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I TA'ed at a tech camp a while back, and there was a 12 year old from Mexico city that had astonishingly good English. I asked him how he was so good at it and he just answered "Skyrim".

So yeah, kids soak up a lot of info through games.



I basically learnt most of my written English from games as a teenager. They didn't directly help as much with speaking, but hanging out in game chats or IRC for a ridiculous number of hours actually helped with that to an extent as well. Even though it's still written rather than spoken, it's still a more spontaneous form of communication.

I took English as a foreign language in school since I was 8 or 9, so I learnt some of the basics there. But if I was faced with a spontaneous conversation, no matter how simple, I easily got tongue-tied. (I was also shy and socially awkward in general, which didn't help.)

Spending those hours in chats is when I started getting more comfortable with spontaneous communication.

I'm not necessarily a huge fan of gamification in general, which might be a generational thing, but learning as a side product of something you're interested in can be a huge boost. It doesn't have to be games, though. Lots of people probably learnt a lot of English from music or books they were engrossed with.




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