Playing in a Different Language Group

[Undine]

I was just wondering, how difficult is it to play in a language group that isn't your own? I'm asking because I would love to make a Spanish character as a way to get better at the language, but I'm afraid that I'll end up embarrassing myself. I've had seven years of study but I'm by no means fluent. Any advice from those of you playing in other groups?

[SekoETC]

I think 7 years of study is enough to play in a language group. I used to play in the Swedish group when I started and no one ever complained about my language skills, even though I didn't know what a curing tub was called (it's not exactly something that would be taught in school).

[Undine]

I'm most worried about conjugations and things, honestly. The conversation part would be fine, but I don't know what to expect with the emotes. I guess just the third person present form like how we do in English?

[*Wiro]

In my experience they don't emote by far as much in non-English language groups. That experience is limited to Dutch, German, Spanish and Polish characters. Most communication is verbal and I often feel like it's a relief not to have to worry about emotes for once.

[Kyriel]

I've seen Polish characters emote quite a bit.

[sanchez]

I play some polish-spawned chars. They are pretty quiet, compared to my English chars who live among Polish, as I feel the errors would be more disruptive. And emotes are of course much more difficult. But it’s a great learning tool, even just navigating the interface and trying to read conversations, so if you are careful not to let your spawns disrupt native speakers (i.e. if you don’t use machine translation like google to generate sentences), you should certainly try it. Else, use sailors, who can RP a language-learning process in another zone.

[Naranjita]

It this helps, when I played my chars in Spanish, the general rule was emoting in the third person, yes.

[Undine]

Thanks for your input, everyone! I think I'm going to try a Spanish character tomorrow and see how it goes. I'll probably be observing the other characters at first to see what the norm is, so hopefully it doesn't turn into a disaster. Wish me luck!

[Marian]

I'm relatively sure I could get along in any language group just as long as I knew how to introduce myself, say *smiles*, 'What can I help with?' and 'Please don't kill me"

[sanchez]

I'm relatively sure I could get along in any language group just as long as I knew how to introduce myself, say *smiles*, 'What can I help with?' and 'Please don't kill me"

But clearly that's not enough to spawn a new char in the language. And that's the difference.

[Snickie]

This is my struggle on whether or not I should spawn a French character. (Other than the whole being completely unmotivated to play nowadays thing.) I've been studying French for over a year, but not seriously. While I could figure out how to do all the things listed above, I'm pretty sure I'd be caught right away. My vocabulary is extremely limited and I can't conjugate anything not in the present indicative or infinitive tenses.

But that's how I was when I started playing my Spanish character upwards of four years ago. Back then, my capacity for speaking Spanish was limited to just a little bit more than whatever Dora the Explorer and intermittent lessons in kindergarten taught me. I did all my emotes in Spanish and then English which practically gave it away that I was not bilingual. Goonslate and Wordreference.com were my friends for quite some time; the latter still is. Even after four semesters of Spanish including AP Spanish I'm not fluent, but I understand them now. I practice every day now with DuoLingo (it's free), which is a great tool to make sure the vocabulary and grammar rules stay fresh though it's not always great with colloquialisms. I understand them and I can communicate with them and it's not a big deal.

(It probably doesn't help that my Spanish character went on to learn English XD)

[Marian]

But clearly that's not enough to spawn a new char in the language. And that's the difference.

We've got a spawn in an English speaking town that I'm pretty sure only knows how to say, 'good morning' 'smiles' 'thank you' and various slightly garbled versions of 'i just want to help' and 'what can i do'. Seems to work out just fine for everyone.

[sanchez]

We've got a spawn in an English speaking town that I'm pretty sure only knows how to say, 'good morning' 'smiles' 'thank you' and various slightly garbled versions of 'i just want to help' and 'what can i do'. Seems to work out just fine for everyone.

How lucky for that player then that they found such a tolerant group, and nobody has reported them to PD. However, it is explicitly against the game rules to spawn a char in a language without hope of generating grammatical sentences:

http://wiki.cantr.net/index.php/Game_Rules

The Foreign Language Rule

Each character spawns knowing only one language, no matter how many you as a player know. Your characters may travel or meet characters from other language zones and learn new languages in game. But, even if you as a player have knowledge of a second language OOC, you must roleplay for each character a language-learning process for a minimum of forty (40) days. This Language Rule is to mitigate any advantage for multilingual players. You are, however, allowed during this process to describe the actions of your character using any common language, though your character may only speak words learned in game. It's understood that characters will learn grammar from experience, but some attempt should be made to explore it. Machine translation such as google may aid in the language-learning process, but it is never a substitute for real world knowledge. You may not spawn a character in a language in which you have no working knowledge. Characters who use machine-generated language only are disruptive to native speakers and not allowed.

Because there are so many more non-native speakers playing in the English zone than in others, we are a little bit more used to occasional errors. Cantr is a great learning tool, but that can’t be abused.

[Marian]

Trying to imagine how uptight someone would have to be to report a harmless, helpful person to the PD just because they can't speak the language well, even when they speak it perfectly well enough to be involved and contributing in a community. Maybe instead I'll just report all these sleepers and sleepworkers my chars see who never speak because I've never heard them form a grammatical sentence, for all I know they're heathen foreigners in disguise, let's get that witchhunt going full swing.

[sanchez]

Trying to imagine how uptight someone would have to be to report a harmless, helpful person to the PD just because they can't speak the language well, even when they speak it perfectly well enough to be involved and contributing in a community. Maybe instead I'll just report all these sleepers and sleepworkers my chars see who never speak because I've never heard them form a grammatical sentence, for all I know they're heathen foreigners in disguise, let's get that witchhunt going full swing.

The rule very plainly isn’t written to discourage sincere language learners. But the game has seen some pretty egregious abuse of the spawning system in this way (i.e. for location, rather than language).

I have also seen chars who travel to other zones and paste straight out of google. It’s obnoxious and disruptive. English has very little inflection, so it’s not too difficult to make simple sentences that sound OK. But in many languages in Cantr, using only infinitives, or always the wrong gender, etc. is not really playing the game.