd already played before in English so that definitely helped. I actually found watching kids TV shows way more useful in terms of exposure. I think a lot of the kids pick stuff up from streamers too who tend to use English memes or expressions anyway. 

     

     

    I only have a passing familiarity with the CEFR, so I can't say much about how these kids would stack up. The thing that sets them apart most clearly is their conversational ability.  In this sense, they're far above the intended level of the class, or the aggregate level of a similarly aged class with no gamers in it. In addition to using gaming slang, and sort of preteen internet words like 'cringe,' they use a lot of informal constructions that I assume they've heard, and are now emulating. The other day, one of these students told me that a situation "would be pretty rough." for more than one reason, that's something that an EFL teacher wouldn't teach a kid to say.

    Another thing that's interesting is that they're generally playing online multiplayer games, which are less immersive, but obviously offer more opportunities for social interaction. I think it's popular to play up the viability of learning through immersion, for example learning the word for an object by needing to interact with it, as would happen in an adventure game. But in an Overwatch match, the language is more natural, and maybe more available, but also significantly less immersive, or contextualized in the game world. Tactics-oriented language might also be more repetitive.

    I should also say that of about ten of the kids I've met this year that fit this profile, two are girls. So boyishness doesn't seem to explain it to me, although these two are less bombastic than their male counterparts in class.

     

    Also, I've unfortunately never been to Poland. I'm in Russia. Spanish feels about twice as intuitive as Russian to my feeble western mind. Russian is dope, but it's loco. I'm not sure how Polish works, but it could be similar.

      

  7. Posted

    I teach English as a foreign language in Eastern Europe, and I've noticed a type among my students in their teens. Two things distinguish them. First, they are very proficient in English, beyond any level that I would expect from EFL classes alone; Second they all participate in a gaming subculture online.

    I have plenty of proficient students that aren't at all interested in games, but I don't think I've met any that are as capable as these kids. In addition to using pervasive internet lingo, they readily, and correctly use colloquial constructions that no EFL teacher would ever bother teaching. This distinguishes their English from other learners that are simply excellent EFL students, making them seem nativelike in conversation. It's fairly normal in this country for parents to have their kids privately tutored in English, and while this can also distinguish a student, the gamer kids with and without tutors are often comparable to the non-gamer kids that get tutored. I'm not a private tutor, my classes are mostly extracurricular, and often relatively large.

    Most, but not all of these kids are male, and younger teens. Some are clearly well off, but others seem not to be (although all of their parents can afford to put them in a class with me).

     

    Does anyone else have any insight into this?

    Have you encountered any research about language acquisition and video games, specifically games not designed to be educational?