Hacker News Reader

Also, video games tended to not be translated into dutch. Mainly because it is suchs a small language. Me and most of my peers learned most english from playing video games and watching movies and tv shows with subtitels, mostly because spoken dutch was not available.

View on HN

How did that work with games? Did you have to stop and look things up, or did you already have a rough idea and just the exposure increased your fluency?

I’ve tried putting my phone/computer into other languages, but within a few days I tend to phase out the changes and I don’t think I learned much.

Games that lean on conversation, Assassin's Creed for example, will sometimes have Dutch subtitles. Those helped me when I was younger, also enabling English subtitles in series and games.

But tbh a big thing is the exposure at a young age, I tried to do the same thing with Spanish series but a new language simply doesn't stick as well as it did 15 years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com