For the Intellivison, $250 is nothing, if… (Tommy Tallarico Type Beat)

if you don't know me and you don't know
my channel I am NOT someone who plays video games and this is not a video game review channel but nevertheless I did a one-hour interview with Tommy Tallarico a couple weeks ago one really interesting moment in that interview was where I talk to about language education and language education software I am currently studying Chinese at an advanced level and I'm acting as a teacher to my girlfriend my girlfriend is more at an intermediary level and the two of us are trying to progress using Chinese and I'm acutely aware of how important the gamification of language education is and that doesn't just mean taking language education and putting into the format of a video game on a console or a computer or a cell phone in reality when you're creating a textbook on paper a large part of what you're doing is the gamification of information taking information and putting it into a format that people can use in a game where people can play as they learn whether that's you know writing out a set of instructions for how four students can sit in a circle and do a certain procedure of asking questions for one another whether people take a ball and throw the ball back and forth while asking and answer certain questions the gamification of language learning is actually a really important part of language education there was a time in the past when I was working on curry in a jib way so those are languages indigenous to Canada First Nations languages Native American languages indigenous languages whatever you want to say I've worked on many different languages and many different language families by the way I've worked on languages from India Southeast Asia East Asia indigenous to Canada and yeah you're up to heard of it anyway whether the language is that the simplest or really the most challenging and the spectrum there is this question of of gamification I told Tommy Tallarico the story that when I first arrived at First Nations University of Canada this is a small college and Saskatchewan that teaches think they both do a jib way and curry right now one dialect of the Ojibwe language called Soto for my first week on campus I was talking to the professors about this but the challenge of creating games creating software for these languages and if we couldn't do that immediately creating card games so you know what do you think of card games you may think of poker but there were also card games like Pokemon and Magic the Gathering and for my first assignment in my first course on curry as a language I created a game that was a little bit like Pokemon and also a little bit like monopoly because there was a board you moved around the edges of and one of the reasons I did that I didn't I didn't know that many words in the language you had a dictionary and so on and a type of simple sentence I could create was something like the bear eats the chicken or you know maybe the bear tries to eat the fish but the fish escapes you make a little bit more of a complex sentence like that but this animal tries to eat that animal this was a type of sentence structure I could do a type of vocabulary get out of the addiction I made a game where like Pokemon different animals in the forest they're trying to eat each other in fight with each other but then you as a player and going around the table and so on while you're playing this you're making these sentences now when I was a kid I played a number of video games that were not created to be educational software but nevertheless in the English language they were an educational experience for me so if you think of the original Zork or its immediate prequels like Zork 2 or 3 those are all games where you're typing using complete sentences in English you know my first language when you were a little kid you don't know your own language that well you're reading text on screen probably all of us have some childhood memories of learning vocabulary from video games unfortunately most the vocabulary we learned is quite worthless in the modern I learned the names of many types of medieval weapons like the difference between a halberd and a BEC Duke or ban and it's really you know gets it again to some really obscure and useless but even even the word plague you know and how to spell plague correctly I remember getting that from a video game when I was a kid so you know there is tremendous educational potential with video games there's a certain level of de-facto educational value that's there already even with video games that weren't created to have educational value and still for me now at age 41 there's this challenge even if it's just for my own education even though I'm not teaching students in a classroom which I sometimes do and from me sitting here in my apartment and teaching my own girlfriend and credit trying to keep my girlfriend age how do you deem a PHY language learning now long story short in reference to the the Intellivision of miko the current hardware and software project Tommy Tallarico is a part of if the Intellivision offers me better language education software and better than what better than what I can get currently on iphone which is trash better than what I can get currently on Android which is trash if I could get better language education software whether for adults or child then that device would be worth $250 to me whatever the asking price is I don't know now if it's 200 250 what the final price can be no questions asked there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that the cost of buying that console will be justified whether I can get that for Chinese or French and you know in general with the market I think most people even if they do buy it with educational software being in consideration we admit this is a niche market then you know once you've already made that $250 purchase to spend $5.99 on an entertainment game on a piece of software of that kind that's probably not a big deal for people then they're gonna buy other kinds of