That does appear to be true, unfortunately. Just the other day I found out that WK doesn’t have the word お世話, which I seem to come across fairly often (in the form of 余計なお世話 or お世話になる)
I play Yokai Watch on Switch too. Sometimes… The Japanese is okay-ish, but I don’t like the gameplay too much, the battles are just “charging up” the special skills and that’s basically it.
Besides the gameplay, how are you enjoying the story? Is it too childish? Or is it okay? I’ve refrained from buying this, but I am somewhat interested in trying a game I haven’t played before in Japanese as a challenge ^^
Let’s be honest here, it took me several hours to play what would be maybe 1 hour if played in another language.
I can’t say much about the story yet, I’ve met a few Yokai and solved a few basic problems in town. I don’t know if it picks up, but I don’t expect anything “epic” here.
Also…unrelated to learning Japanese but…Spritfarer is going to be getting some updates with 4 new characters. So I’ll be replaying it once all the updates are out, then I can finally 100% it I think.
I said this in another post, but 10 pages in to Penguin Highway there are 141 vocabulary words not in WaniKani, and this is not a hard book to read.
So, to emphasise, that is potentially 141 times consulting a dictionary in 10 pages.
Level 60 means you are able to find those words easily in an online dictionary quickly, as opposed to like this:
Or like this
Japanese is a lot more than just kanji knowledge. I would argue that grammar is the hardest part of the language, and of course WK vocab is far from sufficent.
When you don’t understand 2 things in a sentence, looking it up can be very hard, since without spaces you often don’t know where one thing begins and another ends. Dialects and 役割語 can make things even harder. And even when you understand each individual thing in the sentence, putting it together can be tough. And then sometimes you don’t know whether that is because you are missing something obvious, or there is some sort of expression or grammar nuance at work.
And of course, even in the realm of Kanji, you will still encounter unknown kanji all of the time.
So it’s very understandable for a level 60 to struggle for a few hundred hours until things start to flow better.
Honestly this is a mood. Although I actually find jokes funnier in Japanese (probably because “hahaha, I actually got that!”) but it’s still too exhausting to just relax and zone out. That’s why I’ve watched a lot less anime since I started learning Japanese too. 
I think you’ll have an easier time playing something in which text is either the most important thing (e.g. visual novels and other virtual stories with simple point-and-click elements, hidden object games – provided instructions are simple etc.) or in which there’s hardly any text. That should make the experience much more rewarding, because you’ll avoid feeling like the text is just getting in the way of the game. Plus, if the writing is good (which is hopefully more often the case in a game where the text is important), you’ll probably feel great about being able to experience the story with all the untranslatable nuances. That aside, doing something for which you have some sort of comprehension aid should help (e.g. watching anime or dramas with English subtitles, or playing a game you’ve already played in English) because you won’t have to interpret absolutely everything yourself and – provided the translations are accurate – you’ll often because to just fill in the blanks: you might think ‘Oh, so that’s how you say that in Japanese!’ or ‘I get what this sentence is about, but what’s this word here?’ That should make things a lot less stressful.
Uh… yes and no. I might be misjudging things because I’m a Chinese speaker and my first textbook happened to be designed to take beginners from zero to all the way to the lower intermediate level, but I don’t think it’s ever ‘too early’ to dive into native content. The only thing that changes is what you’ll be able to get out of it at a particular point. A complete beginner who’s only been studying Japanese for a week probably shouldn’t dive into a light novel and use it as study material because there will be too many things to look up, and it’s fairly likely that, at that point, the learner doesn’t even know enough basic grammar to understand why the verbs and adjectives are changing forms and what those forms mean. However, starting an anime with the subtitles on could be a very good way for that beginner to get used to how Japanese sounds and to reinforce the simplest Japanese words that are common in beginners’ textbooks. It’s really a matter of choosing material that’s appropriate for you at your current level.
However, that said, if AIAtIJ (your current textbook) is your very first time encountering ‘intermediate Japanese’ structures and you’re less than halfway through it, then I think text-heavy video games might be a bit too difficult for you right now unless you’re willing to look lots of words up or settle for understanding whatever you can from kanji and context. After finishing my first textbook (about seven months in), I still wasn’t very comfortable with anime. (40% comprehension, maybe?) My intermediate textbook was Tobira, and I still haven’t finished it. (I stopped at Chapter 13 because I got bored. I intend to moving on to an advanced textbook this summer.) While most of my grammatical knowledge comes from my first textbook and anime (I checked a lot of dictionaries and online sources while watching), I think I was only able to comfortably understand 60-70% of everything without subtitles around 1.5-2 years in. Basically, regardless of how you acquire the necessary grammatical knowledge, I don’t think you’ll be able to easily parse sentences in native material without at least N3 grammar. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try; I’m just pointing out how difficult (or otherwise) it might be. If you’re willing to tolerate a lot of dictionary checking and searching for grammatical knowledge, then you could probably start even with just N4 knowledge. My grammatical knowledge was probably around low N3 when I started studying using anime, and it got me through N2 grammar + maybe 50% of N1 grammar (based on the grammar point list on Japanesetest4you.com) within about a year with a lot of breaks in actual serious study? My point is that I think a basic level of grammatical knowledge is important for making immersion more productive and rewarding than painful, but what exactly the threshold is is up to you to decide.
