Only playing competitive online games won’t make you learn a new language

Of course you will practice the language but only under certain conditions. Depending of your commitment that is to say if you are going beyond the game aspect. By trying to get to know other players or talking about various subjects.

Indeed, if you only talk about the game, you limit yourself to one area. The vocabulary is basically the same. In top of that online games, especially competitive ones, require short communication. You must throw key-words to your teammates as clean and fast as possible.

Roughly communication is like “Planting”, “Rushing”,“3 B ! 3B Guys ! Rotate fucking noob !”. You may notice sentences are not necessary.

There are many non-native English speakers on EU server. Lot of Russian and middle-east player that doesn’t speak well. Whereas your native tongue is from Neo-Latin languages you might think you are an excellent English speaker. Russian people will make you think fluent in English. Amazing isn’t it?

Actually I knew I wasn’t a good speaker before coming to Norway. However I thought it would be easier. For example I didn’t know the kitchen vocabulary and other words in different fields. I have realized that I wasn’t able to speak English fully.

I guess there is no secret to learn a language. You must live in this language. Meaning you need to read, watch, listen and talk most of the time to create automatisms and then you will think sometimes in the learning language.

If you aim to learn while you play, I advise you to stay in touch with other international players. Building an international team in a game or whatever is a good idea for improvement.

I think that playing online games can’t teach you a language completely. As well as just reading because the pronunciation matter to understand oral expression. Unless you are exceptional.

By the way, recently, I spoke to someone on a Teamspeak3 server having a sentence in English in his pseudo. I asked him the meaning, he told me that he doesn’t remember the signification because it was a private joke with his friends. Apparently he came to the United States for holidays 3 years ago. So I asked him if he speaks English. The answer was “Of course I do” (in French) therefore I was glad to tell him something in English as he seemed confident but he couldn’t understand a word… The situation was quite funny. Pretending to know something sometimes works.

It is an outline of my mind. Feel free to react.

I hope this is pleasant to read.