So in my game my players have just made contact with the local people of this brand new continent they are on. It is a village of Kalashtar people. Now obviously I know they speak Quori for the most part but I do want some to possibly speak in a broken common as well. My question is what kind of broken english real world language could I use to help represent this. I am no voice actor, but I can do some with a little practice before hand.
I always recommend people think twice about doing an accent to represent "doesn't speak Common very well", because that can go some very uncomfortable places very quickly. If you do use an accent, make sure to avoid using one that is associated with marginalized groups in the real world. I have seen way too many white midwestern DMs doing miserable Carribean accents trying to make characters seem ominous. It's cringe.
Putting accents aside, word choice can do a lot of work to show that a character is speaking a language they're not totally familiar with. I have a couple of golem characters in my campaign who don't use personal pronouns; they refer to people by their full name every time. My players felt very smart when they figured out that this affectation came about because the golems' language doesn't have personal pronouns.
Think about what Quori might be good or bad at expressing. If I remember right, Kalashtar are bonded with dream spirits? So their language might have a very expressive vocabulary for emotions, and they might feel limited in that respect by speaking common. They might code switch (inserting a few words in Quori in the middle of a sentence in Common) when they talk about a strong or specific emotion. Because distance and time are weird in dreams, maybe Quori doesn't place as much emphasis on verb tenses as common does. In that case, some newer Common-speakers might have trouble with verb conjugation; maybe they always use infinitives (I to think this could to risk to be very to frustrate to parse though) or always use present tense or something. Just some ideas you could play with.
I always recommend people think twice about doing an accent to represent "doesn't speak Common very well", because that can go some very uncomfortable places very quickly. If you do use an accent, make sure to avoid using one that is associated with marginalized groups in the real world. I have seen way too many white midwestern DMs doing miserable Carribean accents trying to make characters seem ominous. It's cringe.
Putting accents aside, word choice can do a lot of work to show that a character is speaking a language they're not totally familiar with. I have a couple of golem characters in my campaign who don't use personal pronouns; they refer to people by their full name every time. My players felt very smart when they figured out that this affectation came about because the golems' language doesn't have personal pronouns.
Think about what Quori might be good or bad at expressing. If I remember right, Kalashtar are bonded with dream spirits? So their language might have a very expressive vocabulary for emotions, and they might feel limited in that respect by speaking common. They might code switch (inserting a few words in Quori in the middle of a sentence in Common) when they talk about a strong or specific emotion. Because distance and time are weird in dreams, maybe Quori doesn't place as much emphasis on verb tenses as common does. In that case, some newer Common-speakers might have trouble with verb conjugation; maybe they always use infinitives (I to think this could to risk to be very to frustrate to parse though) or always use present tense or something. Just some ideas you could play with.
I like a lot of these idea and I will make sure that the voices I do use don't marginalize. It is with friends so I should be ok with them, but that is also why I want to practice to make sure I have something solid and fun.
I can usually do new Orleans southern and eastern European pretty well. But I can also do some Spanish as well.
Eastern European (Soviet Block) would be good, especially if you follow the advice above and have them stumble over words or concepts using adjacent terms.
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"The mongoose blew out its candle and was asleep in bed before the room went dark." —Llanowar fable
My store cleric has a lisp and has become the favorite character of my campaign. He is lisping on the wrong tones however, where there is no 's' involved xD
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"Time, like hope, is an illusion" - Lumalee "Time is relative" - Albert Einstein "It's a joke. It's all a joke. Mother forgive me" - Edward 'The Comedian' Blake "Do I look like the kind of clown that can start a movement?" - Arthur Fleck
If you're a native English speaker here's some observations from a teacher of English who spent a lot of time with students for whom English is not their first language.
More often than not, those students were very highly skilled in speaking English but there were always some identifiers that 'gave them away' as non native speakers. Rarely do you encounter someone who speaks broken English, instead what you'll often see is overly formal forms of speech. So, contractions will often get used less frequently (don't - do not, can't - cannot, it's - it is). The bigger identifier however is colloquialism. Now much of this is less true in our modern world with English and it's been massively diluted by American dialects and spellings due to the pervasiveness of the internet. However, you do still see it. So - let's take the phrase 'butterflies in my stomach' - it's pretty universal across English speaking nations and tends to symbolise nervousness or something similiar - there are of course regional differences. This is a phrase that many non-native English speakers tend to need explained to them. You can't take it as read that they will understand the phrase.
