hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2677.txt

Episode: 2677
Title: HPR2677: Thoughts on language learning part 4 - RPG.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2677/hpr2677.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 07:21:45

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This is HBR episode 2677 entitled Thoughts on Language Learning Part 4 RPG.
It is posted by the ODD Dummy and in about 18 minutes long, and carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, I pondered the idea of an RPG with players not speaking the same language.
Today's show is licensed under a CC hero license.
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Hello, this is D.O.DD Dummy, recording another episode for Hacker Public Radio.
Now for this episode, I'm recording on my phone, so I can't, well, I don't know if I can or not,
but I don't use my phone enough to have figured out how to record and wait if it's possible.
So I'm going to be converting this from in for AMA4M4A to something to submit.
Now this is going to be the fourth or another episode in my series on my thoughts on spoken
language learning.
I thought I was going to be done at three, but I was walking to work today and I started
thinking about this and I have another idea.
So I figured I would go ahead and put it in an episode as much to try to get some feedback
as anything else.
And this is a continuation on the, this is a continuation on the using games and language
learning.
Now what happened was I started thinking about how to make a point and click game, the
idea of being it, I could start off on point and clicks or text adventures, I could start
off with maybe not point and click, maybe it's normal text adventures, but I could probably
approach that easy enough, not really no understanding how the tech works.
That's probably a programming level I could manage in my spare time and actually put something
out to see, you know, as a little point proof of concept.
And I was thinking, you know, well I could start off with just a plain old text and then
keep in mind, so kind of make it modular, where down the line I would plug in something
that would read the audio to you and then maybe plug in later something that would do text
to speech, speech to text.
So voice recognition on the input, and then I got to thinking a little bit about that
and how the story might go and turning that all into turning all that into some kind of
a game.
And I thought, oh boy, that's a lot more work than I'll probably manage.
And then I thought, well, what if I do the different kind of game, because well then
I was thinking, well, what if I use crowdfunding, crowd sourcing, right?
So you get, you know, other, you know, people from around the world to give you voice files
and translations and things like that on the internet, and that seemed like a good
ale.
Anyway, to cut it short, because maybe I'll still post that episode or those recordings
to get to the point, what I ended up thinking about was, what if this
first was a board game, kind of like an RPG role-playing game, and maybe not just, maybe
not a board game, probably more likely in my opinion is on the internet board game.
So, and so I was thinking RPG and just to give you an example, I'll just give a quick
example of the kinds of things I'm thinking about.
Of course, this could play out in all different kinds of scenarios.
Basically any story that has kind of the fact that you have different languages as part
of the storyline, or I guess maybe the main part of the story would probably lend itself
to this.
So my thinking was, so okay, I'll just put one scenario, we've kind of did the scenario
of a hospital, so we'll do keep that same scenario.
And so in this case, let's assume for sake of this example that we have two nurses and
Chinese as their main language, and they work in this place where we start off with.
And let's assume that these two nurses are, they're good people, but they work for a
bad regime.
And I wouldn't make it Chinese, even the language that picked for this conversation is Chinese.
I mean, I wouldn't do like current nations against each other, that just seems like the
wrong thing to do.
So I would do some unknown governments, some future place, but the language that just
happens to be Chinese, let's say Mandarin, because I don't know, can you say Chinese?
I guess that question in Georgia Rob from the Geological Podcast sent me a link saying,
yeah, you can say Chinese.
And then I guess the Chinese means formal Chinese or Mandarin, I guess, according to that
link.
But I also heard from lots of other people that it's not, you really shouldn't say Chinese,
you just call it Mandarin or Cantonese or so I don't know what's the proper.
But anyway, we're talking Mandarin here.
But so these two nurses, they are good people, and they work for a regime that is maybe
not so good.
So now in this RPG, the ideal and this whole thing is that to have it set up in such a
way that people of different languages can all play this game together, even though they
don't necessarily know each other's language, that's kind of the whole point.
And based on that, it would make sense to me that it's most likely that you would have
people in different, definitely not in the same room all the time or most of the time.
So that's what I was thinking like an online RPG.
