#440 - How to Become FLUENT in English by Playing Video Games — Stories From Learners Who Did it, and Our Favorite Video Games from Our Childhoods
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All right, Ethan. So the other day we were talking about the impact of video games in the learning process of the people on our team, right? Because we did a survey just to investigate how our team members actually learned English. And this was when we were developing the method that we use today for teaching English. We call it the real life way. If you guys don't know, the real life way is really, really is based on how people actually learned English. I'm going to share today some stories with you guys from a

these people, our team members, you see that to this day, we still learn a lot from video games. Depending what game you play too, you can get such specific vocabulary, right? I think anyone can find a game that might help them to learn

precisely the kind of vocabulary that's going to be helpful in their everyday life. So I'm sharing three lessons today and with Ethan as well that I've learned from all these people, right, who work with us and learn with video games. And for each one of these stories that I'll show, you see why learning with video games is effective, different aspects of it. And I'm also going to share some recommendations of mobile games that you guys can download,

style today, start playing and also benefit from this great medium that is video games. And later we're going to take a blast from the past, right? And talk about some of our favorite video games coming up when we were kids. What does that mean, by the way, if something's a blast from the past? Oh yeah, that's a, I would say a native expression. That means it's something that's like old that gives you just all these great memories.

And it's nostalgic maybe, or reminds you of the good old days. So these are other expressions that you could say. So that's what it means. Like, oh, it's such a blast from the past. This is... And these games, yeah, like I...

actually in revisiting them, we'll share that later, but in going through them again, I just, I don't even know how much time I spent because I was watching different videos. I even wanted to download them again. I was looking up like, how can I install this game again? Me too. That's the same. It's like, if only I had more time, I'd play all these games from my childhood. Anyway, so let's get started with the first story. This one is from Humbert. Now, Humbert is one of our team members.

and he is one of our video producers. If you watch our Learn to Shoot TV lessons, he edits a lot of those. So you can see his fine work on our other channel if you're watching this on YouTube. Totally. Humbert's such a great storyteller. He is so passionate about cinema and video games and medium or media that are used to tell stories. So Humbert's story starts really early in his life. He started playing video games when he was like five or six, I believe, through his father.

that showed to him games like Monkey Island. Do you know Monkey Island? I don't think I know that one. So this one, the theme is like pirates and adventure. And it's like a point and click game, but it gives you all these options of things you can say, things you can do. It's almost like an RPG in the sense. Yeah, like a choose your own adventure, sort of. Would you say that that's descriptive of it? Yeah, I could say that. It sounds more descriptive of it, I would say.

Anyway, so this was the beginning for him of his journey of learning English with video games that continued later with other adventure games. So the cool thing about adventure games is that they're really immersive. They put you in this journey and you have everything that you needed. Yeah.

in one game. It's really engaging. It's just like a movie. You know, it's like a movie that you play, basically. That's how you feel oftentimes. And I was watching some clips of this game, which for me, again, it was just such a blast from the past watching those videos. And I realized, man, this would be great to show on a podcast.

But since it's like from 19... Yeah, it's from 1991 though. But it's so good. Like Lucasfilm, like the LucasArts actually, from George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars. It was his studios that developed this game. And they put so much passion and like love into the art, the pixel art, as we call it. It's really great. I mean, I could get down like playing the original Mario Bros for sure. So...

No qualms here. By the way, what does timeless mean?

A timeless game. A timeless game is a game that if you play, like it was released, let's say, years and years ago, like 20 years ago, just like Monkey Island. And if you play it today, it still holds up or it's still good. Like you still find it like a quality game. That's a great one. It still holds up. Friends is also like a very old series, right? But it's near and dear to our heart. We'd say it also, even though there's a lot of situations that would easily be solved by a smartphone, a lot of aspects of the show, the friendships, the...

challenges that they're facing in that time of their life, all those sorts of things still hold up to make it a great series. Alright, so in this clip I'm gonna share now, you hear me, Izzy, myself speaking because I am dubbing the characters, I'm reading their lines. Hi, my name is Guybrush Threepwood and I want to be a pirate. Yikes! Don't sneak up on me like that. I'm over this way.