So, my advise would be ditch the accent - often non-native English speakers don't tend to have an overly strong accent unless they grew up with said accent. In fact walk around Birmingham (UK) which has a hit and miss level of literacy (40% of students fail to get the basic qualification in English at High School, but over half are in the top 10%) and you'll find a diverse range of people, cultural backgrounds, and skin tones. Mostly you get a thick Birmingham accent. So, instead consider overly formal styles of speech, or odd phrasings.
Some examples from other languages here - in French if you want to learn how to say please, you'll be taught 's'il vous plait'. Now my fluent in French Grandma taught me that this actually translates directly as 'if you please'. It is for this reason that in some areas of France the correct phrase is actually 's'il tous plait'. Now I think it's something to do with formality and dialects but could be wrong. That's unimportant. If a non-native speaker goes using 's'il vous plait' in an area where 's'il tous plait' is more common it's going to signify a speaker not native to the area.
Likewise, if we look at the structure of some European languages we can see that the phrasing and colloquialisms are different. If I say 'half-eight' in the UK, I will likely be understood as meaning 8:30. Half-eight being a contraction for 'half an hour past eight', or more commonly 'half past eight'. However in some european languages the same phrase means something different. 'Half-eight' could mean 7:30 - essentially some languages and cultures utilise different contractions - in this case meaning 'half an hour until eight'.
Similarly ordering is a dead giveaway for some non-native speakers. In some languages you will have a fantastic, big, old, red, ball. However in Spanish, the adjectives (fantastic, big, old, red) would all appear after the noun (ball). So a non-native speaker might in rare cases mix this up - I have seen this with Welsh First Language speakers when they are learning English for the first time. The order of adjectives might get mixed up. Even then, a native English speaker might not be able to tell you why a 'red, big, ball' sounds wrong - it just does. We pick up instinctually on this stuff as we converse and our conversational experiences grow.
So, in short ditch the accents. They're needlessly time consuming to learn and the same effects can be achieved with how you utilise the language. Intentionally throw in words out of order, or speak overly formally as if you're concentrating hard to get the right words. Delays in speech cvan help too. When speaking French I need a lot more time than usual to translate due to language gender. That means my sentances are usually a lot shorter too. Here's an example of what I mean as an English speaker with low french skill:
Je suis en vacances. Je visite mon Frere. Ill habite a Samaur. [This is an attempt to say: I'm on holiday visiting my Dad who lives in Samaur]
What this actually says is: I am on holiday. I am visiting my Dad. He lives in Samaur. A native French speaker is going to understand what I mean, and often are polite enough to smile through the painful managling of the language, but they'll also know that I am not skilled in French and that I've got it entirely wrong.
This is a good replication though of what people with a lower fluency level in any language tend to do. Short, simplistic phrases. That allows thinking time between sentences and allows them not to get it wrong.
And notice that non of this is contingent on an accent!
Apologies for a second post but a separate but linked idea also occured.
Pronunciation. Obviously we all know that the way things are pronounced vary depending on your country of origin - US/UK pronunciations of Aluminium. Obviously, this is a notorious example and exists largely as the US dialects ended up deciding to contract it down from five syllables to just three - A-lu-mi-ni-um vs - alu-min-um. A big timesaver and not a terrible thing. However, this also happens in other spaces too. Consider to word - Biopic. Now when I was growing up this word was pronounced Biop-ic, however there is a popular (mainly with internet personalities) pronunciation that has crossed into the mainstream around the 2010s - bio-pic. Now neither is necesserily more correct than any other, but it made me think - you could also play about with different pronunciations of words?
I always recommend people think twice about doing an accent to represent "doesn't speak Common very well", because that can go some very uncomfortable places very quickly. If you do use an accent, make sure to avoid using one that is associated with marginalized groups in the real world. I have seen way too many white midwestern DMs doing miserable Carribean accents trying to make characters seem ominous. It's cringe.
Putting accents aside, word choice can do a lot of work to show that a character is speaking a language they're not totally familiar with. I have a couple of golem characters in my campaign who don't use personal pronouns; they refer to people by their full name every time. My players felt very smart when they figured out that this affectation came about because the golems' language doesn't have personal pronouns.
