On my lunchbreak so just read the OP, but I think it’s just a matter of exposing yourself to more Japanese, so short answer from me is yes, keep playing. You are level 60 so obviously know a lot of Kanji but maybe you haven’t had that much exposure to reading?
I am 30 hours in to Dragon Quest 11 and about 12 hours into Persona 4 and finding it quite manageable. The way I do it is to set aside 30 minutes of playtime for active immersion where I translate everything, and the rest of the playtime is more relaxed, where I skip sentences I don’t get and am happy if I just get the gist. It keeps it fun and not feeling like homework. I wanna be very clear here though, I do not understand everything. But I get the gist of most things and quite a few sentences I do understand completely, after a bit of work…
But I think what has gotten me to that point is reading graded readers, simple manga and easy books like reading a long the absolute beginners bookclub. Had I only focused on WK or just done Genki, I would not be able to play these games at this point.
Keep going I say, but don’t expect too much of yourself and when it gets frustrating, take a break. Take it from someone who couldn’t parse a single sentence a few months ago, it gets easier.
OP - if you’re level 60, I would think you’d be able to recognize a lot of the kanji in the game. What would you say was holding you back from playing? Was it words you didn’t recognize, grammar, or?
So a lot of people have been recommending to try something in Japanese that I’ve already played through in my native language (for example @trunklayer@ChaosControl ) and other people have been recommending starting with Manga first (for example @lemke ). I merged it together and started reading a copy of the Hikaru no Go Manga, that I bought couple of years back (Watching the anime with subs made me get into Go) and I was able to read without looking things up. Of course there were things I didn’t know, but that didn’t bother me, because I already know the story and wasn’t afraid to miss anything.
@ChristopherFritz@kusuri Most of my playing time went into looking up vocab. The only grammar point I had to look up was -べき. Also I recognized a lot of the kanji, but sometimes I wasn’t sure of a certain combination of kanji. A nice example would be: 去れる. That kanji is taught in WK, but never as a verb. And since typing きょ didn’t show 去, I searched it via radicals, which took time.
I love these types of emotional games, which is why I want to soak up every single drop of dialogue. So keep playing without going for near 100 % comprehension is not an option for me. But I can definitely see how I wouldn’t bother not understanding if it were a game like Pokemon (@CDR-Strawberry@Andyglue ).
So I’m not going to continue playing Spiritfarer in Japanese. But I’ll keep reading the Hikaru no Go Manga. I’ll also see if I can find another game with less and easier text, that I’m not as invested in. But knowing myself I may get too bored to follow through with such a game (@anon3564849@WhiteSeraph ).
Thanks for your reply! Sounds like a great strategy. Reading is definitely exhausting, but I think the more we do it, the better we’ll get.
It’s interesting that at Lvl 60 we’ll still need to be looking up words a lot. I guess Anki will be the next step. Always more SRS!
A lot of times when I read, I find I know the kanji, but not the words. So I have to try to guess and if I can’t figure it out, I have to fake type in the kanji using spellings I know until it forms the vocab I’m looking up. For example, 家で（いえで） I didn’t know the reading, but I guessed かじゅつ. Nope. So I had to type in いえだす and delete the すat the end. Funnily enough I was pretty close.
Japanese aside, I’m really enjoying Spiritfarer. I’ve been playing it with a friend (in English), and it’s so soothing. I can see why it wouldn’t be a game to study with, since it’s supposed to have this calm and relaxing feeling.
Games I’ve played in Japanese are Stardew Valley (aggrivating), Animal Crossing (actually pretty fun), Yo-Kai Watch (really fun), and WILL：素晴らしき世界 (too far above my level right now). I’m thinking I might try Nyan Nyan Love next…
Not going for 100% and feeling fine about it is one of the key habits for a self language learner imo, but when it comes to consuming content it’s whatever floats your boat. I do consider games to be tools for learning languages, and focus on benefitting my language studies first. For this reason I go for more immersive games a bit later, to add even more immersion to them instead of breaking it with constant dictionary searching. That the fun part in language learning. Not the learning itself.
Lvl 60 just means ~2000 kanji, and ~6000 words. A regular adult knows how to read ~3000 kanji and, based on the stats from koohi.cafe, there are usually 6000~8000 unique words in a light novel.
