I’ve heard of people making their own Anki decks based on native material like books, news, anime, etc. Would it be much of a stretch to make deck(s) based off of video games you want to play/are trying to play in Japanese? I would imagine it wouldn’t be that crazy, since doing so would teach you vocabulary that’s likely to appear multiple times within the same game/series.
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Not only is it possible, but if the game is on PC there is software to help you extract text to assist in making anki cards.
If the game is console or handheld, there are a lot of videos on YT that cover how to work through specific Japanese video games as a learner. Pokemon is covered exhaustively.
What you are probably referring to is “sentence mining”, a technique that people use to make cards out of entire sentences, so that they can memorize the vocabulary/kanji/grammar in-context.
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In my case, the games I’m interested in trying to enjoy in their native language are not on PC or accessible from a web browser so I don’t have the help of any desktop/browser tools for extracting sentences/words and making cards. My interests are on Nintendo games, namely the Pikmin and the mainline Pokemon series for the time being.
I skimmed over most of the sections on this video, and most of what he talks about seems to be specific to video platforms like Netflix and Youtube. I’m primarily interested in reading, not listening or speaking, so I’m mainly interested in media like books and video games with text. However, the video still gives a reasonable general approach to mining sentences. It’s just that if you’re not able to take advantage of any of the fancy tools like the ones he talked about, you’ll just have to create your cards manually. Which it looks like that’s what I’d have to do.
I’ll have to see what I can find in the way of Pokemon sentence mining tutorials.
Not that I would advocate the use of any infringing software, but I believe I have heard rumors of software that can emulate Pokemon games. And by running them in said emulator, you’d be able to capture screenshots from a desktop computer to make cards with. I also haven’t looked, but I imagine there are full text dumps available for all of the dialogue in the games.
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