I do think the OP level is beyond this, being lv 60 and all! , but yeah, I recently picked it up and love it.
On the theme of Neko Atsume = games that comes in both Japanese and English and you can seamlessly switch between the languages, I do recommend the remastered Nintendo DS version of Chrono Trigger as it also allows you to just switch language in-game. You donāt have to shut the game off or anything.
This is compared to for example Ace Attorney/Gyakuten Saiban when you have to go into the main menu and you have also difference saves for each language. Not ideal, if you wanna do a āparalellplayā that Iāve attempted in the past. Just as a way to keep up with all the crime scene analyses. ^^;
One other (maybe a little overboard) option is a capture card.
When I wanted really badly to try my first long, difficult game in Japanese (so I could play Yakuza 7 before the localization date was announced), I started out capturing video of me playing so I could review what had happened and pick up stuff I missed.
I ended up learning so quickly from the experience that I stopped needing that safety net quickly, but it was psychologically useful in getting over that āI want to keep playing but I also want to understand and I canāt quickly enoughā hump which is very real.
Probably this can be approximated just fine with Japanese longplays and LPās on youtube, but there might be something to be said for the personalized aspect of the recording.
Iād just find a game I do enjoy in Japanese. I think the benefits of engaging with native material are unsurpassed. So, itāll be a struggle, but just because this experience was a struggle and bad doesnāt mean it has to be.
Iāve had a lot of experience where playing in Japanese that actually wasnāt very hard was unfun for me, but playing a different game that was very hard was a lot of fun - even though both games were normally fun games. I find the relationship isnāt intuitive and you have to experiment to find something that clicks.
One of the earliest games that clicked for me was éč»¢č£å¤, which was objectively a struggle. No furigana; somewhat complicated subject matter; tiny, pixelated kanji. But I enjoyed struggling with it, partly because all the unknown terms were intrinsically interesting to me (I like crime).
OMG! I will no longer claim I was patient when playing VN-games with a dialogue-grabbing program on the side. This is so much work. I doubt I would have managed it, frankly. At least ctrl+c/ctrl+v is a quick command with little fuss.*
Personally, Iāve just paused some game projects because of me not being on part with the kanji and that feels fine. I mean, the game, once you have it, is not going anywhere! itās like a belayed present instead! ^>^
*Iām sort of lying through my teeth here as it was all very flaky in how it worked - or didnāt! But it still sounds like insane amounts of work!
Honestly, it was surprisingly easy to set up - I had the card already so it was just plugging it in and starting OBS while I played.
I only ended up actually reviewing the first couple of videos, because that part was indeed time-consuming, but for a bit after that I think it just helped to think in my head āah I can go check this again if I need toā even though it quickly turned out Iā¦ didnāt need to. Which was a great feeling!
The whole experience ended up being bar none the best time Iāve had with a video game, as much for how much I learned over the 100+ hours as being a great reinvention of a series I already loved. So even punching heavily above your own reading comprehension weight-class so-to-speak, and with a lot of dictionary lookups, the fun is there to be had!
I think itās just that I was extremely enthusiastic to try that game in particular, it was turn-based and had pausable cutscenes, and I could lean on prior series knowledge to help too.
Yes, I think finding a genre that you like is a good starting point. Not to just start with a game youāve been longing to play (going back to my previous argument), because youāre just more patient with a game you donāt have a lot of preconceptions about - but which is still a genre that you quickly become invested in! :+!:
I did Sigma Harmonics on the DS that was also crime solving stuff. I really liked it, though again, this was more than 10 years ago and after the first case solved, I felt overwhelmed by the cut-scenes when I had no time to fully get everything - but with more experience points in Japanese on my back.
I completely agree with this. I fully enjoyed the games I played to the end in Japanese. No doubt about it.
But, it was also a different gaming experience from what a native would have had. Thatās also true.
I just want to make that obvious. Both are lovely and gratifying in their own ways. And if you do make it through in Japanese, thatās fantastic, it really is! ^>^
Iāve been doing this as a hobby for nigh on 20 years now. Yeah, when I first started, it was agonous. It took me a good ten minutes just to get through a single caption, and even then, I only knew āacademicā Japanese so I was confused all the time. My first game was Live A Live, which isā¦ not a good first game.
As the other replies have said, Iād recommend starting with a game you enjoy. Or something youāve already played in your native language maybe a year or more ago. Iād avoid RPGs and visual novels for now; until you have a solid chunk of kanji in your muscle memory, that goal is going to be overambitious.
You might also consider playing them ātop-downā: avoid looking words up but just try to pick out what you do understand. Youāre really looking for what Koichi calls the ā+1ā level of difficulty, where the task is only a little more difficult than what you already know.
If you do want to understand everything you read as you play, there are games that provide furigana. Hereās a list that I just found. I remember reading somewhere that Mario games for the DS have furigana that can be toggled with the touchscreen, but Iāve never tried it myself.
Hahaha, very relatable! 5-year-old me was curious about the meaning of the word āparcelā which Professor Oak so desperately needed .