Even if everything from WK showed up, there’s still a lot to look up… and obviously it’s not like there’s such a huge overlap usually.
In terms of SRS, I really like koohi.cafe and kitsun.io. The former provides word lists with frequency from specific books, sorted in order of first appearance in the text. That makes it work like a prescient dictionary as well as an SRS and it also remembers words you learn across books (so you can see which book will be easy to read for you). The latter is a much nicer interface than Anki and works in a way more similar to WK. It also has a bunch of neat features.
Finally, both tools are developed by WK users and have active threads on the forum.
I find that you really need to be in the right mood to play a game in Japanese. For me, I stick to Visual Novels that I can’t possibly play in English, and take my time with them. But I’ll sometimes go weeks without playing just because I can’t stand sitting through a game in Japanese! I also try not worry about not understanding everything; if a word is repeated and I still can’t understand from context, I’ll look it up, but I find trying to understand from context to be a useful skill.
I was around level 15 when I started playing. It’s a cute game on Switch where you play as a girl (or boy) who lives in a Japanese town. You end up making friends with a ghost/yokai that explains to you that many yo-kai live in the world around you and influence it. So you can go about making friends with them and then helping the yo-kai fight any problematic yo-kai. There are 11 chapters and each chapter there’s a story within it.
The Japanese is upper beginner/lower intermediate level, and there’s furigana for everything. So it’s approachable. I’m not so much a fan of Pokemon-style games, but I do enjoy the snapshot of everyday Japanese life in the game. Like - it shows you removing your shoes everytime you enter a house, and also one of the main stories happens in a bath house.
I also don’t care so much about it that I’m trying to translate everything. So it’s a great starting video game for practicing Japanese.
Didn’t imagine this would be my first post here, but being a gamer and studying Japanese like like you, why not? =D
Try simpler games perhaps? I have been playing 桃太郎電鉄 on the Super Famicom lately, and while I don’t understand everything I get the gist (a big thanks to the crockcrab for that) of it. Also playing a little Super Mario RPG. So far I get most of it, but of course not everything (yet) but I learn while playing actually. I would lov to play Nier:Automata without subs and understand everything, but all in due time, eh? Learn the radicals to learn the kanji! =)
Oh and: Hello everyone! This is one damn great site! =)
Santha
P.S: Actually understanding more of a agme or movie etc from really working with the language gives a great feeling of reward!
Nice. I didn’t know they have released it for switch. I might have to grab a copy. I liked it for DS. Does the english version allow for language choice, or did you import? (or live in Japan?)
You can buy the Japanese import (Amazon sometimes sells it). To play it you need to set your language and region to Japan on your switch. This is easy enough and reversible.
Switch your region/language for both Switch and your Nintendo account to Japan. (Or make a new Japanese only account.) and buy the game off the eshop. To purchase it you will need Nintendo point cards in yen, which you can buy off PlayAsia. It’s a weird process, involving them needing to call you to verify you’re a person, but it is legit.
I’ve done both. I think if its a one off game number 1 is easier but if you’re going to start buying a few Japanese games, might as well learn how to do it the PlayAsia way.
It depends on what you mean by fluent and what you mean by word, but yes, that’s a number I have seen thrown around. At the same time, conversational Japanese is easier than novels, so it makes sense that just 10k can be enough.
You will be able to talk superficially about a variety of topics, but you will sound like “the flower is red” rather than “the hibiscus is crimson”. In everyday life, that’s fine most of the time, so depending on your standards you can say you are fluent. When I only knew around 10k words, my inability to express nuances felt very frustrating though.
This might also be rather specific to expressing yourself rather than understanding. Having someone say that “This hibiscus is a marvellous crimson color” while pointing at it can be perfectly understood without knowing beforehand what “hibiscus” or “crimson” means.
I’m by all measures a novice, but even just understanding slightly over half of the used words can be enough for full or at least major understanding (depending on the medium).
Sure, understanding with context is easier. The question is then usually how much you can stand uncertainty. If someone pointed at a flower and said “this xxx is a marvelous yyyy color”, as you said, you are mostly fine, but in a situation where nuances matter, as OP said, you’ll probably need to look up everything you don’t know.
(Anyway, my initial comment was about why OP had to look up so much stuff at level 60, and the answer being that WK covers only a small fraction of the vocabulary present in native media)
