Learning with gaming – Any suggestions ?

20 comments

1. You can look up “Game Gengo” in YouTube. He recommends games to learn Japanese.

2. いつか全然読めない時があったなあ。ベルセルクを読んだ時、一時間に7ページしか読まなかった経験がありました。色々なことを調べて時間がかかりますよね。

3. You need to streamline the word lookup process.

   You need to be able to go from a word showing up on the screen to a dictionary lookup as quickly as possible (and then, if you mine, mining should take another one or two clicks). 12 words should take you a minute, not an hour.

   I’m not going to recommend a particular setup, but people use various OCR tools that either have a lookup dictionary built in, or pipe it to the web browser, where you can use your typical lookup tools.

   (Of course that’s assuming you’re playing on PC. If you’re playing on a console, then it won’t be as fast and easy.)

4. Is this 7 Reimagined?

   I’d say if you’re spending that much time looking up words you might not be ready to use that for learning/immersion, at least not optimally. Comprehensible input means what you’re reading needs to be largely understandable, so if you’re looking up every word (or doing it very often) it’s a sign the material is a little too difficult.

   If you’re having fun playing the game in spite of this, then go nuts. But if what you’re having to do is not super enjoyable right now, then for the love of god please try something else. I keep seeing people insist on going with material that is too hard for them (because they feel the need to be HARDCORE), burn out, and then give up entirely on immersion. There’s no need to try to go Draconian Quest mode in your Japanese learning journey, you can choose Dracky Quest mode. Start with slimes and drackies and level up first, don’t fight dragons at Lv3 with a shit sword and shit armour.

   If you can, try to play DQIII HD-2D and DQI&II HD-2D first, as they have a furigana mode (and pretty sure an all-hiragana mode). There is way less dialogue, and as far as I can tell a lot easier too. Furigana mode means it’s a lot easier to lookup, compared to plain kanji where you need to either lookup by radical or do some OCR shit.

   A lot of the words in DQ3 and DQ1&2 will just transfer over verbatim to DQ7. If anything the menu options for equipment, spells, etc as well as the battle options will largely be the same (in every DQ game, not just 7) — things like こうげき、ぼうぎょ、そうび、まほう、どうぐ、さくせん etc. Items like やくそう also appear in every single DQ game, sometimes in hiragana only.

5. This is pretty much how the grind is. Once you’ve got a good amount of the vocab and grammar for a particular piece of media down, it gets faster, they tend to repeat themselves. Otherwise you just need to pick something easier with more familiar vocab, or something where the lookup process is very fast (books with yomichan)
   For kanji, I agree it seems to be better to work on recognition first and writing after you’re comfortable.

   Although I’ll say, making diagrams and categorising things is slowing you down, personally I don’t think it’s necessary.

6. Ideally you’d be using some sort of word miner to meant for games but that’s not an option if you play on Switch or the like

7. How much Japanese have you studied before playing this game? The game was made for native speakers who already have a grasp on the language, so you should try to have a grasp on it too.

   Learning from a beginner textbook like Genki (or other resource) should be enough to expose you to major grammar points and common words so you can read more easily with fewer look ups.

8. The fastest way to look up words in game in my opinion is to use a PC. I have my switch hooked up to my monitor using a capture card device. I also have a dual monitor setup so on one screen I can play a game in Japanese and the other screen is used to display dictionaries etc.
   You can use OCR programs like YomiNinja or Kamui to make looking up words very fast.
   ChatGPT can also give very good grammar explanations, so if a certain grammar point trips you up, just ask ChatGPT to explain.
   When I play games on my handheld device, usually I just extract the text using Google lens and use ChatGPT to quickly parse the sentence for me. I would highly recommend trying it this way if you crave grammar explanations!

9. Yes, I can still remember, the first Japanese game I played was *Diabolik Lovers: Haunted Dark Bridal*. The font was something I wasn’t used to and it was also one of the first thing I tried that at least had a bit of jargon, as in Vampires and balkan folklore in general. I can still very much remember within seconds of it starting having to look up the term “東欧” and realizing that Japanese of course had such a short term that meant “Eastern Europe”, now that word and the font don’t phase me any more, years later, *Diabolik Lovers* is basically a walk in the park in terms of comprehension for me. I don’t have to look up really anything, the few new words I learn are self-evident from context and characters, as “東欧” would be for me right now. I’ve never seen “南欧” before, I think, but I assume it’s a word? I’ve only seen “東欧” and “北欧” but I assume “南欧 and “西欧” are also words right? To the point that I don’t need the characters any more to understand them in speech. If I heard “南欧” for the first time in speech I would know what it means. from context and that I know how “なん” and “おう” work in that context even though both can obviously mean many things but it’s not going to be “男王” in that context.

