Sup ya’ll!
soo ive been using wanikani for basically the past year and i can say im pretty far deeply into it at this point, soo ive been wanting to improve my grammar for a while and ive only really started doing it recently and im using “japanese the manga way” which is pretty alright, which brings me to the subject here, do you guys have any good game/manga recommendations for beginners? im really into rpgs but ive found that alot of them contain alot of text that sometimes is too complicated for my level so im looking for soemthing more basics (i heard pokemon is pretty good but since ive conditioned my brain to kanji its a bit hard without it) and about manga anything will work! anyways thanks in advance and thanks for reading!!
6 Likes
If you want to play Pokemon, the newer games have a kanji option as well as a kana option. All kana is confusing for me too.
I’ve been playing Dodgeball Academia recently. It has kanji with furigana. There are a lot of words I don’t know but I put them into Anki and I’m capable of getting the main point of things. It feels like a good level for me.
I also played Link’s Awakening on the Switch, which also has kanji + furigana.
At the intermediate level, you just have to accept that in any native content there will still be a bunch that’s new to you, but that’s how you know you’re learning!
4 Likes
Hi, in this link there is a small list of games that feature furigana:
Furigana Games - Giant Bomb
There is also Dragon Quest XI on Steam and consoles but it’s region locked so you have to install a mod from Nexus in order to have Japanese text.
Pokémon games were region locked until X and Y came out on the 3ds, so it might be easier to pick to the games released up from there.
To add to what’s said above, I highly recommend spending some time translating every menu and adding all the vocabulary to Anki or any list. It takes some time at first but you’re going to memorize the vocab quickly as you will see these same words appear all the time during your playthrough.
4 Likes
If you’re looking for manga, have you tried looking through our book clubs yet? We have clubs for all levels, and you’ll find that each book or volume of manga has its own discussion thread for grammar and other questions that come up. Even if the scheduled reading is already finished, everyone is welcome to post new questions. We’ll be alerted to the new posts so we can answer your questions. =)
5 Likes
There’s a slight inversion. The 3DS games are the ones that are region locked. I believe B2/W2 are even region locked on a 3DS (but regionless on DS), but I may be mistaken on that.
Black and White were the first to have kanji as an option, so if you go the DS route you have those and B2/W2. If you go the 3DS route, I believe only B/W are available unless you have a Japanese 3DS.
At some point, the option was added to select the language when you start a new game. I think Sun/Moon has that, in which case region wouldn’t be an issue. I don’t recall about earlier titles offhand.
All Pokemon RPG’s for Switch you can select language when starting a new game.
5 Likes
Ah yes I mixed things up, what I can confirm is that Pokémon XY, Omega Ruby / Alpha Sapphire, Sun / Moon and Sun 2 / Moon 2 all feature an option to select the language (only before starting a new game file) and it includes Japanese in every region.
4 Likes
That’s good to know that the language selection option went back to X/Y. (I couldn’t recall.) That removes any worries about region if you don’t need to import!
2 Likes
Hi!
I’ve been looking for the same thing and it seems like we’re not too far apart at Wanikani.
I eventually found Flying Witch ( Manga ) to be surprisingly readable, and I actually enjoy it, even if I’m quite slow at reading it. The book club has read it as well in the past, meaning there are wanikani community pages dedicated to the various chapters, which make for useful reading if you’re stuck.
Also, you can buy the ebook on bookwalker.jp, which is convenient ( I found it very difficult to buy japanese e-manga ).
The manga crystal hunters will be dropping chapter 4 in the upcoming weeks. When new chapters drop, they usually have all of their chapters up for free for a limited time. They are accompanied by grammar guides that will help you if you get stuck on a kanji or a sentence.
The manga / grammar guide assumes you have 0 Japanese knowledge so its not a bad place to start.
2 Likes
You’re at a level that Final Fantasy 6 (SNES) would be perfect for.
-Grammar not too challenging (minus Cyan’s)
-Kanji is mostly what you’ve seen so far (biggest issue would be the various kanji for “cave” that appear often when talking about Narshe and some other areas)
-Vocab shouldn’t be too bad, but you’ll come across some hiragana only words that you may need to look up.
I think the other SNES FF’s are probably fine too [edit: nvm they aren’t. just play 6] if you don’t want to play 6, but 6 is the only one I’ve played from start to finish in Japanese and can fully recommend.
4 Likes
Has anyone tried Phoenix Wright? If so, which one would you recommend for someone around level N3 on JPLT?
1 Like
I started playing Ace Attorney games around mid N4 and level 25ish of WK. On the handheld, so no text-hooker, and zero furigana.
I think the scientific term for it is that it kicked my ass. 
But not in a bad way.
It took me months to get through it, but I stuck with it (alongside rigorous studying). By the end, my reading speed, reading stamina, and overall ease of parsing Japanese sentence structure shot way up.
I had played all the games before in English. If not, I wouldn’t have managed. But you’re also deeper into grammar than I was at the time.
I’d personally recommend giving it a go!
4 Likes
I will check it out! Thanks for your feedback
1 Like
I highly recommend Yotsuba&! It’s a fantastic manga and is very suitable especially for beginners.
2 Likes
I can recommend よつばと！(Yotsuba&) - It‘s pretty good where to start cuz there are mixed dialogues. For Yotsuba there are kana texts and the adults dialogue contains kanji.
After that I started to read からかい上手の高さん (Karakai no jouzu Takagi-san)
and 徒然チルドレン (Tsuredure Children).
2 Likes
thank you all for the suggestions! i read all of them! i didnt know there was a book club so im looking through it now so thank you for that! also yotsubato seems like a good read so id be glad to check it out! and about ff6 i was already planning on playing it so ill probably play it in japanese
again thanks for everything!
I didn’t see anyone mention this: There’s a great website called Learn Natively that organises novels, manga, and light novels by JLPT level. I super recommend it!
6 Likes
If you have a Nintendo Switch then Mario Odyssey has been amazing, it has furigana and most text in the game will only progress once you press a button. A lot of the language is simple and around common actions (run, jump, throw, princess, ring) often with visual explanations.
Japanese Quest on YouTube plays through it and other games using it to teach Japanese, watching his videos on Mario have been great. Japanese Quest Mario Odyssey
Another YouTube worth checking out is Game Gengo, He has a new series where each episode he plays a different game and introduces and explains things as he plays - you can find this vocabulary series here.
+1,000,000 to the Absolute Beginner Book Club - it has been an amazing boost to my Japanese, highly recommend joining in - you can also read a book the club has covered before and ask questions in the old threads.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.