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May 2020

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Learning German 7: Fremdsprachen und Computer (Foreign Languages and Computers)

In der A1 “Start Deutsch 1” Prüfung muss man in das Schreiben-Teil ein Formular ausfüllen, z. B. ein Anmeldeformular für eine Sprachschule, oder eine Reisebuchungformular. Obwohl ich darin eine sehr gute Note bekam, bin ich noch nicht sicher, Formulare auf Deutsch auszufüllen. Ich würde immer noch Englisch benutzen, weil ich Missverständnisse vermeiden möchten. Auf der anderen Seite, das Spielen von Computerspielen hat am meistens weniger Konsequenzen, wenn man Fehler machen. Ich spielte ein paar Spiele auf Deutsch mit meinen Freunde, darunter “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes” und “Tick Tock: A Tale for Two”. In diesen Spiele ist gute und klare Kommunikation sehr wichtig. Wir machte viel Spaß, obwohl wir waren viel langsamer als wenn wir Englisch benutzte.

One has to fill in a form in the writing part of the German A1 (“Start Deutsch 1”) exam, for example a registration form for a language school or a travel booking form. Although I got a very good mark there, I’m still not confident filling in forms in German. I would still prefer to use English, because I would want to avoid any misunderstandings. On the other hand, playing computer games mostly has fewer consequences when one makes mistakes. I played a few games with my friends in German, including “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes” and “Tick Tock: A Tale for Two”. Good and clear communication is very important in these games. We had a lot of fun, even though we were much slower than if we used English.

A suggestion I’ve come across fairly often as part of language learning is to set one’s computer’s language to the target language. The aim here is likely to achieve immersion: one will see the language as part of one’s daily activities. Admittedly, the vocabulary one comes across is likely to be fairly domain specific (one will probably very quickly learn what the word for close or delete are – in German schließen and löschen respectively), but it does still likely cover a fair few common phrases and expressions that might be useful. For example, I have to think a bit to translate how to play (Spielanleitung or Wie man spielt, probably not the direct Wie zu spielen), while that would probably come very quickly to someone who did this.

As the previous sentence implied, I did not do this. I did try it briefly, but ran into enough frustrating issues that I switched my laptop back to English. I think the main issue wasn’t that I found the system unusable, but it did considerably slow things down. Many websites presented content, forms and questions to me in German (it’s possible this is my failure and/or I went for even more immersion when I changed the language settings), and I needed to read them really closely to be sure of precisely what I was doing. For example, I remember being asked, when booking a flight to Switzerland, Brauchen Sie aufgegebenes Gepäck? (Do you need checked baggage?) I knew Gepäck meant baggage – the problem was that I wanted hand (but not checked) baggage, and while I knew that hand luggage is normally written Handgepäck I didn’t know if aufgegebenes was another word for hand baggage or if it referred to checked baggage. While these kinds of disruptions could certainly be viewed as learning opportunities (and that is how I learned those words), they happened at a higher frequency than I would like, and were often disruptive.

There were also more technical issues relating to internationalisation (or “i18n” as is frequently written in tech). For example, my copy of The Sims 4 couldn’t find its old data directories because it decided to search in Die Sims 4. Most of my documents are still written in English, and Office also seemed to think that it should follow the default language for spell-checking (a reasonable assumption, and it’s probably too much to ask to have it infer the input language and then run spell check based on that, but frustrating for me).

On the other hand, I find computer games, especially ones that are relatively simpler, suitable for playing in a target foreign language because, as discussed above, there are generally fewer consequences for mistakes. If one is playing competitively, of course, then this would be an unnecessary handicap. The Sims series would probably be very good games for playing in German (or when learning a foreign language) because many of the words encountered would be similar to ones used often in real life – compared to Keep Talking, where numbers, colours and orientation were much more prevalent. Tick Tock was interesting and communication felt more difficult (we’ve only finished chapter 1): it’s basically kind of like an escape room with puzzles and instructions in German. I was able to figure out at least the gist of what was being said, so that wasn’t too much of a problem – the bigger challenge there was because my friend and I communicated entirely in German. Relaying instructions was tricky; there is a richer range of things that needed to be communicated (as compared to saying Vier Kabeln, rot-gelb-schwarz-weiß; thinking back the part of Keep Talking made trickiest by using German was the symbols module).