Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town -Study tool/fun?

Japanese Language
1

So, recently I decided to start playing Harvest Moon in Japanese, hoping to be able to get some use out of this, to practice my grammar, pick up some new words, and have some fun. I thought I would share the experience with you guys, and hopefully get some help, because I know I’m walking in over my head, and maybe you guys can give me some help now and then when I get completely lost, or explain things to me, or whatever. It will (hopefully) be a good study tool for all of us!

Since I’m not very advanced yet, the progress might be slow, so bear with me, I’ll build up a wonderful farm soon enough!


I got to pick my name, my birthday, the name of the farm, and the name of my dog, in that order, here are my answers. I named the person after me, the farm after the site, and my dog a random name my roommate picked.

I was looking around when I got accosted by this gentleman in a red suit, he told me that this farm belongs to his? grandfather that had passed away the other day.

He yelled at us for entering this place arbitrarily(I think?)

after we explained, he asked if we were acquaintances with his grandfather

And asked if we had not heard that he had passed away

In truth, he had died half a year ago.

This one gave me a lot of trouble, but I think he said that he was sorting through some of his grandfather’s bookshelves, and he had found a will. I think I got it right, but it took a lot of searching to find the kanji, and I’m not exactly sure I got any of it right, if someone could give me a hand, that would be wonderful.

The document said that it entrusted this piece of land to someone named Arc

This was another rough one, could someone explain it? I got out of it that he can entrust the land to the person in the will, but I have no idea why it means what it means, or if I’m correct for that matter.

Our character spoke again, and this he was asking if we were really Arc.

I think he was asking if the grandfather had taught us how the farm works, but I’m not sure on this one either.

And we hit a flashback, and I had too much of a headache to put in the work for this one, so I don’t know what it says yet. :frowning:

That’s as far as I got this time, Any help clarifying any of the panels would be helpful, and any suggestions/things you want me to do, just let me know. I’m excited to get into this, and hopefully I start getting better from it. :slight_smile:

@anon75098302 @Sylph you wanted to see this, so I made sure to mention you so you got notified for it. Thank you for your interest!

9 Likes
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For the most part it looks like you’ve got it!

No. 9 is more like, “Until that person (Arc) appears, I’ve been in charge of/managing this land.”

No. 11 is not about how the farm works, but “Could you tell me how you came to know (my grandfather)?” I believe.

Good luck! It sounds fun! Makes me want to try too…

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Thank you for the corrections, I’m not great at grammar yet, so I’ve mostly been looking at all the words and trying to piece together a sentence, so I’m glad I got most of them right, even though I don’t know exactly why the sentences worked like that.

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This is great! Definitely monitoring the thread.

Woah, some of those kanji were hard to find.

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Yeah, you’re telling me about it. it took me a while to find some of them, but I got them. Syntax was more of an issue to my understanding than the kanji, and the kanji were a problem, lol. I’m getting better at it though.

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I love harvest moon so following too :3 are you playing a rom?

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I’ve gotten about half of what I want done for the next batch figured out, but I’m in kinda a bad mood right now, so it’ll probably be a couple of days before I get back around to doing it.

Yeah, I"m playing a rom, it was the only way I could screenshot the text for this thread and just so I can have them for later, and the only way I could play any of the games in Japanese without spending more money than I can afford right now.

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It might be a bit longer than i anticipated here. My computer’s power cord went out, so i dont have access to my stuff till friday. My apologies.

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I’ve been using Stardew Valley（which is a very similar game. you start a farm, talk to people, etc. Also, it’s on sale currently for the Steam sale!) to do this. Grammar is also the area I struggle with when trying to play. Good luck and have fun!

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How is Stardew Valley for Japanese? I tried animal crossing a while back, and it was hit-or-miss. A lot of the dialog was very colloquial so some of it was rough going. Is Stardew more textbook Japanese? Somewhere in-between?

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It’s hard for me to say as I consider myself to still be in the beginner stages of reading. I’ve spent more time on WK than I have the other areas of study so my grammar and vocabulary are lacking. So I’d say that yes, it is rough going, but probably more due to my lack of practice than any fault of the game.

Sorry I can’t give you a better answer. :frowning:

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No worries. I already own Stardew Valley and I knew that it had Japanese support, but never got around to it. I’ll have to give it a try myself.

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I started play #2 Stardew Valley recently. I thought about changing it to Japanese, but I am only a lowly lvl 6 Wanikanian, so I’m too afraid to try!

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If you start a new game and choose to play it in Japanese, that isn’t set in stone. You can go back and change it back into english without it affecting your save. So I say give it a try! If it’s too difficult, back out to the main menu, change it back, study for a couple more weeks, try again! That’s actually what I have been doing.

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I love going back to all my resources that were too difficult and feeling out my progress

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Me too! It’s a huge motivator to overcome obstacles like that. :slight_smile:

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Update: I tried for about two seconds, turned on the TV, and went uuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhh what??? :scream:

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xD!

Just keep studying and you’ll be able to read it with ease before you know it!

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Playing games in Japanese can be a fun and motivating way to study, so I fully endorse it! It’s definitely helped me improve over the years. If you’re really motivated, you could even make a note of unfamiliar words that seem to pop up frequently, and then go back and review your list every now and then (or toss them in a flash card app).

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That’s my plan, I’m going to go in here every couple of weeks and pull out a bunch of the words/vocab that I’ve seen and plop them into an srs for it.

Right now I’m waiting on a computer charger…come on, one more day and I can have my GOOD computer back.