Think about what Quori might be good or bad at expressing. If I remember right, Kalashtar are bonded with dream spirits? So their language might have a very expressive vocabulary for emotions, and they might feel limited in that respect by speaking common. They might code switch (inserting a few words in Quori in the middle of a sentence in Common) when they talk about a strong or specific emotion. Because distance and time are weird in dreams, maybe Quori doesn't place as much emphasis on verb tenses as common does. In that case, some newer Common-speakers might have trouble with verb conjugation; maybe they always use infinitives (I to think this could to risk to be very to frustrate to parse though) or always use present tense or something. Just some ideas you could play with.
Could you give me some possible examples? I am interested in this, but I don't think I fully grasp it, especially that last part (infinitives in particular).
Sure, I can try. Up front I want to say that I'm not bilingual myself; all of these statements are based on observations of my bilingual friends, conversations with language teachers, and mistakes I used to make in Spanish class.
Code switching is very common in people who have been immersed in two languages their entire lives. You might hear a Spanish and English speaker say "Oh, he's so guapo" referring to a man they fancy. "Guapo" can be roughly translated as "pretty", but it doesn't carry the same connotations as calling a man pretty in English does. It also connotes smoothness or coolness in a way there's not one clean word for in common English. So rather than fish for a close-enough English word, they just use "guapo".
Using code switching is going to require you to make up some Quori words. This can take a lot of work, but there's ways to streamline it. When I make up words for a language, I don't go full Tolkien on it; I just come up with a general vibe for the language and bash out a handful of words I can pepper in. Going back to my golem language; it's heavy on percussive sounds, so there's a lot of short syllables that start with consonants and end with resonant vowels. I like the words to be 3 to 5 syllables long, because I want the language to sound like hammering or a drumbeat. So putting that together, I can drop made-up words into sentences that sound like they follow a rule (like "dokomo" and "radochako") without ever having to figure out what that rule is. I would advise writing out your words and what they mean beforehand, because it's very easy to forgot and contradict yourself if you try to make them up on the fly.
Applying this to Quori; we can guess from the name that Quori uses a lot of compound vowel sounds and soft consonants. The only two words we know are "Quori" and presumably "Kalashtar", so I'm going to keep the words around 3 syllables. We want words for complex emotions that aren't easily expressed in common. So off the dome I'm going to invent "aosho" (AH-o-show), which is an intense anger-hurt at being wronged by a loved one, and "luarka" (lu-AR-ka), which is disappointment-relief-guilt. You don't have to use these or even agree with my assessment of what Quori should sound like; I'm just laying out a system you could use for this.
I'll come back and talk about verb conjugation later but I gotta actually do my job a minute
In English, the main thing verb conjugation indicates is "when the action occurred". If I say I went, I will go, I have gone, I am going, etc, the main thing you learn from the way I conjugate the verb "to go" is when the going happened. Other languages use verb conjugations for other things; Spanish has different verb conjugations for formal and informal speech, and I've heard Japanese has a whole range of conjugations depending on the speaker's relationship with the verb object.
Verb conjugation is one of the things new language learners have to work very hard on, especially if the learned language uses conjugation for different things than their native language. So you can imagine if Quori doesn't use verb conjugations that place an emphasis on time, Quori speakers might have trouble mastering the time-based conjugation of Common (English) verbs. This is where we come around to infinitives. A verb infinitive is a form of the verb that can be used as a noun, adjective, or adverb (and perhaps most importantly, as the object of another verb). An infinitive is usually considered the "base form" of a verb, and so when new verbs are taught to language learners, they often learn the infinitive first. So, someone who has learned some vocabulary of a new language but doesn't necessarily understand it very well might reach for an infinitive verb where they shouldn't.
In such a case, you might get sentences like, "I go to the post office," when the speaker actually means "I went to the post office," or "I am going to the post office." You can see how this would be an easy mistake for a new speaker to make, especially if their native language doesn't use time-based verb conjugation.
You can get weirder with it; "I am going to went to the post office." "I will have going to the post office tomorrow." Or, if you want to make it easier for your players to parse, you can have a character consistently make the same mistake every time (like always using present-tense); "Yesterday, I go to the post office, and I meet my friend there. We talk and decide that tomorrow we go to the bar. But today it is tomorrow and they do not go to the bar." You can create a range of distinct ways of speaking with little variations on this concept.
In English, the main thing verb conjugation indicates is "when the action occurred". If I say I went, I will go, I have gone, I am going, etc, the main thing you learn from the way I conjugate the verb "to go" is when the going happened. Other languages use verb conjugations for other things; Spanish has different verb conjugations for formal and informal speech, and I've heard Japanese has a whole range of conjugations depending on the speaker's relationship with the verb object.
