Warning: very long post alert!
TL;DR: Armed with my minimal understanding of Spanish, I launched into Fallout 4. I surprised myself with just how much text was I able to understand and translate, though I couldn't easily follow spoken dialogue. I picked up some vocabulary and phrases, some of which I'm confident are in my long-term memory. Without knowledge of grammar, this wasn't a good exercise for making meaningful strides in my understanding of the language, so it represents a low-efficiency way of learning. Still, it's a game I enjoy and I had fun playing it, and the fact I learnt some Spanish was a bonus! I'll happily continue with this save file.
Language: Spanish
Game: Fallout 4
I have no particular ambitions to learn Spanish to a high level, but I am planning a trip to Spain this winter, so I figured why not spend a few months seeing how good I can get in that time?
My current level of Spanish
Extremely basic. I never studied Spanish in school. I have done two days of Duolingo, Memrise and Pimsleur. I've picked up a smattering of words and tourists phrases over the years (I can count to five and order a beer). My knowledge of grammar is minimal and doesn't extend beyond what you're taught in the introduction lessons of Duolingo!
The beginning
I spent what felt like an age downloading/installing the game and mucking around with mods, then figuring out how to launch the game en Español. I found that my mods weren't working, mucked around some more and finally, I was in!
Navigating the menu
Pretty straightforward, but I knew where the buttons were already. Still, I made a note of words like cargar 'load [a game]' and nuevo 'new'. There was also the word jugar 'play'.
Intro cinematic
I didn't understand much of it beyond the first word la guerra 'war', and I only got that because I know the English version!
However, I did hear a few easily translatable words and phrases such as bomba atomica and robotos domesticos. I don't know what context they were used in, but I was pleased I could pick them out.
Towards the end of the cinematic I heard two words drilled into me from Duolingo: mujer and niño. I know it's a minor thing, but I was pleased I could pick them out of the audio - that felt good.
Character creation
This was really useful because as I interacted with the menu I saw things on my character change. It was easy to tell that cara meant 'face', for example, and other words had obvious meanings (e.g. sexo and complexión). I added these words to my dictionary. As I picked my hair colour from the list, it was easy to see that rubio meant 'blonde', roja meant 'red' and negro meant 'black' (the latter I could have guessed, but other words were less obvious), but I also got a few extra words in, like sucia 'dirty' and intensio 'intense'.
Throughout this process, I took a note of words I was pretty confident from context I knew the meaning of (which I double checked in a dictionary later). While I was just looking at words and short phrases, this was still an immersion environment, and I wasn't looking up the English. I was relying purely on the cues from the game to tell me what things meant, so I was learning almost entirely from context. I translated daño as 'scar', for example, though the dictionary later told me this means 'damage'.
First few minutes
One of the first interactions you can do in the game is play with your infant son. As I went over to him, the cue came up on the screen jugar. I knew from the main menu that this meant 'play', so that was a nice link to make.
I quickly learnt the word for 'door' (puerta), as well as the commands to 'open' and 'close' (abrir and cerra). You do this a lot in the game.
While I was having quite a lot of success with individual words, actual dialogue completely eluded me - I couldn't follow it. While I occasionally heard individual words I either knew or could guess, the dialogue went so quickly I couldn't make any real sense of what was going on. I enabled subtitles. This helped, as while I still couldn't fully translate the dialogue, it was easier to read than listen, so I could understand a bit more.
Picking my stats
This felt good. In Fallout 4 you get to assign your puntos 'points' to different stats. I felt confident translating the descriptions of these despite my absolutely minimal vocabulary. For example, resistencia ('endurance', which I know because of where it is in the list in English) has the description: Afecta a tu salud total...
This bit was easy - I know the common Spanish toast is salud, meaning 'health', and the rest was guessable: 'affects your total health'. It goes on to read: ...y al consume de puntos de acción por esprintar.
This was a bit tougher, but again guessable. The word puntos I already knew because it was obvious from what I was doing. I translated this as: 'and consumes your action points when sprinting'. How accurate that is I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that's the gist.
This felt really good and filled me with confidence, because I wasn't completely lost and with a bit of logic I could figure things out. Sure, if you asked me to translate these sentences in Spanish I couldn't do it, but I feel like I could at least have a stab at it.
One of the stats is called suerte, and as, err, 'luck' would have it I just learnt that word this morning because it came up on my Memrise list!
