Audrey: This is a tricky area- Most video games consoles have regional encoding. The main regions are: Japan and Asia- NTSC-J, North and South America- NTSC-U, Europe, New Zealans and Australia-Pal, and China- NTSC-C.
Some Regional lockouts have also been achieved with software authentication, slot/pin changes, Cartridge/case differences, and IP blocking. According to wikipedia, All playstation 3 games are region free- but some individual publishers have chosen to region lock certain games. Microsoft Xbox and Xbox360 are region locked BUT the Xbox one is not region blocked- but again individual games may be encoded. Your best bet would probably be Xbox one or playstation-3. That being said- my son regularly plays japanese games before they are made available here using computer proxy sites- that takes up a lot of computer space and he regularly deletes to make more room. Many of the international games do have different characters, content and locations so it would no doubt be a good learning experience