Well then, Threepweed! Threepwood. Kybris Threepwood. I see. So, you wanna be a pirate, eh? You look more like a flooring inspector. But if you're serious about pirating, go talk to the pirate leaders. You'll find them in the scum bar. Gosh, thanks! I'll do that. Bye now. I'm off to seek my fortune. Good luck!

Where did you say those pirate leaders were? The scumbar! Right, thanks. Alright, so controlling the character, now you walk to the bar called scumbar and you choose to open door and enter the bar. Now we need to find the pirates, so let's go look for them. Alright, here they are. Let's go talk to them. Let's see what they'll say.

What be wanting, boy? Umm... I-I wanna be a pirate. So what? Why bother us?

Oh my god, I loved everything about that. Like your voiceover was amazing. And like the I forget what it's called, like the 8-bit music or something like that. But this music that just like it's so just such so typical of 90s video games. And just like the whole graphics and everything is so old school. Yeah, that's pretty much I think what's called 8-bit music. Yeah.

So yeah, that's the game that Humbert would play and because it was in English at that point his dad would translate to him. Because it's all in English, right? Yeah, yeah. So he would like, there's a lot of story there, a lot of storytelling. So he'd translate to him and then he'd still, you know, be in touch with English but at that point it was really like on a beginner level.

But in here, I think we can already see some expressions that if you learn English, it's just really great. Did you catch anything? Yeah, I was just so enraptured by your voice acting there and everything and just the magic, the mysticalness of this video game that I wasn't paying so close attention to the vocabulary. But...

For sure, this type of game, I think it's one of the best types to learn English, right? Because to move the story forward, you have to figure out what the NPCs, what these non-playable characters are saying. And being that you have to choose the right response or depending what response you choose, the story can move in one direction or another one. And I laughed when he said, like, you look more like a flooring inspector because that's like so specific and weird and kind of like outside of like the world that I would imagine this game is in.

You look more like a flooring inspector. What is a flooring inspector? What did you say? I'm not a... I mean, it'd be someone who inspects flooring. Flooring is like the... what you put on the ground in your house. So, I guess someone who...

inspects like wood floors maybe to see if there's any warping of the wood or mold or things like this. Could be something like that. What does that even mean? Like it look like a flooring inspector. But anyway, so this is from the very beginning of the game, this very first scene. So that's why I didn't give you any context because it really starts like that. I think back in the day like they didn't bother really giving so much context and it's great because you just get thrown into it. So when he met the guy there, the old guy in the beginning of the game,

He said like, hi there. And then the guy was like looking out of the way and then it's like, yikes, which is an expression you could. Yeah. What is that? You're surprised and kind of scared. You might say, yikes. Scream that if you see a spider.

Yikes, the spider. Yeah. So he said like, don't sneak up on me like that. If you sneak up on someone, it's like you quietly try to go surprise them without them noticing you. And then he said that he could find the pirates in this place called the Scum Bar. What's the play on words there? I mean, Scum is literally, I believe, this...

green stuff that grows in rocks like in rivers, but you can use it as a insult. Like if you call someone, especially you'll hear a collocation like scumbag is an insult. So I imagine because the people who tend to frequent this bar are

Or like pirates and things like this. Or, you know, maybe we could be considered scum because they're not very good people. They cause trouble. And then finally, he says, like, I'm off to seek my fortune when he leaves and goes to you. So, nice collocation there. Reminds me of The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, right? Like, you're going off...

to find your riches, to make money. So seek something is to search for something. That's kind of like a literary word to use for search. And as I said, like I'm off is like when you're about to set off. You're leaving. You're leaving on a journey.