software and do other kinds of things with it but I just emphasize it would not be difficult at all for Tommy Tallarico in this company in television to come out with educational software that's better than the best that currently exists in the market because the best that currently exists I think I've looked at every single piece of software within this year even for Chinese French and Greek I looked at every single piece of supper for Greek I was working on Greek just about 4 months ago now all right so with all this having been said almost any method of language acquisition will get results if you do it if you're motivated to do it and you do it again and again and again and I say this because any one of my audience could point out look the type of applications you're talking about in a cell phone or possibly in future on a console they're tremendously inefficient or limited or you know they have this or that disadvantage no matter how steep or stark the disadvantages are if you're motivated to do it again and again and again if you actually put in the time and effort and do it again again you will get results the example popped into my head the other day you know I'm sometimes tempted to study language in this kind of way and I think my thing was other let's say you had someone who was a real cheapskate and didn't want to buy the newspaper in Chinese but every day when he goes to the grocery store he just takes his cellphone and he takes a photograph of you know the top half of the front cover of the stack of newspapers right so you know when newspapers are piled up for sale you just see a few paragraphs of text let's say you had someone who every day was going to go home after buying his groceries and study the top half of the front page the newspaper you know right away you could come up with a whole bunch of objections both kind of academic you know linguistic objections to this method and pragmatic objections you know to learning language the way but III think you have to agree no matter how badly flawed this method is if you did that if if you were motivated to who knows why you know you'd have to be a certain kind of compulsive character for some reason you find it rewarding or you find it entertaining if you did that every day day after day after day for 300 days of course you'd get results of course you'd gain vocabulary you'd gain familiarity with sentence structure you probably would even gain writing ability you'd approve your ability to write articles in Chinese not just to read them you could get miraculous results even though this is a really bad method so you know it's true when you take language and you chop it up and put it into dialogue boxes and put it in an RPG or an urban planning game or a life sim game or whatever you somehow take the language and and you know put it into the software that's meant to be entertaining whether to children or adults there may be tremendous disadvantages over sitting alone with a textbook or sitting with you know teacher and student and textbook and chalkboard and other methods like that but most people are not motivated to be in the classroom for four hours a day five days a week and then when they're not in their classroom to go home and sit alone at their desk and write out an original essay and read and do rote memorization and exercises and then go back to the classroom the next day for another four hours that's incredibly rare and with several different languages I was one of those people who had that extraordinarily high level of motivation and commitment with some languages I had no teacher at all with Chinese you know I did but by that same token it's not like I'm on an ego trip precisely because I know what it's like to live with that high level of motivation and commitment I also know what it's like to lack it I know what it's like to be without it I know what it's like for a few months at a time to just feel like man I'm not motivated to hit the books forest attack I'm not motivated through this language this way or to be on a train or sitting around an airport and wish I could turn on my mobile phone or maybe I'm at home sick I've been I've been sick a lot lately to be lying in bed sick and think you know I wish I could I wish I wish I could engage with this language through software through a game or what have you and again the fundamental challenge of taking language and in rendering it into a playable form so that language practice you know become something engaging and interactive that's actually a challenge we have as authors when writing books that's a challenge you have when standing in front of a classroom with a piece of chalk and a chalkboard it's a challenge you have whether you work with a deck of cards or assembly code and the C++ and you're making software on a computer disk drive so the problem is not so different for a formal language educator and for a software developer the difference is the solution end of rants I don't think anyone looks at the situation Tommy Tallarico is in I think he's in an easy position but yes it was funny for me to stop and reflect 250 dollars if really there is educational software on that system $250 would seem like nothing because just take a look at how much it costs to buy a stack of audio CDs from the Pimsleur corporation it's such a ripoff just look at the terrible terrible language education software you can get from rosetta stone hundreds of dollars for nothing look at these awful websites they wanted to sign up for a membership or how quickly you would burn through two hundred and fifty dollars on I taki paying twenty dollars an hour for a tutor basically over Skype visits through a website like I talked to you a paper pay-per-view website man compared to going to an actual class with a teacher in a classroom even when it's run by a charity we have non-profit charities here that teach French in Canada two hundred and fifty dollars relative to the cost of education is nothing and what it's worth relative to the cost of entertainment frankly is a question doesn't interest me at all