Quote:
Originally Posted by unipus
Probably if you were stranded in a foreign land and everything was collapsing around you, you would be both more immersed and also far more motivated to learn.
Also, Polish and Russian are not easy languages, but they're not Arabic.
Anyway, for me it still just comes back to this: are rules for language fun or interesting? To me, they can be -- but they're usually just a drag. What would be more fun and useful, I think, than a bunch of rules on language would be a section of a GM's guide all about interesting situations or reasons why you might bring language aspects into your game.
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For westerners, *any* language that uses "squiggly lines" instead of the familiar alphabet is going to be doubly hard.
By the time I left South Korea after living there for 4 months, I had the Hangul characters memorized - surprisingly many words were English borrow words.
Japan, on the other hand - Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, and Romaji... I only really know the ones for the train stops. Shinagawa station - three boxes and three lines. Easy-peasy. Yokohama - a spear, some squiggles, and then a T with a half of a square... The interesting thing is the realization that Tokyo and Kyoto are essentially the same sounds reversed in order but don't use the same kanji.
That's the key, I think. Seeing the foreign words and understanding their literal words in your native language is different from understanding their meanings.