So that was the beginning of a Humber story. And then he followed that like a years later, he started playing Legend of Zelda. So at that point, he understood some things. He'd even ask some of his relatives who lived in the United States like, oh, what does this mean? And he'd go on MSN or Windows Messenger. I don't know if you remember that. It's another throwback. Yeah. Yeah.

Because I had a spark of curiosity, you know, for the language. That's a great sign. I think the best learners have that. What is a spark of something like a spark of curiosity? Well, if you think about the literal meaning of sparks, like to actually make fire, you spark it. Like it's possible to use like rocks to create a spark. Think about that figuratively.

And then you can spark other things, right? A certain emotion or certain skills, certain capacity. And there's ways that we can do that. Or it's something that you feel. Like it's the beginning of something that you feel as well. So a spark of curiosity, just like, wait, I am sensing curiosity in me. So this is the habit of the best learners, right? To use all the opportunities for learning. So that's what Humber did. And playing Legends of Zelda several times.

of that game, iterations. And then later, more recently, Baldur's Gate. Baldur's Gate is like this RPG. It's way more advanced. You get a lot of the voice acting that I did for Monkey Island. If you play Baldur's Gate, it's all there, right? There's different accents. It's really rich. It's an amazing game. And RPG, you mentioned, that's like...

Is it real player game that it stands for? Role playing game. Role playing game. That's right. So if you role play, it means that you're like taking on a character or taking on a role, right? Which is this type of game where it feels kind of realistic, like you're making decisions and so on. It's not necessarily just like a linear game. Just like Monkey Island. Exactly. So I have here one game to share.

That's kind of like RPG, kind of like adventure, but it's so great. It's Harry Potter Hogwarts Mystery. It's a free game. It's a free mobile game that you guys can download and start playing today. Give it a try. And you find a lot of what we discussed here, several expressions. There's some expressions that are more unique to the world of the universe of Harry Potter, but you find really many useful expressions too. And the most important thing here is immersiveness. It's a game that allows you to just really get immersed in it.

So, just like the other ones that I shared. So, to sum up, real context, real language. That's one of the things, one of the benefits of playing video games because it puts you in all these situations where you need to use your English. This is the takeaway, I would say, from Humber's story here for me. Oh, and guys, by the way, if your phone is not set, the language of your phone is not set to English...

you're going to need to do that if you want to play these games that I'm recommending today in English. A lot of times they come already translated to your native language, so you can do that by changing your phone settings. And if that doesn't help, you can just look for the settings inside the game. Just go to the menus, like

change language that can also be possible. Alright, Izzy, don't leave me in the dark. I'm really curious what the next story that you brought us. Right, so the next lesson or the next story here that I have to share shows that learning video games is effective because we get thrown into a universe of advanced vocabulary. Like if you're thrown into something like you can imagine like throwing a person into a pool, a swimming pool. So they're just like... You're grabbing them and tossing them there. So...

You get thrown into this, like a world of new words and expressions when you play video games, just like we saw. So that first lesson that we saw, the first story, I think it already has a lot of the elements that I want to share. But now I'm going to get more specific and talk about vocabulary. So in my case, this is my story now. So I have a claim to make that...

A large percent of my vocabulary in English comes from video games. Now I'm saying a large percentage because I don't want to say like a 50%. I'm not sure. It's really hard to know. But one way that I can know this is true or it could be easily like 50% is that the more I look at words and try and remember where they came from originally...

I have this association with that particular video game, you know? So for example, I have here, I listed five games here that I've played that they...

They gave me vocabulary related to different topics. And these are pretty popular games. So I want to see if you can guess. For example, if I tell you a game where you can learn a lot of like a city, society, and politics, like vocabulary, what would be a nice game for that? SimCity? SimCity, exactly. Exactly. So like the word budget. I totally learned that from SimCity. I remember specifically the moment. Employment rate.