@Thofte I think with things like gaming itās kind of important to have fun, otherwise that sort of defeats the purpose. If you find the experience painful, you should maybe try something with slightly less text and on the side, outside your āgame timeā work on the bits and pieces you found challenging language-wise, like lots of reading, especially manga.
Or you could try games geared towards younger audiences like early Final Fantasy games, Pokemon, Digimon, etc.
Iām a major Pokemon fan, and Iāve played through the Sinnoh games many times. I recently bought copies of Platinum and RSE in Japanese. First, I havenāt encountered any kanji, so at the moment itās just cementing vocab. Iāve also played through Platinum twice before, so I know what Iām getting into. Lastly, being an RPG, there are plenty of spots for me to just play the game without needing to worry about dialogue.
So far, despite the difficulty, Iām seriously enjoying it, and I feel like my language skills are coming together a lot faster since Iām already familiar with a lot of context. I agree with some of the other comments people have been making - choose a game you know, maybe one thatās aimed towards a younger age group, and one that doesnāt revolve completely around dialogue
(as a side note, iām fluent in french and i play games in said language to practice - i always run into new words somewhere (especially slang), and i always write it down in a google sheet. maybe youāre already doing that, but i would recommend writing down new vocab!)
I agree. I do tend to start a gaming session looking up a lot of stuff, slowly starting to neglect more and more words after every several minutes, but the idea is the same. Another thing about games like elder Scrolls or gothic or the like, that i find makes them better for language learning than vns imo, is that they give you a mixture of talking and action like exploring and fighting. This way you get small breaks between learning without having to keep track of it yourself. I donāt think thereās a jp version of gothic sadly, but Iām talking about language learning in general.
I managed to find only Gothic 4 on amazon.co.jp. True, it looks like Gothic 1 and 2 donāt have Japanese translations which is a bit sad
I totally agree exploration games are amazing for language learning! Itās kind of like real-life level of interaction with the environment, except you pick how you interact with what. As I remember, dialogue was kind of limited in the early Gothic games and even less in TES 1 & 2, but Morrowing is chalk-full of text and on top of that in very small font. I think I would die playing that in Japanese
Maybe that gameās script uses too much slang and/or archaic Japanese? Thatās what always trips me up with games and anime. Iāve had good luck with Ni no Kuni Wrath of the White Witch, which has furigana on every kanji and seems to be written to be playable by a younger audience. Another recommendation (no furigana, though) is Trials of Mana.
I also loaded up āI am Setsunaā and went āNope. Gonnaā have to play that in English!ā
Replaying an old game that you loved the first time around is a good suggestion. Iām also working through Final Fantasy X, and the Steam version lets you change between English and Japanese. That game is voice acted which helps with the lack of furigana, but sometimes can go by too fast.
Iāve also noticed that the language tends to stay consistent so when you learn terms early in the game they get repeated and you donāt need to look them up anymore. And now I know all sorts of random words that Iāll never use in a conversation (unless itās about games, I suppose!)
Before I even started WaniKani I played Pokemon Shield in Japanese and I wrote down loads of common kanji into a notepad. Took me a long time to complete, but I found it a lot more fun than doing my coursebooks.
Over the course of those many (many) hours I memorised a lot, so despite it not being as fun as playing in English, it was a lot more fun than the textbooks.
Saying that, I donāt think it was the best use of my time (it was before I even knew WK existed so I was learning kanji in weird ways, anything to avoid reading a book tbh).
Also, I heard somewhere you should aim to engage with native content where you understand like at least 60% of what is there? Japanese grammar is a behemoth, so IMO kind of not fully attainable simply by playing games or watching manga. Happy to be proved wrong on that!
I think youāll probably get more out of something you donāt have to force yourself to do, itās usually not really possible to force yourself to do something for very long anyway.
Once your skills are up to it, you can always replay it later in Japanese and get a fresh experience that way!
Hey, Iām replaying it right now after a similarly miserable experience a few years ago. If youāre having trouble with anything, feel free to start a āgame clubā thread and give me a poke. So far Iāve been able to understand nearly everything save for some of the more obtuse brush gods when they whip out their ęčŖ.
Gothic 1 and 2 have dope german and polish versions though. French is not bad either. There is no japanese version of morrowind, so youāre lucky there.
I was actually planning to play morrowind first in japanese like I did with every other language I learned except polish (went for gothic first instead), but there doesnāt seem to be a japanese language pack. Seems to be one for oblivion though, but Iām not sure. The page itās on is in japanese and would take too much effort to read at this point. And of course skyrim remaster has a full japanese version with text and voice. The dialogues are real time except when choosing what you want to say, but you can use developer console to kind of pause the game, leaving the text on the screen. Or you can just load before a conversation and load if you want stuff repeated. Gets annoying fast though.
, but yeah, I recently picked it up and love it.
I will no longer claim I was patient when playing VN-games with a dialogue-grabbing program on the side. This is so much work. I doubt I would have managed it, frankly. At least ctrl+c/ctrl+v is a quick command with little fuss.*
itās like a belayed present instead! ^>^
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