No, I don't know that we have to do any tech for this because I think we could probably
use existing chat tools that are out there already, any combination of text, voice and
our video.
And I'm sure that I didn't search, but I'm sure there's already this kind of RPGs going
on now.
So we have these two nurses get back to seeing here.
We have these two nurses, they speak Chinese for the sake of this conversation.
And let's say we have two people who are kind of going to be their patients.
And by their patients, I mean, they're the people who wake up in the medical facility
and then they have these two nurses taking care of them.
And let's say we have one who speaks English, the other one who speaks Spanish.
And so the goal of this here could be that, let's say we make it cooperative.
So we have the two nurses, their goal in the game, right, aside from learning.
One's goal is obviously going to be learning English and one's going to be Spanish because
so the English person is the patient of one of the nurses, the Spanish one is the
English patient of the other one.
And so the kind of overall goal, if we like make this a cooperative game, is the two
nurses will be helpful to us, kind of subvert their leadership and help us.
So of course they have to do this in a way where they're not going to get us all killed.
And the patients, their goals could be to, so in other words, they have to the Chinese
nurses have to learn English and Spanish respectively to
to get to the point where to get to the point where they can help.
So they're learning the English and I'm learning the Chinese.
And so, and well, one of the nurses in this case, the other nurses learned Spanish.
And so me and the, the English and Spanish speaking person have to learn Chinese enough
because they're somehow on the same team, even though they're speaking different languages.
Maybe it's a simple fact that they're both the prisoners or the patients or whatever
put them in this situation.
Maybe that bonds them together and makes them a team or maybe it's like an alien versus
earthlings and they're a team because they're both from Earth or whatever reason they're
a team, even though they don't speak the same language.
So we need to learn Chinese enough so that we can help each other and be a team and
get around in this Chinese speaking world to do or whatever our missions are.
And the nurses are learning our languages so they can help us better.
So in this way, if we have four people who are relatively committed as a gaming unit
that would stick it out and maybe it's going to be slow going originally and kind of stick
to whatever mechanics in the game we have to do the learning, the language learning, then
it seems to me like that might be an interesting dynamic and it could be a way to where you
could really get people of all different kinds of languages together and where they normally
wouldn't work together, they could work together and kind of on their own footing.
Now there's other ways to do this too.
You could do it like where the goal of the game is, while you can have any language that
you want, so I like the language you know is not any kind of requirement in the game.
And your goal is to work towards the new language.
So it could be cooperative or it could be where you're not cooperating but the ideal
being that the goal of this game aside from having fun, playing a game and meeting some
cool people is to learn this language, this new language.
And it could be that maybe there's a DM that was beneficial that knows the new language
or maybe it could be that there isn't a DM who knows the new language and everybody just
kind of learns it together.
You might need some, I don't know how those things work actually, but my point being that
you could probably make it so that if everybody's learning at the same pace, you could probably
make it to where people just learn together.
But those are just kind of two examples of how you might be able to do this where the
to where the new language or the starting language of each person doesn't really matter
and they can still work together.
Especially maybe if you did it where you had some kind of a minimal game in the language,
you know, like a minimal rule book in the different source languages.
And so you had some kind of a mechanism to where there's some kind of a starting point.
Now it's possible in that case maybe you need some software to somehow do part of the
translations or something, but yeah, I think that this could be workable to get like
a said to get new people together and the language of the people doesn't necessarily matter.
Now it could be more elaborate where you could have set it up where like you have kind
of a rule book for in this case to two nurses and maybe that rule book you need to kind
of duplicate that for eat for the languages and then they could be using that to play
even though they don't know the language and interacting with people who don't know
the language, maybe that's kind of part of the game.
So you got your rule book and you need to somehow talk to the people in the new language.
So to me that is that's an interesting idea and I'm curious one again, I didn't Google
maybe this is common and there's already something out there, I didn't Google it so maybe
maybe this was a few tile exercises, but I'm curious what you guys think if this seems like a
reasonable fun idea. So that's enough for this episode, I'm going to go ahead and publish this
if I can figure out how to convert it.
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