Like such a long expression, like what is that? And I remember I looked at it, I was like, ah, okay. And never forgot because I was using it. And I would see like employment rates are low, right? People were, what is that? Employment rates or unemployment rates are soaring. You'll hear that quotation a lot with soar, which-

To soar is birds soar, they fly. So if you imagine unemployment rates are soaring, it means that they're going up very quickly. And that's something that you see in SimCity as a problem that you may need to solve. So you never forget it because you're pretending to be a mayor there. You know, it's really... That's a really good point that video games, not only do you pick up words, like when you're reading, you pick up a lot of words, right? But in video games, you tend to, as you said, not only be...

passively like reading them or hearing them, but then usually needing to use them right away to accomplish something as well. So that's a really good reason to use video games to learn. Well, this one is going to be a little bit harder, but business, what would be a game that I could learn business English with? Do you have anything in mind? Yeah, nothing comes to mind right now. I feel like you're going to say something and I'll probably know it. Do you know, these are computer games, so like a roller coaster tycoon? Yeah, I loved that when I was a kid.

Yeah. So this one is about building and managing amusement parks. Right. What is that an amusement park? It's a place that has roller coasters and different types of attractions. Sometimes even, I don't know, like clowns, entertainers, things like this. Like Disney World? Disney World is a great example. Yeah. And when they have a certain theme, you could also call them theme parks. And you said roller coaster, which are those wild trains that you get on. Yeah.

So anyway, this game allows you to build amusement parks and there's so much like word profit. I remember, I remember the day, even the park that I was building was like, Oh, what is profit? And I looked it up and I discovered the meaning in our advertisement or employee. Right. And many other words that I took note here.

But yeah, right. So just a couple more. So let's say house vocab, like construction or maybe social interactions. The Sims. The Sims. There's like a theme here, SimCity, Roller Coaster Tycoon. It's like all these building video games. Yeah. Simulation games. You probably know The Sims, by the way. And this is going to be, let me already go ahead and say, this is the recommendation that I have for you guys here. The Sims Mobile.

perfect game. They made it so much better. It was kind of bad years ago, but now it feels just like the game that you play on computer or console. And it's free to play. So, amazing. And why is The Sims Grateful in English? It's pretty obvious, right? Because there's all these objects, types of appliances, right? House objects and maybe also social interactions. So, I remember learning stuff like Hangouts

or to invite someone over. You can even learn recipes and so on because you cook things in the game. There's all sorts of different careers that you can have your Sim choose a job and work their way up through the ranks and probably learn specific vocabulary, but depending on the career. Because it's simulating life, it's going to touch on so many different aspects of life, of everyday vocabulary. Yeah, and in the case of The Sims, it's such a sandbox-type game.

Right. What's a sandbox? A sandbox, well, literal sandbox is where kids go and play and they can build a variety of things the way they want to build it or whatever they want to build. And that's a sandbox. A sandbox video game is a game that allows you to do whatever. Also, maybe it doesn't have necessarily a clear goal. You create your own goal. So, The Sims is kind of like that, even though you can find goals there too, but...

You can create your own story in the same way like Minecraft. Every person's going to have a unique experience playing that game, right? No two people are going to go through the same thing. So most... Well, I don't know most video games nowadays, but many video games, especially traditional ones like Mario that we talked about earlier, it's very linear, right? Pretty much everyone's experience playing is going to be very similar. But...

Another sandbox game is like the newer Zelda games like Breath of the Wild and so on that there's so many possibilities that they put into this world and everything that every person is going to go through the game in a unique way. That's a very nice point about open world games, which are also sandbox games, expressions.

Minecraft also comes to mind. I learned a lot of vocabulary about tools and different types of terrain, elements, minerals, which is kind of random, but it may be useful. You never know. So like pickaxe, I learned that from... Because you may think of Minecraft as something new, but I started playing like in 2010. Yeah, I remember that too. It's funny now my nephews are all about Minecraft. And finally, the third story and third lesson that I have to share is about

The fact that learning with video games is so effective because you get so many social opportunities. Now we talked about immersion, vocabulary, and with online games, like where you get to interact with other people, you get that plus the ability to really speak with real people in user English. There I got literally like typing. It's pretty unique thing about online games. And Marcelo, this other team member who works with us at RealLife,