   So yes, it gets better, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a slog to get there. *Diabolik Lovers* seemed hard at the time but now it’s really extremely easy. Later I also tried *Norn9*, one of my first experiences with science-fiction and when I first tried it it felt like the final boss of Japanese. It felt like if I were able to play that game without issue I would actually have good Japanese, also, I felt it compared very favorably to *Diabolik Lovers* and many other games I tried in terms of plot and characterizations, but it was also frustrating and hard so I quit, I came back years later and it was so easy now it’s not even funny and it wasn’t close to the final boss of Japanese in hindsight, which is one of the depressing bits, the other one is that I never finished it even though I now easily could, even though I remember being very impressed with it in terms of other things I played and it made me realize that it’s not actually something I would ever touch were it not for that I wasn’t learning Japanese. It didn’t feel like enough of a challenge any more to actually be educational for that purpose and it was only good in comparison to all the other trahs and it kind of made me realize I had at that point spend more than four years of my life mostly engaged in utterly mediocre and poor fiction I wouldn’t ever touch were it not for learning Japanese.

   But yes, one gets better, things that seem impossible to brave will become approachable in the spam of mere months, things that seem impossible without lookups to as much as understand require almost no lookups within a year. I’m sure there was a time where “薬草” would be difficult to me, it is after all a fairly technical word but that word doesn’t phase me at all and I know what it is and every other word in your image even though that once seemed unthinkable. But the issue is, there is always a hidden boss behind what you think the final boss is. One year ago I tried watching *Ghost in the Shell* and that was the final boss to me, not to mention actually something I originally watched in Englishj many years back not to learn Japanese because I enjoyed it. Maybe I should go back to it, who knows, maybe it’s really easy now but I doubt it because it’s kind of a meme among language learners how hard it can be, but there is no doubt a hidden boss behind that final boss as well. Every time you think “If I can understand this, then I will actually know Japanese well.”, you are wrong.

   Finally, one thing, I’d personally not advice starting out with anything that has “薬草”. I must’ve been leaqrning for 3 years when I first encountered it, and now at 5 years it doesn’t phase me at all and I’ve seen it so many times but it’s not a linear but exponential scale with how much reading speed encreases as one improves. Of course the issue is, can you find some simple enough fiction that at least somewhat aligns with your interests? I was lucky enough that I could but I realize that simply doesn’t exist for many people.

10. >Regarding kanjis, I feel it’s easy to recognize their general idea very quickly but I have real troubles writing them from scratch.

    In this modern day and age of computers, I wonder what’s the real purpose of being able to write kanji anyway?

    When I type something on my computer in Japanese, my computer will auto-suggest the correct kanji for the word. The only thing I have to do is recognise it, and correct it when its wrong.

    About learning through gaming – although fun, its a grind. [https://www.youtube.com/c/GameGengo](https://www.youtube.com/c/GameGengo) can be helpful as well.

    But still, I’m not sure what your retention will be in the long term. For things like kanji and vocab, I’m using an SRS system otherwise I will not reinforce what I’ve learned in my memory.

11. I started with various old RPGs, including DQ1 (SFC), and had a pretty similar experience. A nice thing about older games is that they have smaller scripts and less talking in general, so there’s generally less new vocab/kanji per time period. (The rest of the time is spent grinding!) I spent a long time building up kanji, vocab, and grammar with WaniKani and Genki before I started (my own version of grinding!), but I think I could have started playing games/doing other immersion sooner and that would have worked too.

    Once your kanji and vocabulary gets large enough, this will get easier. I’m up to about ~1500 kanji and ~5000 vocabulary and I generally get a manageable amount of new stuff per session now, though it can still be a bunch, particularly for games with more flowery/archaic language. I just pulled a ton from the list of ~50 occupations in Sorcerian, for example.

    30 kanji per session, and presumably at least as many new vocab, is indeed a lot – I wouldn’t worry about writing them from scratch; recognition, particularly recognition in vocabulary, is the most important thing if one of your main goals is reading. 頑張れ！ Every kanji you learn is one you’ll recognize next time!

    Games I’ve finished: Dragon Slayer (Saturn), The Legend of Zelda (FC), Xanadu: Dragon Slayer II (Saturn), Dragon Quest (SFC), Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (FC), Drasle Family: Dragon Slayer IV (MSX2)

    Games I’m playing: Miracle Warriors/覇邪の封印 (Master System), Dragon Quest II (SFC), Ys 1 (PC Engine), Sorcerian Original: Dragon Slayer V (Win98)

12. If you’re playing on a system that doesn’t allow for hooking in a lookup dictionary (I game almost exclusively on Switch in handheld mode, I hear you), you might want to go find a vocab deck someone else has already created. Or at least a transcript so you can load that into a parser that can create them for you.

