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Comment by soneca | Hacker News Reader

Me too. I learned english "by force" by playing basically Monkey Island and Indiana Jones series. Funny thing is that I played them a lot in pair. I would go to a friend's house and we would play together, even if is essentially a one player game.

One that infuriated me was King's Quest, the one that you could type anything you want the character to do. Such a powerful potential, but I took days just to discover the term "pick up", to pick up a book, for example. My basic english didn't know that verb, I tried every variation of get, hold, put in pocket and stuff.

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I played a lot of games as a pair with friends around that time. I think it was something about liking games that had a story and therefore didn't lend themselves well to taking turns. We even played Quake like this a few times, one person moving the other shooting, even when we could have taken it in turns with a level each.

I also remember arguing with my sister about who got to play Commander Keen one day, so our mum blindfolded one of us and had the other shout directions.

Thanks for reminding me, I had forgotten how much I enjoyed it at the time.

WOW! your mother is a genius! Noted here for my future parenting guidelines! :D

King's quest was easier the alternatives. The worst for foreigners was Police quest. One command was seared into my brain: 'administer sobriety test'

Good luck figuring that out with a small learner's dictionary.

Police Quest was pretty picky. I remember the scene where you have to get the suspect from the car laying down on the ground. Shouting "Lay Down" would only give you nitpicking about the sexual meaning of "laying", which I never got until later.

Heh, this morning I was thinking about this in the shower, don't know why.

The worst for me was the part in the sewer, where you had to write "look at shit". I only knew the word's pronunciation. Spent days on the combinations: shed, ched, poop, and so on.

Hehe yeah I remember also going through a dictionary with my friend to look how to pronounce these things, and our mother helped too. Brought together the whole family for a while.

The worst for me was the "monkey wrench" puzzle in Monkey Island 2 ... Being French, playing with the French version, I had no way to put this together. I ended up trying every item combination in the whole game world until I found the correct one by accident. Took me days.

I think "take" worked. Sierra games had extremely limited vocabularies, of course. The Infocom games and later those by Magnetic Scrolls were much more advanced at natural language parsing; you could type "put key in bottle", and if you had several bottles it would ask you "Which bottle?" and you could simply answer "the green bottle". Wish I could think of more examples, but it's been a long time.

What was that like? I've never tried playing a game in a different language before. How much English did you already know before starting those games?

Very basic vocabulary, I was like 10 years old and studied english at school, like, 2 hours a week. We used to play with a dictionary on our hands.

It is not easy, but still fun. It took around (i'm guessing here) 5 or 6 times more time to play it.

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