He's one of our software developers. If you guys download the app, you'll see a lot of his work there, right? With flashcards and everything. And he says, he claims that he developed his fluency in English through video games first. So by the time he started working and using his English to accomplish things in life, he kind of owed that to video games and more specifically online games. So it all started with a game called Diablo. Like Humber's experience, Diablo is...

an adventure game, you could say, right? It's RPG sort of a game. And he would always play with a dictionary next to him. Always, like he was saying. Just like Rodrigo, another software developer from our team. I told you, like, there's so many cases of this on our team and I bet, like, out there as well in the world you can see many people who

improve his English this way. Well, it just goes to show too that something as innocent and playful as trying to play a video game can ultimately like lead you to your life's work. It's amazing to see that kind of story. And we, like we said, I think more than half of our team has a similar story related to video games. For a good reason, right? Like based on everything we're saying here, maybe, I don't know about you guys, but I'm feeling like, man, I want to play something right after this lesson. Yeah.

So Diablo is an RPG where you build your character. And the reason what Marcelo was telling me about this was that he actually needed to learn English and to know what these words are that you can see on screen now, like 10% faster cash rate or 3% life stolen per hits in order for him to make the...

better decisions for like what weapon to use, right? What path to take. So he needed to know specifically the stats and the specs, the specification of weapons and stuff. Otherwise he wouldn't succeed in the game. So he said that initially this was like what really got his attention. But from there, he started learning more about the lore, right? The story in the game.

And that's how it started. And then that evolved into online games, which are kind of like Diablo, like you saw on screen here with the character that you build and stuff. But imagine that, you know, online setting where there's other players walking around and obviously you're able to interact with them. That's the beauty of online games. So maybe you're familiar with the term World of Warcraft. Mm-hmm.

I think it kind of like a... Infamous for being dangerously addictive. Yeah. We see it being referenced in many TV series and movies exactly because they're like really random people playing. It's not just like gamers, right? People get like sucked into it and completely disappear. Right. So another game that he would play was Tibia.

similar game and it's important it was important for him to learn more at that point and start using his english because he needed to you know join a guild or trade items right or join quests and raids you know so all of that like if you don't speak english though how could you even get into it because it's all done by people right it's not set by the computer and then you're

you're playing real time with other people right so like you also need to be able to communicate and i imagine in this kind of game where you're going on quests which is generally that you choose some sort of mission that you are cooperating with other people who are playing the game with you that you need to know how to communicate right so if people are from different countries then you have to have a good enough level of english to communicate in such a way to successfully achieve

the quest. Yeah, and English is the language that is used by pretty much all players, I'd say, to play these games. And if you guys are playing any online games like this, look for an American server, right? Or an international server, because these days there are a lot of local servers and then you only find people from your country, which is okay too. But if you want to play for learn, just like we did back in the day when there weren't local servers...

then you can do that. Something that used to happen too, and I imagine it still happens, is there was a lot of online forums for different video games. So you could talk with different people who are fans of the games about different things related to the games or talk about different...

aspects related to advancing in the game or beating the game, completing the game, right? Yeah. So these kind of things too would be important to understand and be able to communicate in English. And even maybe just be an idea if you're someone who already plays video games, then it might be a good idea. Even if you don't need any help with a video game or anything, you could like look for these forums just as an excuse to use your English skills

to talk about something that you're passionate about. Yeah. An easy way to get into that, I would say, is on YouTube, right? You can just look up a video or somebody's playing it and in their comment section, you'll be able to see discussions happening there. For sure. Or I imagine on, I haven't used these sites so much, but like Twitch

and so on that you can actually watch people playing live right and I think there's a chat and stuff so you can be chatting with other people who are watching the live stream anyway so a recommendation of a mobile game that I have for you guys is Albion Online I want to spell that it's like A-L-B-I-O-N Albion or Albion I'm not even sure how to pronounce that I've learned about this game like years ago but I'm not sure I'll leave the link in the description as well

But this is what we call an MMORPG, a Massive Multiplayer Online RPG, Role Playing Games, very long acronym, to describe something very simple. It's like an adventure game that you play with other people, pretty much as we were describing. Anyway, Ethan, so these were the lessons. Let me just recap briefly.

