#(after all it's not as though there's a scarcity of translations of the haggadah or anything)

[moonlit-tulip]

I grew up in an environment where there was a lot more reading-things-out-loud going on than I have the impression there is in most places. Particularly, although not exclusively, from my father.

There were bedtime stories when I was a kid, both before and after I learned to read things myself. There were the various textbooks my father used as bases from which to do homeschooling from childhood up until college, where our pattern was largely "we sit together on a couch or a bed with a pile of books, he reads from the books out loud, I ask nitpicky questions, we go off on long conversational tangents based on those questions, and learning happens thereby", sometimes with interludes of me reading things out loud instead (e.g. for language-learning, or when we were covering plays for English and each took on one or more characters per scene). There's the Passover seder every year, where the standard pattern is "for each logical-chunk-of-content, my father reads it out loud in Hebrew, then translates it to English, then pauses for discussion". There's his pattern when studying the Gemara or other such books with others (which: he ~always has a nonzero number of study groups going on in that general area), which is very similar, reading the original Aramaic out loud, then translating it, then going into discussion about it. Et cetera.

Thinking about those later ones in particular—the ones with translation packed in as part of the reading-out-loud—it's occurred to me: that could make a pretty good format for a Let's Play! Find some untranslated-to-English game (or visual novel, or book, or whatever); go through it piece-by-piece; for each piece, first read the text in the original language, then give it an English gloss; and, thereby, allow people who don't speak the relevant language to experience it alongside you and Basically Get It.

I'm kind of considering doing this myself, even, once I progress sufficiently along the path of Learning To Read Japanese to be able to do so in any substantial way. Bringing untranslated VNs to the masses! Or at least to whatever small not-particularly-massed niche exists of people interested in that sort of thing. It seems potentially fun, and it's a valuable niche which it seems like not nearly enough people are trying to fill, right now.