Learning German by Playing Pokémon

Have you ever found yourself trying to find a fun way to learn German? Willkommen in der Welt der POKéMON! If you have ever played any of the games in this franchise, you can be happy to know that the game can be played in other languages as well. Recently, I have purchased Pokémon Brilliant Diamond, a new rendition of Pokémon Diamond that was originally played on the DS. I want to share some thoughts about what I’ve learned so far.

1.  It’s a bit overwhelming

When I taught English in Brazil, I had a buddy who learned English by playing a Pokémon game. This inspired me to try this to learn German. Since I’ve played Pokémon Diamond before, I have a good idea of what is going on and what I generally have to do. The thing is, most of the vocabulary goes over my head and I have to translate them or else I’m left lost and confused. For this process, I’ve decided that I will use the game as a testing resource to see how much German I’ve learned so far. So instead of clicking A through the dialogue and moving on through the game, I will take my time playing so that I can note down phrases and vocabulary to build on what I already know. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Having this type of resource to test my German will be great because I can do something that is mentally challenging, yet fun and nostalgic.

2. Google translate is your best friend

I like having Google translate and Google Docs on my laptop open so that I can use them to write down some phrases that I’m reading. Something I do when noting the text and its translation is seeing if it is colloquially relevant to everyday life. You can tell if it appears at the beginning or end of a sentence, and as you continue playing, you will notice things in the middle. The game has a lot of short phrases to give personality to the characters and make the situations more interesting. This is important because those are little things that can greatly improve your natural speech. A technique that I use is (1) sounding out the phrase, (2) hear the audio of the text, and (3) mimic the audio as close as possible. There are so many regional accents of the German language that I don’t worry too much about my accent, just my pronunciation. As long as I can be understood when I speak, I am good to go. The accent will develop itself the more I speak the language.

3. You need to set up time for this

If your schedule allows, go ahead and set up at least an hour block of your day to learn German via this method. The great part of learning a language through video games is that you don’t need to build a structure because all you’re doing is immersing yourself in the language. Being lost is a good way to learn directions, steps, and instructions in any real life situation. That being said, it is important that you have a good chunk of time to dedicate to this process. Here are some rules that I follow:

1. Don’t take a break until the hour is up
2. Expect to play the game slowly
3. Write down the moves, items, etc. and their translations on a reference sheet
4. Have fun!

This is meant to be study time, and it can also be fun if you make it so. A good mindset for this is to play the game the way you played it before, and just learn the new words for the moves and items that you already know. This is similar to watching a TV series in a different language that you’ve already watched over and over again except that in this case, you are more involved because you are interacting with the resource. The downside is that you can’t replay dialogue unless you are just talking to an NPC that repeats their given lines. However, if a phrase comes up only once, it might not be as important as you might think because if you already played the game before, you don’t need to have a character repeat themselves.

I hope that this inspires you to restart a game in a new language because I am certainly learning German at a 5th grade level. I think playing video games is a fun testing method that also delivers a method of immersion that you might not have anywhere else. It rekindles your inner child and offers challenges that you might not see in a textbook. If you are a seasoned language learner, you won’t need to look up grammar rules as often because you can figure out the sentence structure after translating. Have a reference sheet ready for you because even in English, the moves, items, and berries are made-up, and I’m certain that they would do the same in any language. This demonstrates the creativity of language, and eventually, you can make up words through a combination of prefixes and suffixes! This can transfer to other aspects of language expression such as music, newsprint and news broadcasting, or television and movies. I wish you the best of luck on your endeavors and just have fun with it! You’re doing the best you can, so might as well enjoy it.