Verb conjugation is one of the things new language learners have to work very hard on, especially if the learned language uses conjugation for different things than their native language. So you can imagine if Quori doesn't use verb conjugations that place an emphasis on time, Quori speakers might have trouble mastering the time-based conjugation of Common (English) verbs. This is where we come around to infinitives. A verb infinitive is a form of the verb that can be used as a noun, adjective, or adverb (and perhaps most importantly, as the object of another verb). An infinitive is usually considered the "base form" of a verb, and so when new verbs are taught to language learners, they often learn the infinitive first. So, someone who has learned some vocabulary of a new language but doesn't necessarily understand it very well might reach for an infinitive verb where they shouldn't.
In such a case, you might get sentences like, "I go to the post office," when the speaker actually means "I went to the post office," or "I am going to the post office." You can see how this would be an easy mistake for a new speaker to make, especially if their native language doesn't use time-based verb conjugation.
You can get weirder with it; "I am going to went to the post office." "I will have going to the post office tomorrow." Or, if you want to make it easier for your players to parse, you can have a character consistently make the same mistake every time (like always using present-tense); "Yesterday, I go to the post office, and I meet my friend there. We talk and decide that tomorrow we go to the bar. But today it is tomorrow and they do not go to the bar." You can create a range of distinct ways of speaking with little variations on this concept.
These two posts you made are great. I am going to give it a try tonight and write up some sentences and quori words to use. I'll let you know what I come up with post here when I am happy with what I have.
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So in my game my players have just made contact with the local people of this brand new continent they are on. It is a village of Kalashtar people. Now obviously I know they speak Quori for the most part but I do want some to possibly speak in a broken common as well. My question is what kind of broken english real world language could I use to help represent this. I am no voice actor, but I can do some with a little practice before hand.
What accents are you already comfortable with?
I always recommend people think twice about doing an accent to represent "doesn't speak Common very well", because that can go some very uncomfortable places very quickly. If you do use an accent, make sure to avoid using one that is associated with marginalized groups in the real world. I have seen way too many white midwestern DMs doing miserable Carribean accents trying to make characters seem ominous. It's cringe.
Putting accents aside, word choice can do a lot of work to show that a character is speaking a language they're not totally familiar with. I have a couple of golem characters in my campaign who don't use personal pronouns; they refer to people by their full name every time. My players felt very smart when they figured out that this affectation came about because the golems' language doesn't have personal pronouns.
Think about what Quori might be good or bad at expressing. If I remember right, Kalashtar are bonded with dream spirits? So their language might have a very expressive vocabulary for emotions, and they might feel limited in that respect by speaking common. They might code switch (inserting a few words in Quori in the middle of a sentence in Common) when they talk about a strong or specific emotion. Because distance and time are weird in dreams, maybe Quori doesn't place as much emphasis on verb tenses as common does. In that case, some newer Common-speakers might have trouble with verb conjugation; maybe they always use infinitives (I to think this could to risk to be very to frustrate to parse though) or always use present tense or something. Just some ideas you could play with.
I can usually do new Orleans southern and eastern European pretty well. But I can also do some Spanish as well.
I like a lot of these idea and I will make sure that the voices I do use don't marginalize. It is with friends so I should be ok with them, but that is also why I want to practice to make sure I have something solid and fun.
Eastern European (Soviet Block) would be good, especially if you follow the advice above and have them stumble over words or concepts using adjacent terms.
Did you ever see the Big Bang episode(s) where they do celebrity voices in D&D?
Celebrities are often easier to imitate and recognizable. Moreover, they bring with them a whole bunch of non-prejudiced connotations.
Making all goblins Italian has issues. Making all goblins Danny Devito is not racist and more likely to make people laugh.
My store cleric has a lisp and has become the favorite character of my campaign. He is lisping on the wrong tones however, where there is no 's' involved xD
"Time, like hope, is an illusion" - Lumalee
"Time is relative" - Albert Einstein
"It's a joke. It's all a joke. Mother forgive me" - Edward 'The Comedian' Blake
"Do I look like the kind of clown that can start a movement?" - Arthur Fleck
If you're a native English speaker here's some observations from a teacher of English who spent a lot of time with students for whom English is not their first language.
