MMORPG with human languages

Solution: Make a MMORPG (Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game) with languages divided by race.

We know that immersion is the best way of teaching a foreign language. The best place to learn French, in my indefensible opinion, is Quebec. Every street sign, business sign, and label is presented in both English and French. In walking around Quebec, hundreds of words and their English equivalents are pasted into my brain. I would like an analog in computer based education.

How about world where the Hobbits speak English, the Elves speak French, the Orcs speak Spanish, the Dryads speak Hungarian, and the Dwarves speak German? In this scheme, new players would start the game in their own towns, speaking their own languages, and building up characters. As the character progresses, quests and treasures lead the characters into border regions where both languages are spoken, as in Quebec.

On the further fringes of the border regions, the original language drops away and only the foreign language is immediately available. Some spells would be available to temporarily translate speech or writing as ghostly highlighting, but the spells are rigged to be too expensive to continually rely upon. As the player spends more time trading in foreign goods, entering Elvish caves that have awaited a Hobbits for thousands of years, and going about their questing, more and more of the vocabulary and spelling of the language seeps into the player’s brain.

Putting grammar into the game and into the player’s brain may require special constraints. Requiring magic spells and puzzle solving to use correct grammar would augment the grammar learned from reading or interacting with NPCs. Some inconvenient items might require short language puzzles for each activation. The goal is to keep the explicit learning low enough that the gaming and the implicit learning continues.

This idea is certainly within reach. The FSF has been working to GPL an MMORPG infrastructure. That is, an organization is working to make everything free software, so that designing the landscape and quests would bring this idea to reality.