What Happened to Anna’s Finnish Skills Through Her Minecraft Hobby?
At School of Gaming, we have many Finnish students, our gamers, from all around the world. They join us from Australia to California, and everywhere in between. From every continent, in fact. If you don’t count Antarctica this time. These SoG “expat gamers” participate in our lessons once or several times a week.
Gaming is a wonderful way to learn new things. Much of this learning happens “incidentally.” Incidental learning in games has been studied quite a bit, and language learning in particular has proven to be very effective. The same mechanisms that help kids pick up new languages in games also help strengthen an existing language that is rarely used. Like when a family moves abroad into a foreign-language environment.
Anna Uses Four Languages in Her Everyday Life
Anne-Marie Jansson has lived in Norway, the land of fjords, since November 2011. Her gamer daughter Anna is eleven years old and has lived in Norway her entire life. In the Jansson household, four languages are spoken daily. Anne-Marie speaks Finnish to Anna and her sister, her husband speaks Swedish to them, and between themselves Anne-Marie and her husband use English. The girls sometimes speak Norwegian, sometimes Finnish. So Anna uses four different languages in her everyday life!
When Anna was kindergarten-aged, Anne-Marie noticed that her daughter often wanted to speak only Norwegian or English. Finnish was reserved for talking to her mother and occasionally with relatives over the phone. Anne-Marie often had to pretend she didn’t understand Anna unless she used Finnish.
“When Anna started school at six years old, I noticed that although she spoke Finnish quite well, she didn’t conjugate verbs and adjectives correctly, and her vocabulary was smaller in Finnish than in Norwegian,” Anne-Marie recalls. “I was quite worried that her Finnish would gradually fade. Just me and a few relatives in Finland speaking Finnish with her wouldn’t be enough to maintain or develop the language.”
What Happened to Anna’s Language Skills Through Minecraft?
A couple of years ago, Anne-Marie happened to see a Facebook ad for a Minecraft club by School of Gaming and signed Anna up. “It’s much more likely that Anna will learn Finnish from peers through a shared hobby than from daily conversations with me alone,” Anne-Marie remembers thinking.
Anna began participating in SoG twice a week and even played with a Finnish girl she met at the club in her free time. Anne-Marie has seen her daughter’s Finnish improve dramatically thanks to Minecraft:
“Anna’s Finnish has improved and strengthened enormously since she joined SoG. Her vocabulary has become much richer, she uses more synonyms, she conjugates words better, and she no longer has to pause so long to figure out how to explain something.”
For Anne-Marie, it is very important that both her daughters maintain their Finnish alongside other languages. Not just because multilingualism opens many doors for study and career, but especially to preserve close relationships with relatives in Finland. Too many expat families face the painful realization that their children no longer share a common language with their grandparents.
Not Just About Language
School of Gaming’s remote game-based education doesn’t directly teach language to anyone. The improvement comes as “incidental learning.” Instead, SoG’s game educators focus on teaching children skills that will benefit them no matter what they choose to do in life. We call them human skills. And they never go out of style!
“Since joining SoG, Anna has learned a lot about group dynamics, standing up for herself, listening to others, and understanding that the world isn’t just about me, myself, and I,” says Anne-Marie.
Emotional skills, positive communication, and teamwork grow while rescuing School of Gaming’s principal from the depths of pyramids or solving mysteries at the "Academy of Shadows" during school holiday's Minecraft camps.
Anne-Marie is very happy with SoG’s work:
“I would definitely recommend this to other parents living abroad, because no matter how much I try to speak and read Finnish to my daughters, it’s not always enough. While playing, they pick up the language and its nuances almost effortlessly. The best part is that to them, it doesn’t feel like studying at all! It’s a fun hobby where language learning comes as a big bonus.”