Let me just go over those lessons again, those stories. So with Humber's story about getting into adventure games, starting early in his childhood and growing up and start in picking harder games with more advanced language and really making an effort to understand what's happening there in English. I'll say that lesson there is that games put you in situations where you need to use your English. So remember that, get immersed in it and it'll work just like real life a lot of times.

Real life, I mean our life, our own life. So in the second story, I was talking about how I was thrown into this world, this universe of advanced vocabulary with all those games that I already mentioned. So that's another lesson that can be learned is like, know that and take advantage of it, right? Take note of the words and pay attention to them and use them later. Use them to solve the puzzles, the challenges within the game. And finally, social opportunities. If you look for an online game,

There's plenty of that as well. And if you go to the App Store or... I recommend the games here, but you can search for more, right? So these were the stories that I had here. And I think this is a good time for us to move into the next part of our lesson here that I think just keeps illustrating how all these games, they are just tremendous for our learning process. Yeah, we get to take a trip down memory lane, right? And talk about some of the games. It's super nostalgic, right? Like getting to...

I think like video games that we play when we're kids kind of shaped us in some way. I'm curious, like what's your first one? Uh, the first one I took note of actually was Pokemon. Cause that like came out when I was, it's probably like, you know, one of the first games I played on the Game Boy. And I think it was like one of the first games that really was one that got us connecting with friends and so on. Um,

I love like the whole premise of it that they used to say is catch them all. You got to catch them all, which has like this great connected speech that you have got to catch them all. But they shortened it a lot to you got to catch them all. And like watching I was a fan of the show to the anime when when I was a kid, like I remember after school going to my dad's office because it was like right next to where I was going to school and watching them.

the new episodes and yeah I was thinking about like the so there's a classics right the red and blue those were the first ones that I played with friends and stuff and like figuring out how to it's such a cool game because like you you get to create like

catch these different creatures and like you're you're building a relationship with them building your unique team and so on and like going on this adventure together with them no time that you play it is ever going to be the same because you're always building different teams and so on um and just like thinking back about like red and blue these games were really glitchy

When you say glitchy, it means that they have like bugs or like things that you can take advantage of. So remember there were several of these. There was like one where you go to one city, talk to this old man, fly to another city. You'd go and you'd surf, which is like the word that they used to ride a Pokemon in the water. You'd like surf up and down this one place. You would like have this encounter with like a glitchy Pokemon. It's like, I think it was called Missingno.

And then after you beat it, you would have a certain item that was in your bag would become unlimited. You get an infinite amount of it. So it's like things like this that like make it super nostalgic for me. I think a great thing too with these games, you can, I don't know how legal this is, but there's like emulators, which this is a nice word. Emulator is like basically that you can download on your computer and

the hardware or software, sorry, that allows you to like have a Game Boy or different types of consoles. And so you can get an emulator and then you can get like the ROM for these old games. And so you can kind of take that trip down memory lane, play some of these old games and you could try playing them in English if maybe like you played it in your native language when you were a kid. So Izzy, what's your first game you thought of?

Hey, so if you want to continue watching this lesson, including this last part where Ethan and I discussed our favorite video games from when we were kids, you should click the link in the description below because it'll take you straight to this lesson over on the RealLife app.

Now, our app is where you can watch the full version of all of our lessons and also get the vocabulary flashcards of the most advanced expressions that we use in these lessons so you can learn and never forget them and add them to your active vocabulary so you can speak more naturally

just like I do. There is so much more. You get a full interactive transcript of each lesson that you can tap on the words to learn more. You can practice speaking with other learners. It's really amazing. So click the link in the description below to go and check it out right now. And I'll see you over there.