If you’re looking for katakana practice, play video games aimed at kids

Games aimed at kids tend to rely on hiragana, which can be fairly slow and confusing to read and won't give you kanji practice, so I wouldn't necessarily call it great for learning. However, you will get a lot of katakana practice, much more so than games for adults, at least in my experience.

Take Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door here. Loads of characters use katakana intermittently, but all speech from this sentient supercomputer will be entirely delivered in katakana (except for 世界 and 見 for some reason). It's a cool way to communicate that the computer has a unique speech pattern, but it's also great practice if you (like me) are not that good at reading katakana naturally. This particular conversation goes on for a very long time (at least at my speed) and it sounds like I'm gonna be having more conversations with it going forward, so there's a lot of katakana to sink your teeth into in this game.

Similarly, I recently finished the Super Mario RPG remake for Nintendo Switch. Slightly more kanji in this than Paper Mario, which was nice, but still not much overall and still a lot of katakana. There's an entire village of people that are meant to be mind-controlled, so they all talk exclusively in katakana. I love getting practice, but my god, the relief I felt when they went back to speaking in hiragana. It's also nice that conversations in this game tend to be much shorter than Paper Mario since this was originally a SNES game.

I've also been playing a few games that are aimed for older audiences and yeah, purely in terms of katakana practice, there's no contest. If you find yourself struggling with katakana, I recommend picking up a game for kids.

by Big_Description538

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