    But also: if you’re having fun going slowly and not frustrated, it’s working for you as is. I’d say put the writing off —there will come a point when the torrent of new kanji slows down, and you can catch up then.

13. Unlike what other people are saying, I would recommend not to worry too much about OCR setups and mining words and just playing the game, and only occasionally looking up those words that you notice come up regularly enough and then focusing on those.

    If you turn the process too much into work you will just eventually burn out.

14. Once you get used to a bunch of vocab used in the game you can go to youtube to watch gameplays of it! It will reinforce what you have seen + help you with listening

15. Honestly I think you’re overdoing the look up. Forgetting words and grammar is fine. You’ll see it again.

    If you come across something you don’t know, look it up, read it, go back to the game until the next thing you don’t know.

    I don’t think this kind of heavy study into individual words and grammar points is worth it.

16. What I did was make an Anki deck for vocabs I read on games and other medias. I have been using the Japanese Kanji Study app by Chase Colburn, which is a dictionary, for the convenience since it’s pretty convenient to add cards to Anki using the app.

    And personally, your method seem to be rather inefficient since ideally you want to understand in-game texts without translation. So there’ll be a point where you won’t make use of your work. Well unless you make your own translation of the text.

    Though I do something kind of similar which is typing in-game text word by word on google docs. In your case I guess it would be a pain to so since the story isn’t probably linear and you’ll have to make a separate tab for texts from side quests, item lists, and lore of the characters, if any.

17. You gotta play on PC else you’re cooked.

    As long as look ups take about 1s per word or so you’re good, it’s normal for things to go slow at first. My first VN is supposed to take 7hs to read or so, took me like 25 I think.

18. I played a few RPGs when I was a beginner. You might be having fun now reading the page that says what a 薬草 does, but they will very quickly get dry and boring. I recommend skipping the long item descriptions once they feel boring, since you have already played the game before and know what they do. Plus, did you even read every item description in English when you played? Or did you just figure some of them out from the name? 

    Also, RPGs like Dragon Quest 11 have a lot of extra NPCs that you can talk to in towns. Don’t feel obligated to talk to every single one for language practice. Their dialogue is usually not as interesting as the story dialogue from your party. DQ11 is probably the longest RPG I have ever played (my English version save file had about 150 hours on it). Skipping optional stuff here or there won’t be the end of the world, because the game just has so much stuff. 

    There’s one other technique I used sometimes when I was a bit tired of reading Japanese but still wanted to play the game. If a cutscenes came up with dialogue, I would use my phone and use Google Lens to select the text, then paste it into a Google Doc. I’d advance through the whole cutscene like this without trying to read it. Then later after I was done playing and ready to read again, I’d read the Google Doc, which made it easier to look up words.

19. I’ll give you my experience learning using games, i went Spanish>English>Japanese not as an old person but when i was a kid, i started playing Japanese games i remember i got from school a dictionary and started looking up words based on how they looked like, then repeating the words as i saw it…

    After that, i started to play MMORPGs, i started using broken simple English words, i want to buy, want to sell, its cheap, expensive, some insults here and there… and so on, since everyone was Turkish or Russian i learned lots of words from these languages too, but not as to be fluent. I used Google translate and had a cheat sheet notepad with the words i would use.

    Nowadays you can use textextract to get the words from the screen and immediately push it to Yomichan or other tool in a millisecond which is nice, There is a nice tool called Game Sentence Miner that help you with that, just remember that some words are never used IRL or are used in the game because they sound cool not because it’s the actual word people use, that is why i recommend playing MMO and talking with actual people… nobody gives a shit if you sound weird or have a broken Japanese.

    If you expend too much time looking up words over and over you might end burned and not wanting to play anymore as it becomes a chore instead of having fun, you can try playing simpler games without 2 million words of fantasy vocabulary.

    Just remember the best way to actually learn is by doing, using the language.

20. I tried exactly the same thing a few months ago with Dragon Quest XI, going through similar struggles. My conclusion was that it was too early for me. At the time I knew around 1000 words and studied like 80% of Genki 1.

    I don’t want to look up every single word of every sentence, that gets tedious really fast. In my opinion the process needs to be at least SLIGHTLY enjoyable: if it’s not, what’s the point of playing? I might as well learn with anki and books.
    Ideally, I would like to understand like 70%-80% of a sentence (both grammar and vocab) so I can look up the rest and learn in a consistent and sustainable way.

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