One final suggestion: it might be worthwhile to use the forums more if you’re really stuck on certain sentences instead of trying to push through them yourself. I usually work through things independently as much as possible, but there were certain sentences I couldn’t parse with certainty no matter what I did, and in those moments, I was really glad I had a friend to ask. In any case, whatever you decide, I wish you all the best.
I’m a native Chinese speaker, or at least as close as you can get growing up in an English-speaking country while starting Chinese as a toddler and having 10 years of formal Chinese education, along with probably hundreds of hours of watching TV dramas in Chinese. (I’m also a native English speaker.) If we only count what I learnt in school, I know at least 2500 kanji. I also have enough calligraphy knowledge to convert between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese or Japanese kanji. I wasn’t able to read much Japanese before I started studying grammar, even if I could get the gist of what was going on. Sentence structure is different, and so are the kanji used for the most common concepts.
Kanji are very important and helpful, especially when it comes to reading long descriptive texts like stories, which tend to use rarer kanji, but I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if someone with N2-N1 grammar but only Level 40 kanji knowledge (hypothetically, because most resources for those JLPT levels are in Japanese and thus require some kanji knowledge in order to be studied) had an easier time getting through Japanese texts than someone with Level 60 or Chinese-native-speaker kanji knowledge but only N4-N3 grammatical knowledge. JLPT levels may not be the best way to measure proficiency, but my point is… both sorts of readers will have to look words up, but the one with more grammatical knowledge will probably have an easier time breaking sentences down and parsing. When it comes to comprehension, familiarity with common structures and ways of phrasing things is much more useful than knowing tons of vocabulary or kanji because knowing sentence structure helps you figure out what you don’t know a lot faster.
I recently started doing this with Xenoblade Chronicles 2 as whilst I loved the regional EN accents, some of the delivery didn’t stick well for me. I know that I’m not going to understand all the audio (far from it) but I’m happy with subtitles and it allows me to get used to hearing JP content. I’m now strongly considering doing JP audio and EN subs when I get to Ghost of Tsushima.
It’s probably worth mentioning that I am a fan of the immersion technique where you listen to loads of content before trying conversation - the theory being your subconscious is more aware of the language structure so it’s less of a shock/challenge when you try speaking/conversation. Time will tell how good it works for me!
Awesome, thank you, I might have to look into grabbing it or Yokai Watch 4 then. Looking for something fun to read and learn with.
I honestly didn’t know this is a thing, but I watch a lot of anime and listen to/watch Japanese news every morning, and I do notice that somehow my Japanese gets a temporary boost/switch in fluency after consuming some native content.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 sounds like a good idea! Probably worth picking up part 1 as well.
I was wondering about Fire Emblem: Three Houses on Switch as well. It has quite some dialogue and strategizing as part of the core gameplay, but might be worth trying in Japanese?
A couple of other titles that look fun in general:
- Trials of Mana
- Lost Sphear (played the demo, a bit of text explaining game mechanics, but not over the top)
- Sakuna: of Rice and Ruin
EDIT: The title is Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Apologies.
I agree with you. But I don’t see Spiritfarer as a mere tool for learning. For that I’m too hyped about the game 
I agree with all the replies you got. I’d like to add that you could be right. Maybe I’m a bad lvl. 60 user. All I can do is share my experience:
There were kanji I recognized from WK. But of these recognized Kanji many were a combination of Kanji, that I hadn’t learned on WK. Or a known kanji in a verb form, that wasn’t taught in WK (fe 去れる).
I’m at lesson 2 at the moment. By going slowly and looking things up, I can understand the material, but sometimes I feel like I wouldn’t have been able to construct such a sentence on my own. Would you say that is normal ?
The greatest thing to keep in mind about language learning is that it should always be fun and never become a chore or something you resent. My personal opinion is that you should just play through the game in your native language and enjoy it (or at the very least, Japanese audio with English subtitles so that you’re still exposed to Japanese), and then when you feel like doing a second playthrough after beating the game, play it fully in Japanese. Just try to pick up as much as you can and only look up words when you feel like it.
Yeah, that’s what it feels like as a Chinese speaker looking at words that only exist in Japanese. Perfectly normal, really. If it happens to Chinese speakers like me, I don’t see why it shouldn’t happen to someone at level 60 on WK.