More often than not, those students were very highly skilled in speaking English but there were always some identifiers that 'gave them away' as non native speakers. Rarely do you encounter someone who speaks broken English, instead what you'll often see is overly formal forms of speech. So, contractions will often get used less frequently (don't - do not, can't - cannot, it's - it is). The bigger identifier however is colloquialism. Now much of this is less true in our modern world with English and it's been massively diluted by American dialects and spellings due to the pervasiveness of the internet. However, you do still see it. So - let's take the phrase 'butterflies in my stomach' - it's pretty universal across English speaking nations and tends to symbolise nervousness or something similiar - there are of course regional differences. This is a phrase that many non-native English speakers tend to need explained to them. You can't take it as read that they will understand the phrase.
So, my advise would be ditch the accent - often non-native English speakers don't tend to have an overly strong accent unless they grew up with said accent. In fact walk around Birmingham (UK) which has a hit and miss level of literacy (40% of students fail to get the basic qualification in English at High School, but over half are in the top 10%) and you'll find a diverse range of people, cultural backgrounds, and skin tones. Mostly you get a thick Birmingham accent. So, instead consider overly formal styles of speech, or odd phrasings.
Some examples from other languages here - in French if you want to learn how to say please, you'll be taught 's'il vous plait'. Now my fluent in French Grandma taught me that this actually translates directly as 'if you please'. It is for this reason that in some areas of France the correct phrase is actually 's'il tous plait'. Now I think it's something to do with formality and dialects but could be wrong. That's unimportant. If a non-native speaker goes using 's'il vous plait' in an area where 's'il tous plait' is more common it's going to signify a speaker not native to the area.
Likewise, if we look at the structure of some European languages we can see that the phrasing and colloquialisms are different. If I say 'half-eight' in the UK, I will likely be understood as meaning 8:30. Half-eight being a contraction for 'half an hour past eight', or more commonly 'half past eight'. However in some european languages the same phrase means something different. 'Half-eight' could mean 7:30 - essentially some languages and cultures utilise different contractions - in this case meaning 'half an hour until eight'.
Similarly ordering is a dead giveaway for some non-native speakers. In some languages you will have a fantastic, big, old, red, ball. However in Spanish, the adjectives (fantastic, big, old, red) would all appear after the noun (ball). So a non-native speaker might in rare cases mix this up - I have seen this with Welsh First Language speakers when they are learning English for the first time. The order of adjectives might get mixed up. Even then, a native English speaker might not be able to tell you why a 'red, big, ball' sounds wrong - it just does. We pick up instinctually on this stuff as we converse and our conversational experiences grow.
So, in short ditch the accents. They're needlessly time consuming to learn and the same effects can be achieved with how you utilise the language. Intentionally throw in words out of order, or speak overly formally as if you're concentrating hard to get the right words. Delays in speech cvan help too. When speaking French I need a lot more time than usual to translate due to language gender. That means my sentances are usually a lot shorter too. Here's an example of what I mean as an English speaker with low french skill:
Je suis en vacances. Je visite mon Frere. Ill habite a Samaur.
[This is an attempt to say: I'm on holiday visiting my Dad who lives in Samaur]
What this actually says is: I am on holiday. I am visiting my Dad. He lives in Samaur. A native French speaker is going to understand what I mean, and often are polite enough to smile through the painful managling of the language, but they'll also know that I am not skilled in French and that I've got it entirely wrong.
This is a good replication though of what people with a lower fluency level in any language tend to do. Short, simplistic phrases. That allows thinking time between sentences and allows them not to get it wrong.
And notice that non of this is contingent on an accent!
DM session planning template - My version of maps for 'Lost Mine of Phandelver' - Send your party to The Circus - Other DM Resources - Maps, Tokens, Quests - 'Better' Player Character Injury Tables?
Actor, Writer, Director & Teacher by day - GM/DM in my off hours.
Apologies for a second post but a separate but linked idea also occured.
Pronunciation. Obviously we all know that the way things are pronounced vary depending on your country of origin - US/UK pronunciations of Aluminium. Obviously, this is a notorious example and exists largely as the US dialects ended up deciding to contract it down from five syllables to just three - A-lu-mi-ni-um vs - alu-min-um. A big timesaver and not a terrible thing. However, this also happens in other spaces too. Consider to word - Biopic. Now when I was growing up this word was pronounced Biop-ic, however there is a popular (mainly with internet personalities) pronunciation that has crossed into the mainstream around the 2010s - bio-pic. Now neither is necesserily more correct than any other, but it made me think - you could also play about with different pronunciations of words?
