Image: Facebook/@GameOfThrones
Like “The Lord of the Rings” (LOTR) and “Star Trek”, “Game of Thrones” (GoT) has its own fully-formed fictional language that fans of the show can geek over. They can already forget about subtitles when Daenerys speaks High Valyrian because a course for learning the language is now available online.
Image: Duolingo official website
Duolingo, a free language learning service, recently launched the High Valyrian language course on their online platform and allows GoT fans to learn the language on their free time. It is also the first GoT-centric language class being offered on the internet.
The webpage even has some cute little dragons razing a castle as its background image.
Image: Duolingo official website
The basic course runs learners through some simple pronouns and a few easy words to get the ball rolling. The learning approach is very visual and it’s just a matter of clicking on the right answer, then pressing “check.”
Image: Duolingo official website
There will also be simple sentence construction exercises to test how much a learner has understood so far.
Image: Duolingo official website
According to Quartz, David J. Peterson, the man who created the fictional languages for GoT, also taught a “Game of Thrones” language course at the University of California in Berkeley earlier this year.
For now, learning High Valyrian is limited to Duolingo’s website but the course should be available to the Android and iOS apps soon. Fortunately, all the lessons are free and learners can opt to sit down between 5 to 10 minutes a day to learn a few words and sentence structures before continuing with their daily grind, in their usual language. JB