You need to understand that we don’t use English for our day to day conversations. Children are just learning to be familiar with English. Is it possible to teach them the language through computers ? I prefer keeping the lessons offline as far as possible.
My parents pushed me to learn when I was a kid. The way it worked best for me was just dive headfirst into it.
Watching movies and shows in English with English subtitles, reading books in English, playing video games in English (not necessarily learning ones), etc.
I had a couple of small dictionaries, and English booklets with grammar help, translation dictionaries, etc. I wrote down notes on them all the time.
The way I learned and internalized English, was through programming and a vocabulary trainer/flash cards at around 11 years old. So my advice would be: find something they find interesting and provide them with mostly English resources to learn that interesting thing, while also starting to learn basic vocabulary through flash cards.
Get old LucasArts SCUMM games for them. Secret of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, Day of the Tentacle and so on. With those you need to understand English for both understanding the story and to actually progress the game.
Good idea. I wonder though, if children can keep up the motivation. I do not want to bash the youth in a “everything was better in the old days” manner. It’s just that games nowadays are way more attention seeking. Flashy animations, sound, level design, etc, all specifically made to keep you going.
Edit: Spelling.
But it’s not ‘gaming’, it’s ‘learning’. And for all of those there’s plenty of walktroughs around if you get stuck. I’m currently playing the newest Monkey island and it has the spirit of old titles, but it has a ‘hint book’ where you can just practically skip puzzles you can’t figure answer for. That one relies heavily on the old games at the story tho, so it may not be the best one to start with.
But yeah, that might be a concern. You can try a lot of those out at Internet Archive before setting up a dosbox, so it’s atleast cheap to try and see how it goes.
