Simulating a language barrier

[Kumpel]

Okay. This idea of decyphering is way too time consuming. Maybe some of you guys have better and therefore simpler ideas how to simulate success in overcoming a language barrier?

What would you do to show, that the player now understands some dialog parts spoken in foreign language more than others or than a few moments before?

[Cassiebsg]

 Why not just write the dialog like that?

- "qcfhd skfnuk  jenf b elfk?"
- "What?"
- "Do skfnuk jenf to elfk?"'
- "I'm not really understanding you."
- ""Do you jenf to elfk?"
- "Oh... do I what?"

Just use gibberish to what he doesn't understand, and replace the words as he learns them. You can even throw some "miss understood" words in the mix to add to the confusion. That can give you some funny dialogs (and eventually frustrating for the character) while he tries to speak using or understanding a wrong word here and there...

Ps - I would not use any recognizable language for the gibberish, since there's always the risk that a player will know that language, and then you lose the effect.

[Snarky]

Are you hardcoding which bits of the dialog are understandable and which aren't, or did you intend for that to be determined dynamically based on some kind of skill check?

In addition to what Cassie says, you could also use a foreign alphabet for the non-understood bits, e.g. Greek or Cyrillic.

Just make a 256-character font with both Latin and "foreign" glyphs, so you can easily display them together. Then I'd add a helper function that lets you "switch character sets" within a string using some control code (when it's turned on, characters get replaced by their ASCII value + 128) so that you don't have to actually type weird characters into the string literals.

[Kumpel]

Cassie: Yeah I started with something like that in shorter speeches but it expands the dialog and therefore the reading time too much very quickly. Also I fear that it confuses the player too much and I would like to impart as much as possible to him (but nevertheless that there is a langauge barrier...)

Snarky:
For now I am hardcoding the not readable parts.
I thought about foreign language fonts (in my case arabic, which is unreadable without at least 30 minutes of practice) too but I have parts in my game, where the player has to apply the little bit of knowledge he already gained about this language.
Doing it in a hardly readable font complicates the process of practicing and turns it into a game of "image search". That's why I chose to write it with phonetic methods which looks very similar to Cassies example and makes it possible for the player to actually learn how some arabic words are pronounced.

But how can I visualize this learning sucess in the way I am trying it? Maybe with ellipses beetween the understandable words, giving it the look of a fill-in-the-blank-text?

Foreigner: Can you ... what helps to ... it?
Player: Uh.. Yes?