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Borderline powergaming with regards to languages


Anton Tszyu

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2 hours ago, Tsarna said:

 they know English and then max. 2 other languages, which is fully in the scope of normal human learning capacity. I learned Estonian, English, German, Russian and Swedish in school and those all were fine - so it is manageable IRL. 
If you start now micro-managing peoples backstories, where they can not even say, that his relative from some country taught him, or he/she learned it with an APP (DuoLingo, which actually does give people an opportunity to learn languages quite well), then we are in some real idiotic territory. 
 

 

In a community with so many European players, we really do have an opportunity to see people who currently speak 3-5 languages on a pretty average scale here. A major part of that is that

  1. Most people come from a country where they already speak a non-English language which they will naturally learn in the progress of their life and probably even be educated in,
  2. English is a non-negotiable language in just about every education system in the world today, and there is ample opportunity to practice it as a large portion of the world's  cultural media is in English and many online communities are in English, and
  3. Schools in Europe and other parts of the world tend to mandate a third, non-English language be learned. Coupled with the ease of travel to vastly different countries by using inexpensive train rides and short flights or even quick drives, it's possible to immerse yourself in another country at will and gain valuable practice speaking.

 

So yes, many Europeans on this community can raise their hand right now and say "bro, I speak like 3-5 languages." However, there are some caveats to be raised here.

 

  • Fluency: It's one thing to be able to generally a speak a langauge, ask for directions, order some food, make your transactions, but it's another thing to be able to freely and comfortably express yourself. That takes a lot of practice and learning for a foreign language. I'm sure many of the people who claim to speak 3-5 languages will find it troubling to hold a lengthy conversation with a native speaker unless they've invested a lot of time, practice, and passion on their study of this language.
  • Comprehension: I'm sure all of us here who have tried learning another language have run into the problem where we are progressing at a good speed in learning vocabulary and pronunciation from the book, but the moment a native speaker opens their mouth and rattles off a few sentences in the native tongue, you realize you only understood like 15% of what they just said. It's one thing to ask "¿Donde está la biblioteca?" in the clean, accent-neutral Spanish taught by your schooling and another thing to hear a group of Nicaraguan gangsters effortlessly discussing their criminal dealings in their dialect and with  their slang.
  • Practice: Even if you grew up speaking a language, if you don't practice using a language, those skills deteriorate. I know many Russian immigrants who come to America and spend years barely ever using the language, and then at some point they realize they've forgotten how to spell basic words because it's not a skill they've been practicing. You can spend 3 years in school learning French, but unless you're a savant, you're not going to actually learn the language without practicing it. Practicing means consuming media in that language, it means finding people to discuss that language with, the best case scenario is traveling to the country where it is spoken and immersing yourself in that. You'll learn more French in one month of living in France than you could in 3 years learning it in an American high school.
  • Availability: Your ability to learn a language is based on how available the resources to learn it are to you, and how accessible they are. Duolingo and other services like that have made this an easier process, but it's still not effortless. Learning a new alphabet is hard. Learning a language without a context of their culture is more difficult. In America it's relatively uncommon to see schools teach other languages besides French and Spanish. Usually, when schools offer other languages, it's because of a prevalence of that language represented in the community, or because the school is just in a wealthy area and can afford to hire more obscure language teachers. I went to a rather well-funded and comfortable high school, and there I could learn French (Level I-AP), Spanish (Level i-AP), Italian (Level I-II), German (Level I-III), and Japanese (Level I-III). I have never been easily presented an opportunity to learn, for example, Serbian, and that's something I'd have to seek out and gather resources for myself if I wanted to learn.

 

So that's ultimately the issue here. I live in America, and especially among American-born people it's kind of rare to see them speak a second language. They might claim they speak a language because they took some French or Spanish in school, but very few of them are able to adeptly converse in that language. As a first generation, I can also say that it's relatively uncommon for American children born in immigrant families to even learn their original language--they aren't educated in that language, and they don't practice in that language, so at most you hear of these American-born children of immigrants only able to speak a few words, or understanding it when their parents speak.