Yes, I think so. It takes practice and quite a bit of exposure before constructing sentences of the same type starts feeling natural, especially if you intend to use your own words and not just copy bits of sentences from the textbook. That’s also a big part of why I watch anime so much: you get to see sentences being constructed in real time to convey ideas that are often quite clear in context (with the help of subtitles and a dictionary). They aren’t usually as long or complex as some of the sentences you can find in writing, but they’re a good way to see grammar being used.
If you want to use your textbook to practise, what I suggest is (provided such exercises exist in the book)… to try to answer comprehension questions related to the dialogues and reading passages in your own words. Only rephrase what you can. You don’t have to worry too much if you can’t. The point of doing this is just to think about how you’d get the structures you see in the textbook to fit into a sentence. You should probably try typing a few of them out and putting them on the forums to see if anyone can check them for grammatical/expression errors, or put them on a site like HiNative or Lang-8. (Lang-8 isn’t accepting new members now though, so it might not be an option).
Honestly though, in my opinion, there are only two main pathways to learning to use a structure correctly and with ease:
- You explicitly learn the correct form along with its meaning and nuances and start applying it in your own sentences, ideally while getting corrected in case you’re making mistakes.
- You hear and read the correct form in so many contexts that you become certain that it’s correct, and it starts flowing naturally into your sentences because it comes to the forefront of your mind as a ‘correct’ expression.
The way we learn most words is a combination of the two. The first is faster; the second will often create more confidence and ease. As such, I think you should either learn new structures actively and then test them out more often, or greatly increase your exposure. You can also do both. What I usually do is to look up new structures I encounter in a dictionary, and then read through lots of examples and definitions in order to get a feel for how they’re used. After that, I go back to whatever anime episode or video I was watching and allow everything I hear over time to confirm or invalidate my assumptions about the structure. If possible, I also use them in text messages to my friend. It’s not so much that ‘input alone is sufficient’ as it is that active listening/reading with understanding and dictionary look-ups cements the meanings of certain phrases in your mind. That’s when you’ll go, ‘Oh yeah, I think I’ve heard this before. Let’s try using that.’ Thus, in my opinion, if you can’t figure out how to use a structure, then it’s either that its use hasn’t been clearly explained to you, or that you haven’t seen enough examples. Both of these problems can be fixed with the right resources: for explanations of grammar points, if your textbook isn’t doing enough for you, try searching ‘[grammar point in Japanese] grammar’ and seeing what comes up. You can also check resources that tend to provide a lot of detail, like Maggie Sensei’s site. If you need examples of word usage, you can try https://ejje.weblio.jp instead of Jisho. They have a lot more examples per phrase than Jisho, and translations are provided.
The last thing I’d suggest as a goal is to move on to monolingual dictionary definitions as soon as you can. You don’t have to drop EN-JP definitions entirely, but the sooner you’re able to wean yourself off your native language, the faster you’ll improve. When I started doing that for French, I was stuck with look-up hyperlink chains for quite a while, and had to go back to EN-FR definitions once in a while, but as I learnt more… I eventually ended up having the widest vocabulary in my French class (slang excluded, because I didn’t bother with that before coming to France to study engineering, which is what I’m doing now) and used expressions in my essays that my teacher himself didn’t know, because I was just using everything I had learnt from reading the dictionary and newspapers. You pick up a lot from seeing how natives explain their own language. I’m currently split maybe… 60% EN-JP definitions vs 40% JP definitions when I look things up? I know not going with 100% JP is slowing my progress, but even with just 40%, I’m learning a lot.
I think I made the most early progress in learning english when I read harry potter as a young teen. The good thing about it was, that there wasn’t a translated version of the current book yet, so I couldn’t just switch languages.
Maybe that would also help here. And Harry Potter was of course a kids book, meaning the level wasn’t that high (even though it had a lot of unusual words, given the setting).
I am not at the level where I comfortably would try to play a jrpg or something in japanese yet - but I heard Tim Rogers recommending Dragon Quest 7 for beginners, if I am correct? That one was never officially translated. And he did recommend tokimeki memorial for intermidiate to advanced learners, in his 4 hours review of it.
Alternatively there is always Pokemon or any other Dragon Quest as a starter.
Usually the pace will pick up with the time, I remember with harry potter being essentially tied to the dictionary for the first few pages and then not needing it anymore and starting to most often just guess what the meaning was by context.
I did what you’re doing—“bottom-up” practice—for a long, long time. I still do when I’m playing video games. But “top-down” practice—intentionally not looking up words and just trying to pick up what you can—will tremendously boost your reading speed. Even your bottom-up reading speed.
I fought top-down practice tooth and nail. I have OCD and like you, I hate having an incomplete understanding. But once I started doing it, I got a lot faster at playing Japanese games.
Sorry, how do you get that handwriting search for Japanese? I normally use the Chinese one but it can get annoying switching between that and Japanese.
the little pencil icon next to the character count (where it says 0/5000) opens the handwriting input