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Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

polygon.com

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Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#41

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

marcan_42 wrote: post #32
CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is assuming they tried to write their own TTS instead of just taking an existing, working English TTS and speed it up and distort it. Why would they do that? To me it does sound exactly like that too in English. I'd wager it's more obvious in the Japanese version because Japanese is the exceptional language. There are only 44 syllables in Japanese (English has about 16,000) and one would probably still notice th…

Writing their own TTS sounds like what Nintendo would do, to be honest. Spanish is about as phonetically consistent as Japanese. Most languages have simpler phonology than English. It's not about the number of possible syllables, it's about the rules to go from text to phonemes. The rules in English are immensely complicated and inconsistent. Meanwhile, I can accurately describe Spanish phonology, such that you'd be…

True, but if they didn't write their own TTS nothing of that matters.

Most TTS software out there will be better at English than any other language despite the more complex phonology. Then it's solely about distinguishing language characteristics and I think the amount of syllables would have an effect in that. Japanese has a lower information density than English (at the same speed) so with the same amount of distortion Japanese should be more recognizable.

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#42

Post by ubercow13 »

marcan_42 wrote: post #27

It was never supposed to be nonsense. To anyone playing in Japanese or presumably other phonetically consistent languages, it's obviously a sped up, slurred/somewhat mangled version of what the text is saying. I guarantee not a single Japanese player didn't notice this, or otherwise thinks it's pure gibberish. Japanese is not my native language and I noticed immediately; any native would have too. The problem is that…

This reminds me of the game killer7, where some NPCs would speak in a partially distorted voice. However in that game it always quite interesting listening to the TTS because the script an NPC is reading seems to be a paraphrased from the subtitle (and maybe partially complete gibberish?) and it feels like you’re fading in and out of understanding the language as they speak [1], which is in fitting with the surreal style of the game and presumably intentional.

[1] https://youtu.be/B-Pw72j6xDg

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#45

Post by hahamrfunnyguy »

marcan_42 wrote: post #27

It was never supposed to be nonsense. To anyone playing in Japanese or presumably other phonetically consistent languages, it's obviously a sped up, slurred/somewhat mangled version of what the text is saying. I guarantee not a single Japanese player didn't notice this, or otherwise thinks it's pure gibberish. Japanese is not my native language and I noticed immediately; any native would have too. The problem is that…

Luigi's mansion 3 does something similar, I wouldn't be surprised if it's using the same or similar technology under the hood. For one of the characters, bits of the dialog sounded like incoherent Japanese and I could make out some words. I haven't played in a while, but I recall different characters had different sounding accents too. I like this approach for in-game dialog!

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#46

Post by imtringued »

klodolph wrote: post #31
zerocrates wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're comparing making a bespoke 3D model of a character as opposed to scanning an actual person, saying similarly you could just create a voice from scratch rather than record a real one.

I thought that was obvious, so I guess my comment wasn’t clear. A 3D scanner is an artist’s tool. By using a 3D scanner, you aren’t getting rid of artists, you are just changing how artists do their jobs. Vocal synthesizers and vocal transformers, similarly, aren’t making it possible to press a button and get reasonable sounding voice in your games if you don’t have a voice actor making it possible. If you aren’t con…

What a lot of people fail to grasp is that there is a fixed cost to staying alive. The big problem for a lot of skills is that the production capacity of a human is not high enough to pay for that fixed cost or just barely profitable enough for the top 10000 humans to have a career in this skill. If you somehow increase the productivity of humans with that skill you are massively reducing the barrier to entry which means more people can make a living out of it.

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#48

Post by dada78641 »

marcan_42 wrote: post #27

It was never supposed to be nonsense. To anyone playing in Japanese or presumably other phonetically consistent languages, it's obviously a sped up, slurred/somewhat mangled version of what the text is saying. I guarantee not a single Japanese player didn't notice this, or otherwise thinks it's pure gibberish. Japanese is not my native language and I noticed immediately; any native would have too. The problem is that…

I've played it in both Japanese and in English, and while Japanese is more phonetically consistent I don't understand how people could miss it in English either. You can tell right at the beginning when Rover says your name back to you. Even if it's usually difficult to make out, occasionally you should notice it's not totally random, especially when you start playing around with giving the villagers catchphrases.

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#49

Post by TeaDude »

ubercow13 wrote: post #42
marcan_42 wrote: post #27

It was never supposed to be nonsense. To anyone playing in Japanese or presumably other phonetically consistent languages, it's obviously a sped up, slurred/somewhat mangled version of what the text is saying. I guarantee not a single Japanese player didn't notice this, or otherwise thinks it's pure gibberish. Japanese is not my native language and I noticed immediately; any native would have too. The problem is that…

This reminds me of the game killer7, where some NPCs would speak in a partially distorted voice. However in that game it always quite interesting listening to the TTS because the script an NPC is reading seems to be a paraphrased from the subtitle (and maybe partially complete gibberish?) and it feels like you’re fading in and out of understanding the language as they speak [1], which is in fitting with the surreal s…

Fun fact: In the Japanese version it's literally just mac TTS voices with machine translated English.

The distortion effects were presumably added so people overseas wouldn't notice how jarring it is. It's such a cool effect it feels like something that should have been in the original release.

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#50

Post by 33degrees »

Galanwe wrote: post #6

Interestingly, we have a word in French to call these gibberish languages that sound like real ones but have no meaning. It's called speaking "yogurt". It was originally used because young French people wanted to sing the English songs that they heard, but didn't know the language, so they would make up sounds that looked like English.

Interesting! I imagine this is specific to France as I’ve never heard this in Québec...
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