 

That's the problem. When someone says "oh yeah I'm 21 years old and my uncle visited every month and taught me Russian" I have to slap that X button to doubt. Like... you mean in your uncle's visits he'd sit with your character for hours on end teaching them the Cyrllic alphabet, grammar, sentence structure, vocabulary, giving them work, practicing with them? And even, assuming all of that, that your character then sought out their own resources to continue learning the language and practicing it for years to the point that they can understand two native speakers in their regional dialect in the middle of a night club? I've spoken Russian my whole life, but sometimes it even takes me a couple of minutes overhearing a conversation as I go about my business in America to even recognize that people are speaking Russian and not Polish, Czech, or any other number of languages which have similar sounds.

 

Frankly, and I say this as an American, most Americans don't speak a second language, despite whatever statistics might say otherwise. If your character is an immigrant, it's natural for them to speak the language where they came from. If you roleplay your character being educated, they might even be conversational in another language on top of that... but unless you roleplay your character actively practicing and giving a shit about these extra languages on a daily basis, pulling out that you can understand random conversations you overhear is a bit edgy.

 

Personally, I roll my eyes any time I see a character who's in their early 20s effortlessly speak a vastly different language. It's possible, I definitely know some really impressive polyglots IRL, but usually these impressive polyglots are highly educated and very intelligent people, and it's not really as surprising when you hear that the incredibly intelligent and  charismatic Israeli woman working on her Ph.D. in literature tell you that in addition to Hebrew and English she speaks Korean, Japanese, and Mandarin. I know that woman spends hours and hours every single day in books, in study, in practicing. Your average GTA:W character spends most of their free time standing around doing small talk, going to clubs and drinking, or driving aimless around. When they're not doing that they're working some low-end entry level or blue collar job. No diss there, but even your average ULSA character is barely believably portrayed as cracking open a book and getting quality work done.

Edited by Ink
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Adding onto what I said before, the issue is not English speakers learning or knowing another Germanic langauge, that is pretty easy compared to an English speaker learning something like Georgian or Armenian, since they have little to no correlation with English, they share little to no grammatical rules, they have completely different methods of writing, pronunciation, etc, etc, add ontop of that, that in a language like Armenian? It is super heavily influenced by region, Eastern-Armenian like spoken in Yerevan has a lot of differences from Western-Armenian spoken by Armenians originating from Arabia 

Edited by Свето
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I also find that people learn languages distractingly quick. Being a polyglot IRL depends on you either: a) being from a very specific location that facilitates learning neighboring languages b) having a very privileged upbringing.

 

Then again, on a parallel tangent, I feel like there's way too much European immigration to begin with, to a distracting, immersion-breaking degree.

 

Los Santos often ends up feeling more like London than an American metropolis.

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3 minutes ago, Koko said:

I also find that people learn languages distractingly quick. Being a polyglot IRL depends on you either: a) being from a very specific location that facilitates learning neighboring languages b) having a very privileged upbringing.

 

Then again, on a parallel tangent, I feel like there's way too much European immigration to begin with, to a distracting, immersion-breaking degree.

 

Los Santos often ends up feeling more like London than an American metropolis.

I couldn't agree with this more. From my perspective it appears to be an issue of a lot of people either wanting to be a played out racial mob stereotype or they're from a certain country in real life and find it hard to separate themselves from their character. 

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This is actually a very good topic for discussion. I am originally Ukrainian IRL, but my family immigrated to Finland when I was just a baby, which means that I speak Russian, Ukrainian, Finnish, Swedish, English, and I studied French for two years. Over the years I have noticed a pattern of people putting no effort into their characters when it comes to languages. I have personally had people with no background with said language come up and speak a difficult language, such as Russian with no struggles. One example that comes to mind is this one Caucasian character (which clearly wasn't from Russia, his last name was more of a French name than anything) that came up to some friends of mine and started speaking fluent Russian with them and even went as far as to clarify that he had no accent. This is simply not realistic, as even I, a native speaker who has studied Russian since I was 7 years old, hired a tutor to help me with my writing, accent, pronunciation, and reading abilities, still got an accent. I don't think people realize how hard it is to actually get rid of an accent or how difficult it is to learn Russian. The Russian language is ranked one of the most difficult languages to learn in the world, yet half of Los Santos somehow manages to speak fluent Russian because they either studied it in the past or had some distant relative teach them; that is not how it works. I even took Russian in high school for some easy points and to see how difficult the language was for foreigners and discovered that throughout 2 years of learning the language at a constant pace, they barely knew how to read.
 

