Best Computer Games To Improve Your English Skills
Computer games is a great way to spend you free time especially during quarantine. A lot of people think computer games is a silly way to escape from reality, that’s definitely not true. Some modern games is a masterpieces that can make you feel a full range of emotions, even make you rethink some things about your live. But not everyone thinks about games as a tool to learn or improve your knowledge of foreign languages in a very entertaining way.
Today we talk about great computer games that will help you improve your English skills. After reading this article you will learn about three great games that will not only entertain you with a great story and interesting gameplay, but teach you a lot about the English language.
Persona 5 Royal
Let’s start with the Persona 5 Royal. Persona series is a game in which your teammates and you fight demons with a supernatural powers called “Personas”, which is a manifestation of person’s heart and spirit but that’s not the only thing that this series is about. Besides fighting with demons, the games allows you to spend your free time bonding with other characters. They will tell you very interesting stories about their struggles in lives. With your help they will try to understand their meaning in life and try to fight for what they think is right. This story is one the best you will ever find in videogames and everyone will find a lovable character with which they can relate to. For example, there is a very emotional story about a young prodigy painter Yusuke Kitagawa who had lost his parents during childhood. Friend of his family and an art teacher who raised him after their death betrayed him and used his talent to became a famous Japanese artist by stealing his paintings. Poor Yusuke was broken and couldn’t do anything about it because teacher was the only one who was family for him but in the end he finds inner power to overcome this horrible situation. He finds friends, with them he claims his name in art world and makes his teacher atone for his dirty deeds. This story really moved me and there are a lot of other characters which’s stories might speak to you. I recommend you this game because it heavily relies on dialogs and monologs in which story progresses and characters gets their development and this game is strikingly long, so there a lot of dialogs. But don’t be afraid language in this game is very easy to understand, you don’t have to look for every word in translation app on your phone. As you may have already guessed this game contains a lot of social interactions, so there a lot of daily life jokes, culture references and modern slang, this games is a good way to improve your English daily life vocabulary. After completing this shockingly good game your vocabulary and your heart won’t be the same. Characters in this game will steal your heart because of their lovability and will teach you a lot of new words that you might use in your daily life. If you will like this game I highly suggest you to play Persona 4 Golden and Persona 3 FES, they will equally entertain you and increase your English language knowledge.
Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
This game is a masterpiece and one the biggest games ever made. Be ready for the best part, it was made in Poland, our neighbors, so that means that there a lot of things that might be familiar for us, Russians. This game is highly based on Slavic folklore and mythology, there are Leshiys, Gnomes, Witches, Baba Yagas, Huts on hen’s legs, trolls and that is far from a full list. You might not believe me, but everyone out this characters can be found in this game, some of them even can be your friends or foes. This game is about adventures of Geralt of Rivia, a famous witcher, who kills dangerous creatures for money. He is searching for his lost daughter called Ciri, during his adventure he will be fighting alongside with Vikings, helping the Queen of France in solving mystery death cases involving vampires in her kingdom and even saving the world! Because of the amount of historic events in this game it can be called A War and Peace of videogames. Just as a Persona 5 Royal it is very long, around 100-150 hours, but you won’t regret spending any minute of this time. Why I suggest this game as a tool to learn English? Because it contains amount of metaphors, idioms and subtle jokes, references to Slavic culture and well written dialogs that can rival with many modern books. That is not surprising, because this game is based on fantasy novels by Andrzej Sapkowski, a famous Polish fantasy writer. If you are interested in linguistics, this game might be very interesting, too. As you may know, Slavic culture has a lot of personality and differs a lot from other cultures of that period of time, so some things can be extremely hard to correctly localized to other languages. This game deals with that fantastically, everything translated to English properly and nothing is missing, so every player can understand the differences between Likho and goblin.
Fallout 4
Fallout series is centered about world after nuclear war and how humankind tries its’ best to survive. All of Fallout games including Fallout 4 takes place in USA, so there a lot of Americans with different accents. This game gives player an opportunity to explore post-war American landscape filled with mutated monsters and humans but that’s not everything this game can offer. Actually this games is not about fighting harmful creatures, it is about what bad there is in humanity and how difficult times affect people and shows their true nature. As I sad earlier this game takes place in USA and because of that there a lot of people who are native English speakers. As you may know, America such as Russia is a big country, so it is not surprising that there a lot of people living there, and sometimes citizens of this countries have different accents and speaking manners and this games represent it perfectly. Different States in USA sometimes have surprisingly different accents, for example citizen from the south of America speaks very differently than person from north of the America because of the historical reasons. Besides Americans there a lot of British, Spanish and other peoples in this game with their special accents. To sum up, I suggest you this game because it will help you become familiar with different English accents and give a glimpse of how different can be same language in different countries and learn many aspects that make difference in languages between speakers from different countries. If you like this game, I suggest you should play Fallout New Vegas; it is equally interesting and will help you develop your English skills.
Text by
Sergey Nesterov