LLearn Japanese

Should I wait to get better at Japanese or play a game in Japanese now?

  • February 8, 2023

I am very low level Japanese (genki 1 chapter 4) and was wondering if I should just continue to study for now or if playing Pokémon diamond in Japanese would be helpful. I’ve seen on here before that you should get into content but I’m not sure if it’s applicable for my level

5 comments

  2. You can technically do whatever, but it’ll be a very painful and inefficient use of your time to slog through a game after 4 chapters of Genki.

  3. Pokemon games are good for building confidence once you’re at a higher level. If you want to learn the language from them, it’s better to watch gameplay with commentary.

    Only a small amount of the game time is spent on story, which would be the easiest part to understand. Most of the writing tries to give you a tiny glimpse into the lives of random trainers. It’s *fun* but it would be like trying to learn from fortune cookies.

    Pokemon does have some excellent novice-level content, though, like [Pokétoon](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBE2D9BnJJUoFiRz8ZjF2KToAirHYn1Ru) — see if you can understand anything. I personally started reading with the Pocket Monsters Special manga.

    Genki isn’t really focused on getting you reading and listening early. It’s not my cup of tea and I’m not really sure what it’s good for besides test prep.

  4. Always continue to study….but that does not mean you cant play a game fully in Japanese (as long as you at least know kana)….but I think pokemon will be just a little bit too hard at your current level

    I suggest you play games with less concentration on story (or less text, I should say)…

    I was very low level too when I started playing games…the one I started with was Luigis Mansion 3..a metroidvania with story thrown in but not a heavy concentration on it….I think you can do games like that….just a heads up but most (not all) first party nintendo games use only kana or very little kanji (with furigana)

    Just be patient with yourself…at first you will need to look up basically every word…pace yourself…only play when you have finished studying for the day as at your level studying with books is more important….since its a switch, you could just leave it in sleep mode in the middle of a dialogue and come back to it at another time

  5. I fully believe you can learn mainly using immersion. However, you’ll likely end up white-noising everything, skipping dialogues, and ultimately just wasting your time while you pretend you are being productive.

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