Borderline powergaming with regards to languages

[Late]

The amount of characters that "know Arabic" is hilarious. 23 year old mall rat women who "worked in the middle east" or the "army veteran that wanted to learn the language of the people they were killing in Iraq, or to talk to locals better." 

Rafi speaks Arabic, English and just for simplicity, and anything I know IRL on another language well Rafi knows too. I don't have much knowledge in other languages other than very basic tourist things so as a 40 year old Syrian man who has traveled around a little, i'm sure he'd know this too. 

[aughh capybara]

When I first started playing on my main character, Farah Al-Suleiman, I realized quite quickly that a lot of people suddenly knew arabic. To help counteract this, I decided to type her dialogue in english, but extremely broken to help throw people off. 

 

24 minutes ago, Late said:

The amount of characters that "know Arabic" is hilarious. 23 year old mall rat women who "worked in the middle east" or the "army veteran that wanted to learn the language of the people they were killing in Iraq, or to talk to locals better." 

Rafi speaks Arabic, English and just for simplicity, and anything I know IRL on another language well Rafi knows too. I don't have much knowledge in other languages other than very basic tourist things so as a 40 year old Syrian man who has traveled around a little, i'm sure he'd know this too. 

 

This tbh. We've both experienced random white women who have no ties to the Middle-East suddenly pulling out Arabic during conversation. A random, starbucks drinking blonde texan woman decided to study arabic 'for fun' or their friend 'taught them the language'. 

 

Yeah right!

[Petey]

Yeah this here is a real problem. Not gonna deny that I've done it countless times on SAMP long ago. Asspulling character stuff and shaping your character in certain situations and so on. RPing a flawed character or a virgin incel ig is not gonna make you less liked OOCly or whatever. You wanna be that guy who gets all the chicks ICly, gets all the love on facebrowser, knows how to drive ricers like a chad, speaks all languages or in short, knows absolutely everything mhm?  it's cool and all but I hate to break it to you, nobody gives one single fuck. I actually hate them to be honest with you. I'd rather praise a player for roleplaying being flawed rather than players who asspull shit and knows absolutely everything that exists.

Edited March 16, 2021 by Pete Williamson

[Xaleya]

On 3/15/2021 at 5:39 AM, Koko said:

Agreed, I'm bilingual in English and Spanish (on top of speaking three other unrelated languages, just for the sake of argument in the sense that I'm a language guy), understand more slang in English than in some varieties of Spanish due to the internet. Put me up against some Puerto Rican and as an actual Spaniard born and raised in Spain I'll have trouble sometimes if they speak in a lot of slang.

Any latinamerican or Spaniard will be difficult, within each province you have different slangs (within a same country) You can have a country with 20 or 30 different zones than uses variations of spanish than might be hard to understand by many people, 90% of America speaks Spanish, aside from Canada and USA, the rest is spanish and within different countries you have different ways to speak spanish and within different states more way to do the same. I speak Spanish, English and I know a lot about Japanese (Which Spanish and Japanese are compatible languages ages easier to learn the other if you know already one of them)  It depends of the type of language and origins.

Japanese/Spanish arent compatible with English, its hard for the people to pronounce and learn it.

While Spanish and Japanese(Portugese,Italian, etc) are way way and ages easier to learn, so you can have a latino than can dominate Spanish, Portugese, Italian and French + English.

My knowledge about language at my current age goes by this 

Spanish: Native
English: Advanced but not perfect, Can understand conversations (perfectly) and answer them but i lock myself sometimes

Japanese: Very basic. I manage the numeration, salutes, presentation, how to act and how to write stuff in Hiragana/Katakana (Not kanji which is the regular way of japanese writtings)

By the way.

I never learnt english at any institute, school or whatever. I always was ages above my education system. All my english knowledge was caught by myself. I took some japanese classes but the teacher told me than 99% of the knowledge in this language must be acquired by my own will.

Thus people barely learn multiples languages, its rare in a regular society and I'm a exception within my own country, where people barely knows spanish and people than speak english like me is rare af.

Edited March 25, 2021 by Xaleya

[Gargam3i]

Agreed, the amount of people I've seen being able to speak Cantonese is insane. Especially given that Mandarin is the bigger of the two big Chinese languages. I've also seen tons of Chinese characters speaking both Mandarin and Cantonese fluently, while this is not impossible of course, but the tones and dialect difference between the two languages makes it near impossible for a Mandarin speaker to understand a Cantonese speaker and vice versa and then in the middle of nowhere you see a caucasian, American 20 something-year-old person speak Cantonese fluently.. 

Personal example: My two Chinese characters do not speak or understand Mandarin in speech, they only speak and understand English + Cantonese, that's it.