DM session planning template - My version of maps for 'Lost Mine of Phandelver' - Send your party to The Circus - Other DM Resources - Maps, Tokens, Quests - 'Better' Player Character Injury Tables?
Actor, Writer, Director & Teacher by day - GM/DM in my off hours.
Could you give me some possible examples? I am interested in this, but I don't think I fully grasp it, especially that last part (infinitives in particular).
Sure, I can try. Up front I want to say that I'm not bilingual myself; all of these statements are based on observations of my bilingual friends, conversations with language teachers, and mistakes I used to make in Spanish class.
Code switching is very common in people who have been immersed in two languages their entire lives. You might hear a Spanish and English speaker say "Oh, he's so guapo" referring to a man they fancy. "Guapo" can be roughly translated as "pretty", but it doesn't carry the same connotations as calling a man pretty in English does. It also connotes smoothness or coolness in a way there's not one clean word for in common English. So rather than fish for a close-enough English word, they just use "guapo".
Using code switching is going to require you to make up some Quori words. This can take a lot of work, but there's ways to streamline it. When I make up words for a language, I don't go full Tolkien on it; I just come up with a general vibe for the language and bash out a handful of words I can pepper in. Going back to my golem language; it's heavy on percussive sounds, so there's a lot of short syllables that start with consonants and end with resonant vowels. I like the words to be 3 to 5 syllables long, because I want the language to sound like hammering or a drumbeat. So putting that together, I can drop made-up words into sentences that sound like they follow a rule (like "dokomo" and "radochako") without ever having to figure out what that rule is. I would advise writing out your words and what they mean beforehand, because it's very easy to forgot and contradict yourself if you try to make them up on the fly.
Applying this to Quori; we can guess from the name that Quori uses a lot of compound vowel sounds and soft consonants. The only two words we know are "Quori" and presumably "Kalashtar", so I'm going to keep the words around 3 syllables. We want words for complex emotions that aren't easily expressed in common. So off the dome I'm going to invent "aosho" (AH-o-show), which is an intense anger-hurt at being wronged by a loved one, and "luarka" (lu-AR-ka), which is disappointment-relief-guilt. You don't have to use these or even agree with my assessment of what Quori should sound like; I'm just laying out a system you could use for this.
I'll come back and talk about verb conjugation later but I gotta actually do my job a minute
Okay: Language. Verbs. Let's talk about them.
In English, the main thing verb conjugation indicates is "when the action occurred". If I say I went, I will go, I have gone, I am going, etc, the main thing you learn from the way I conjugate the verb "to go" is when the going happened. Other languages use verb conjugations for other things; Spanish has different verb conjugations for formal and informal speech, and I've heard Japanese has a whole range of conjugations depending on the speaker's relationship with the verb object.
Verb conjugation is one of the things new language learners have to work very hard on, especially if the learned language uses conjugation for different things than their native language. So you can imagine if Quori doesn't use verb conjugations that place an emphasis on time, Quori speakers might have trouble mastering the time-based conjugation of Common (English) verbs. This is where we come around to infinitives. A verb infinitive is a form of the verb that can be used as a noun, adjective, or adverb (and perhaps most importantly, as the object of another verb). An infinitive is usually considered the "base form" of a verb, and so when new verbs are taught to language learners, they often learn the infinitive first. So, someone who has learned some vocabulary of a new language but doesn't necessarily understand it very well might reach for an infinitive verb where they shouldn't.
In such a case, you might get sentences like, "I go to the post office," when the speaker actually means "I went to the post office," or "I am going to the post office." You can see how this would be an easy mistake for a new speaker to make, especially if their native language doesn't use time-based verb conjugation.
You can get weirder with it; "I am going to went to the post office." "I will have going to the post office tomorrow." Or, if you want to make it easier for your players to parse, you can have a character consistently make the same mistake every time (like always using present-tense); "Yesterday, I go to the post office, and I meet my friend there. We talk and decide that tomorrow we go to the bar. But today it is tomorrow and they do not go to the bar." You can create a range of distinct ways of speaking with little variations on this concept.
These two posts you made are great. I am going to give it a try tonight and write up some sentences and quori words to use. I'll let you know what I come up with post here when I am happy with what I have.