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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

#51

Post by ubercow13 »

TeaDude wrote: post #49
ubercow13 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh wow that’s so interesting! Especially how incomprehensible most of the dialog still is. I just realised this account posted the same video with the non-distorted speech too [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/Jz7FUYRQqfY

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

#52

Post by wincy »

Waterluvian wrote: post #12
vimy wrote: post #8

Reminds me of a song from 1972 by an Italian comedian. The song is called "Prisencolinensinainciusol" which means...well, nothing. It's gibberish. In fact, the entire song is nonsense lyrics made to sound like English. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8&feature=emb_titl...

It's also a pretty catchy song. But yeah it messes with my brain that is working hard to parse English. It's interesting. If a language is clearly not English I don't have the same issue.

Is English your native language? Because for me at least as a native English speaker I immediately recognize it as gibberish and have no such problem. I’m curious if it’s a native/non-native issue with parsing or not.

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

#53

Post by wincy »

lovemenot wrote: post #23
treeman79 wrote: post #4

How English sounds to foreigners. https://youtu.be/Vt4Dfa4fOEY

Yeah, that's good. As a native English speaker (UK), I'll be pedantic. That's also how Americans sound to me.

My wife is from New York and has a very difficult time understanding non-US accents. She has to watch British period dramas with subtitles.

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

#54

Post by Waterluvian »

wincy wrote: post #52
Waterluvian wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a pretty catchy song. But yeah it messes with my brain that is working hard to parse English. It's interesting. If a language is clearly not English I don't have the same issue.

Is English your native language? Because for me at least as a native English speaker I immediately recognize it as gibberish and have no such problem. I’m curious if it’s a native/non-native issue with parsing or not.

Yes it is. I'm a very strong English speaker/listener.

I get this in a lot of things. Human brains love finding patterns and everyone does this to an extent. I think mine does it so much more. For example if I ever see numbers anywhere I'm compulsively adding them to see if any nicer looking numbers result.

I wouldn't be surprised if this inclination to hear jibberish and try to parse it into language is a me thing.

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

#55

Post by lloda »

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…

English spelling is inconsistent. English phonology is complex. These are different things.
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