Playing the game
I played for about three hours before I realised just how tired I was getting. I was looking up words quite often and compiling a dictionary as I went. Many of these words will be completely useless for anything other than playing Fallout 4 or otherwise extremely niche conversation topics, but not all of them. Much of what you're looking at are simple verbs and nouns. One that quickly became engrained was coger, because you do pick up a lot of stuff in this game! There's also stuff you can leer ('read') and cosechar ('harvest').
I still couldn't follow the dialogue even remotely, but if there were words I heard a lot I looked them up. Ayuda was one of them ('help'), which combined nicely with another word I learnt, puedo ('may I'), giving me puedo ayudar 'may I help', which I figured would be a useful phrase to learn.
There were some really cool (to me!) links I made. For example, I know there's a character called Skinny Malone in the game. In Spanish, his name was translated as 'Flaco Malone'. The reason I like this is because there's a character called Flaca on Orange is the New Black, one of my favourite TV shows. Wasn't difficult to see that they were the same word just with masculine and feminine endings, so now I know that Flaca from OINTB is literally just 'Skinny'!
Links like this mean I'm not going to forget the word. It helps it root into my brain.
I kept playing like this until my brain got tired. I was trying to read absolutely everything and consciously register the words appearing on screen as I was doing them, while I'd usually just automatically perform the action when playing a game. This did affect my concentration after a while and I called it a day.
Was it useful?
Something that made me happy was I did use all of my Duolingo, Memrise and Pimsleur vocabulary! Even words like manzanas and leche made an appearance!
I certainly learnt some vocabulary. Obviously like all things you learn you need to get it into your long-term memory by using it regularly, but I was reading the same words over and over again. However, it's still fairly passive. I'm not using any of these words in actual conversations, either speaking or writing, and without that active use of vocabulary I'm not going to be confident using it.
Without really any idea of how Spanish grammar works it was more or less impossible for me to know why certain things were constructed in that way. For example, I know the verb 'to speak' is habla, but in the game when I approached characters the command was hablar. I don't know what form that word is in because I don't know the grammar. I think there's a perception that you can just listen to a language and surround yourself with it and somehow imbibe it. You can't.
Similarly, even immersion environments where you're forced to speak a language don't mean you just 'pick it up'. Sure, babies do, but it takes them years and they've got lots of sympathetic adults teaching them (full time) very slowly. As adults, I think in order to get the best returns on immersion (and I include things like watching films and listening to music in this) we really need to have a solid grounding in the language first. That's not to say watching films is useless - of course I don't think this. They're good for hearing the cadences and dynamics of speech, as well as learning something about the culture. Just, as a beginner, shouldn't really be treated as a serious learning tool.
Where video games have a massive advantage over, say, films, is in their repetition. The bad guys cycle through the same handful of phrases, as do your companions. While I didn't translate these phrases, I could, and I would if I were to play again. You also perform the same actions hundreds of times and often have similar conversations when engaging with traders and other NPCs in the game.
As an absolute beginner, I did find this useful. I did learn something, and, at the end of the day, it's a game I enjoy so it's not wasted time. For a language like Spanish, which has plenty of similarities with English, I think this was more worthwhile. Would I play the game in Arabic or Chinese? Definitely not. I would have no idea what was going on, and I couldn't even read the text.
Would I do it again?
Yeah, I think I would. I've started a new Fallout 4 save, so why not keep it going? I'm going to keep up Spanish and continue with Duolingo, Memrise and Pimsleur. I'll eventually mix in some more formal studying and perhaps some iTalki lessons later on this year. I'm going to import the dictionary I compiled into Anki and try to actively use the vocabulary I learn. For example, if I'm engaging in dialogue, I'll try and reply to characters out loud before I select my dialogue option and I'll try and repeat phrases used by my character/NPCs so I'm engaging more in the roleplay.
Overall, I enjoyed it and I think it was a useful exercise. Playing a bit of Fallout 4 each weekend could prove be a really useful way of consolidating in my more formal learning.
I don't play online games, but I imagine people who do could benefit even more by joining servers in their target language. I've never studied Russian, but I know what cyka blyat means from interacting with Russians from when I did play online games! Probably not so good for high stress/high pace games like FPS and MOBAs, but Minecraft? Animal Crossing? Interacting with people in these more relaxed games in your shared hobby could be a great learning experience, and fun!
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