[PrinceCane]

On 3/16/2021 at 2:45 AM, Pete Williamson said:

Yeah this here is a real problem. Not gonna deny that I've done it countless times on SAMP long ago. Asspulling character stuff and shaping your character in certain situations and so on. RPing a flawed character or a virgin incel ig is not gonna make you less liked OOCly or whatever. You wanna be that guy who gets all the chicks ICly, gets all the love on facebrowser, knows how to drive ricers like a chad, speaks all languages or in short, knows absolutely everything mhm?  it's cool and all but I hate to break it to you, nobody gives one single fuck. I actually hate them to be honest with you. I'd rather praise a player for roleplaying being flawed rather than players who asspull shit and knows absolutely everything that exists.

I kinda don’t get how someone can find it fun to create a character that’s the jack of all trades with zero flaw.

 

As a person that knows English + a bit Creole(french) there are many different dialects and slang like how the spanish language would be nearly different as the other spanish words.

 

even if you were to know a certain language you would not be able to fluently speak 100% of the different slangs that comes with it and for a 20 something(probably) Caucasian individual to suddenly speak the tongue of those that probably learned it from their homeland or grew up learning it from family members that speaks it doesn’t make sense.

 

The whole

“I worked at that country”

“I learned it from a friend” or cousin“

“I learned it online”

excuse just doesn't add up on math of the person’s age or why would they even learn it.

[Alyssa McCarthy]

Is there any desire to script languages, meaning, a method by which new characters could start with maybe English + optionally 1 other, and any further languages would have to be approved via a special background request. (so in the rare cases of a multi-lingual professor or translator char (as an example), it could be approved).

By having a script where you set the language you're talking to such as /language English & when you're talking, only people who speak that language can understand what your typing? 

I know it's from RPG text based games, but as a rough idea, doesn't that help with the problem of Mary Sue's knowing every language under the sun while giving 99% of the players who usually speak English + 1 other, protection from that kind of PG?

Edited March 26, 2021 by Alyssa McCarthy

[Vassilios]

On 3/26/2021 at 11:42 AM, Alyssa McCarthy said:

Is there any desire to script languages, meaning, a method by which new characters could start with maybe English + optionally 1 other, and any further languages would have to be approved via a special background request. (so in the rare cases of a multi-lingual professor or translator char (as an example), it could be approved).

By having a script where you set the language you're talking to such as /language English & when you're talking, only people who speak that language can understand what your typing? 

I know it's from RPG text based games, but as a rough idea, doesn't that help with the problem of Mary Sue's knowing every language under the sun while giving 99% of the players who usually speak English + 1 other, protection from that kind of PG?

I agree with this. It might seem RPG-ish but it also counteracts accidental/incidental metagaming.

[Resick]

On 3/13/2021 at 8:59 AM, Tsarna said:

It is up to the individual, what languages does he or she speak - what is it your problem to say otherwise? It is all about the backstory, where people come from and what did they do before coming to LS. If people say, that their relatives taught them, then you have to take it on face value, not whine about it. 
Some people even whine about names, that if you have a Balkan name, you can not be from Baltics - sorry, pal, but ya know, people tend to move from some countries to other countries, we are not living in North Korea.
It would be a problem, if people know five-six or more languages fully, then it is questionable, but like people say here, 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. 
And I speak of the large language groups - it would become a problem, if people speak some languages, which are usually not so well-known, but you guys have problem with people speaking Mandarin and Russian... https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/the-10-most-spoken-languages-in-the-world#:~:text=Numbers vary widely — Ethnologue puts,is the one for you.

moving from a country to another country doesn't mean ur name changes aswell lol

 

you probably speak those languages like a robot that even someone from that country wouldn't understand it

 

the numbers on the link you put up are literally  countries population numbers so i don't think you proved anything

[joshua]

On 3/26/2021 at 11:42 AM, Alyssa McCarthy said:

Is there any desire to script languages, meaning, a method by which new characters could start with maybe English + optionally 1 other, and any further languages would have to be approved via a special background request. (so in the rare cases of a multi-lingual professor or translator char (as an example), it could be approved).

By having a script where you set the language you're talking to such as /language English & when you're talking, only people who speak that language can understand what your typing? 

I know it's from RPG text based games, but as a rough idea, doesn't that help with the problem of Mary Sue's knowing every language under the sun while giving 99% of the players who usually speak English + 1 other, protection from that kind of PG?

this probably goes against the whole 'anti RPG' argument lots of people have, but i like this. the community i used to play had this exact feature, where when creating your character you could ask an admin to add one language alongside english to speak if you want. any more and you'd need special approval for it.

you could then set your language i.e spanish, and then speak.. in spanish. anyone else with the spanish language can see what you wrote, everyone else just sees '[name] says something in Spanish.'

perhaps it could be made smoother over here, but it'd help counteract the characters that know 16 languages with 0 development for it, as well as the obvious subconscious metagaming that happens when people discuss something in another language that you icly don't know, the same reason nametags were removed - subconscious metagame when you see their nametag through a wall.