It is highly unlikely for a 3-4th generation Russian immigrant to speak Russian, let alone someone who learned Russian from some distant relative or by reading books. You don't learn a language from a 1 hour conversation with someone over the phone, it requires constant learning, and you forget it much much quicker than you learn it. People are just not up to research their characters and are not open to criticism in the slightest. Good topic though.

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Takeaway from all of this? Blessed be the exception: those players who do portray intellectual or well-traveled characters! There's nothing wrong with wanting to RP a polyglot, just have it make sense. Realistically if a character is going to be good at multiple languages, they are probably traveling. Why are they traveling? Up to you! Could be criminal business, could be vacationing, could be volunteering to save dolphins and shit.

 

If your character is perhaps a bit too young or not financially successful you could go the route of involvement in online communities instead of expensive travel from the US. Of course, if your character can travel, they also probably have hobbies which connect them to this culture back home. What if your character posts on an online Spanish-language forum for telenovela/Soap Opera fans or hosts a weekly podcast about geography to students in Korea? What if your character's interest in the French language came from when they were in culinary school, and their newfound francophone tendencies are tied with their practice of gourmet cooking.

 

Plus, there's nothing wrong with wanting to use a popular language in the "GTA RP meta", just make that a meaningful decision on your character. There is a lot of fun progression to be had about roleplaying with a group of characters who all speak a different language than your character. It is something else to roleplay to build character and IC relationships beyond the usual RP of guns, drugs, money, and blood. How heartwarming it would be when the local {ethnic}ish-speaking murderers and kidnappers were teaching Ke-mo sah-bee over here how to speak their language bit by bit. 

 

"Oh, yeah, haha... yeah man if you want compliment Boris tie, tell him he is pizda. He love that!"

 

I loved this:

  

9 hours ago, DasFroggy said:

Sure, knowing what people are saying in a foreign tongue can be fun, but knowing only half of what they are saying can be much more entertaining.

 

In writing, dramatic irony is when the audience knows something the character does not. There is much enjoyment to be had from roleplaying in the space of intentionally not knowing. Have your character be wrong, have your character make assumptions, have misunderstanding be a thing. 

 

Maybe your character is confident they can speak Spanish because they've been studying it for a year on their mobile phone. They've told people they can speak Spanish. They even can read it and translate things! And then they confidently approach a group of Spanish-speaking banditos to have a proper Spanish chit chat... only to realize they understand like a third of what these guys are saying and their own grammar is stilted and awkward in comparison and they're leagues out of communication with these dudes who speak it all day versus how little practice they have. Etc.

 

There's a lot of fun way to use language in your RP. The suggestion I threw on page 1 is more a way to guide more people to making some authorial decisions about their character's capabilities, and opening the door for that to be an avenue of expressing their character as more than just a secret language to use as an IC non-MGable faction chat with your droogs in public.

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I know for a fact that a lot of characters in the Rancho area are at least only partially fluent in Spanish (even as Latinos) and it makes for interactions that are a lot more meaningful when they have to use Spanish, particularly with other people who actually are fluent.

 

Not knowing is sometimes the door to a lot more depth than knowing everything.

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On some roleplay servers you can apply  to be able to speak a certain language and - once given permission to be able to speak it - can switch with a command, for example /language Cantonse.

 

Once the command is on, anyone who also speaks Cantonese can read your text as 'Lau says (Cantonese): These pathetic cockroaches' - however anyone else who doesn't speak the language (who hasn't been given the ability) just reads; 'Lau says something...' and that's in. 

 

This way, there's no way for people to metagame/powergame a language being spoken by others (a common trope) and characters who wish to realistically be able to speak other languages have a good way of doing so. Like I said, I've seen this on other servers and it's a bit of a no-brainer when you think about it.

 

 

Edited by Haitian
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