Learning English on the Speccy

Y'know, other stuff, Sinclair related.
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R-Tape
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Learning English on the Speccy

Post by R-Tape »

I'd be interested to know to what extent the Speccy helped (or forced) people to learn English, or another language.

Speccy users outside of Britain—did you already have an understanding of English from movies etc? Or did a particular Speccy program encourage you to learn? How did it go? Good, bad, confusing? Or did you spend the most time on releases in your own native tongue?

Interested!
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Alessandro
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Re: Learning English on the Speccy

Post by Alessandro »

The Spectrum definitely helped me learn English better, not only with games like text adventures, but also through the press, i.e. when, in May 1987, I casually found that a newsagents in the city center sold Sinclair User, which I bought until they did not sell it anymore because British computer magazines and foreign press in general did not sell well, due - I presume - to the proverbial inability of many Italians (except for those who lived and/or studied abroad) to learn a foreign language, especially English.

The infamous "tape magazines" which sold bundles of pirated games on one cassette were often poorly translated, up to the point that playing some titles which relied heavily on text was practically impossible; that's what happened to Stormbringer, for example.

I still remember to this day how I, aged 11, struggled to understand Mugsy's speech balloons. That was definitely not the kind of English you learnt at school!
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Re: Learning English on the Speccy

Post by Ralf »

Yes, I learnt a lot of English from Spectrum games and later from PC games. A lot of new words.

Often I didn't know how to say all these new words correctly and invented some my own pronounciations ;)
For quite a lot of years I pronounced "delete" like "palette" not like "deeleet" for example.

I can't say I learnt English through gaming as I was taking courses as well but it certainly helped. In the 80s
and early 90s you had limited access to English in Poland, there wasn't internet or even foreign TV channels
available. Songs were too hard to undrestand, actually many are even today ;) So games were my first and then
only contact with English.
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Turrican
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Re: Learning English on the Speccy

Post by Turrican »

R-Tape wrote: Sun Feb 10, 2019 8:48 pm I'd be interested to know to what extent the Speccy helped (or forced) people to learn English, or another language.

Speccy users outside of Britain—did you already have an understanding of English from movies etc? Or did a particular Speccy program encourage you to learn? How did it go? Good, bad, confusing? Or did you spend the most time on releases in your own native tongue?

Interested!
To understand the magazines Crash and Your Sinclair, I had to improve my English skills. :)
I used to buy both magazines in the 90's.
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Juan F. Ramirez
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Re: Learning English on the Speccy

Post by Juan F. Ramirez »

I didn't need a high level of english to use my Spectrum. I was 13, almost 14 when I got my Spectrum Plus. I was about to start secondary and my english was 'basic'.

The Plus manual was translated to spanish. The two first games that Igot with it were Match Day and Raid Over Moscow, with their original british inlays & instructions but with a separate sheet with the instructions translated to spanish thanks to Erbe, the spanish distributor. There were several spanish magazines that talked about games & programming, ... so with all this and a basic level of english I didn't really need a deeper knowledge of Shakespeare's language to play games or make my first steps in BASIC programming. Nor I came across any british magazine (there was a wide catalogue of Spectrum related or computing in general spanish magazines back then so we didn't need them either).

The only problem I remember was text adventures. There were very few of them translated to spanish (now I think of Gremlins only), so great adventures like the Questprobe series, Level 9 or others were nearly impossible for me to complete it. I remember getting the great Sherlock, by Melbourne House, and spending hours and hours with my spanish/english dictionary next to me trying to get out of 21b, Baker St. and get a cab (how in the f*ck*ng hell you could call a cab in english!!! :x ). I know it was a great adventure but I couldn't progress much, as you can presume.

Curiously, what encouraged me to improve my english was at the end of 90s, when I came across the wonderful world of emulators, FTPs files and forums. My level of english was already much better then but I had to improve even more to help me get all that Internet offered to me (as I said before, emulators, FTPs, ...).

Years and years joining WoS and now SC forums really helped me to improve and get a better level of english, forced me to learn how to express ideas and read long texts quickly. And I find all this marvellous.
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Re: Learning English on the Speccy

Post by Metalbrain »

I had basically no English when I got my Spectrum (I think I was around 7?), but I didn't really need much to use it, specially to play mostly arcade games.

At the beginning I just learned a few basic words from games, such as: Keyboard, Up, Down, Left, Right, Fire, Shoot, Start, Game Over, Lives, Level, Score... And some others from BASIC: Load, If, Then, Go to, For, Next, Ink... And for many other words I got the meaning because they're very similar to their Spanish versions (Redefine, Print, Save, Border, Paper, Music, Graphics, List, Program, Extend...)

Regarding the "did you already have an understanding of English from movies etc?" , that's a big NO because in Spain (and some other countries) everything on cinema and TV gets dubbed instead of subtitled, so for a long time we've had a really low English level compared to people from other countries where English content is not dubbed (except maybe the one for very small kids). Things only started to get a bit better with DVDs which included the original audio (and subtitles) together with the dubs, and a lot better with Internet and people downloading movies or series + subs (because they can't wait for the dubbed versions) and watching Youtube videos. I think most young Spanish people nowadays have a quite decent level of English.

That sentence about the proverbial inability of Italians to learn English makes me think they also have dubbed TV.
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Re: Learning English on the Speccy

Post by Ralf »

Interesting thing that you say about dubbed films.

In Poland we had and still have dubbed films in TV. The funny thing is that all dubbing is made by a single man who reads with a wooden voice without much emotion both male and female parts ;) But actually it works, you can hear original voices behind it and while they may be hard to understand you get their tone and style easily. And we are used to it.

In cinema it's different. We have subtitles except for films for children which are fully dubbed with full actors cast.

Maybe there is some truth in it that when you have dubbed films, you learn English slower.
On the other hand we generally had in Poland few English films in TV during communist times. It changed radically in the 90s.
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Re: Learning English on the Speccy

Post by cha05e90 »

Starting with a Sinclair ZX 81 I had to read and learn along the English BASIC manual (alas there was a German "translation" included - but the original was much snappier...). The most important source for English were of course the British magazines which I were able to buy at the local train station's bookstore: PCW, YC, YS, C&VG, ZX Computing and the like. Funny enough the famous Crash magazine is more or less unknown here - I can't remember that it was distributed (to this part) of the continent. Therefore Your Sinclair or ZX Computing were much more common.
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