Los Sims (Les Sims, Die Sims...)

Here is a truly brilliant idea. You can read the whole paper if you want (there are good screenshots, at least), but the basic brilliant idea is this: modify The Sims and popular MMORPGs to be bilingual, in order to provide practice using a second language. I've always heard that immersion is the key to really learning a language fluently, and playing The Sims or EverQuest in another language would be pretty immersive. Think how cool it would be for your German homework to include playing your favorite sim for an hour a day.

In playing the English version of the game, I noticed the vocabulary for the tasks contained many of the same words as the German homework I should have been studying instead. Finding that the language of the game could be changed to German simply by switching a single registry setting, I placed a laptop with a translation tool beside my main computer and continued playing the game in German. When the vocabulary items then came up in class, I was already familiar with them and could recall the relevant associated contexts and animations used in the game.