Learning Japanese by playing vidya, is that even possible?

Learning Japanese by playing vidya, is that even possible?
If yes how efficient is it, are you better of reading manga or a VN?

What games are best suited for that?

I want to create a list of potentially good games for learning Japanese, but unsure whether or not it is even remotely viable.

Browsing Sup Forums for years I often heard people say "I learned English by playing video games", which does indeed sound like a fun way to learn a language, but I have my doubts this works just as well for Japanese.

1.European languages are similar to each other, some more than others, but they are still similar unlike European languages compared to an Asian one.
2.Looking up words is way easier if the latin script is used, Japanese has 3 scripts which amount to around 3000 "letters".

So let's say we are from Germany and we are playing an English game, grammar isn't all that different, words can be easily looked up if needed and we might even passively pick some words meaning up, while having fun.
Some games have more text than others so the amount of new words you learn differ greatly but all in all sounds okay in my book.

So far so good, what about Japanese?
You need to learn kana, the first 2 scripts to read about anything, this can be done in a week, but then there are kanji, there is a fuckload of them and learning them by themselves won't get you far cause they have different readings and you only know how to pronounce a word when you know the word already.

For example 雪 is read yuki and means snow, but 雪崩 is read nadare and means avalanche or snowslide.
You can see the same kanji read in 2 ways, now way to tell how it is read if you don't already know it.

This makes looking up words a rather bothersome task and is definitely not fun.

That's why I'm looking for games that allow you to use tools to assist you like a texthooker or games that either feature furigana or are written in kana only.

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This for example is written without kanji, you can read it when you know kana and can easily look it up.
But Japanese has many homophones (words that sound the same but mean something different) and especially beginners won't know which meaning to use.
Also you need to learn words with kanji sooner or later anyway.

Ape Escape 3 here has furigana, furigana is little kana letters over kanji that tell you how they are read so you can look them up easily.

This is a good soloution but there aren't many games that have furigana unfortunately.
Mostly games for kids have it, I doubt many JRPGS have it for example.

Sadly while Ape Escape easy very very easy to read it's a very gameplay heavy game and you barely ever have to read like many other games for kids.

install ITH (text hooker) and Translation Aggregatror (text paraphraser), get the proper dictionary plugins for them, download all those rpg maker h-games and go crazy.

Last option is a text hooker that can extract the text from the game and allows you to look it up.

That's very convenient and people use this to learn by reading VNs, sadly barley any normal game supports it.

To name a hookable game Neptunia Rebirth on PC can be hooked.

Please share your experience if you learned with games yourself and/or recommend games that are easy for beginners to read due to furigana or games you can hook text from.


RPG maker games are hookable?
Nice thank you for the advice.

You might get used to hearing it, which is good, but I'd imagine you'd still have no clue as to what the context or details are until you actually do some studying.

Yes of course!
It's definitely recommended to read a grammar book and learn kana prior to playing Japanese games.

Learning some vocabulary can't hurt too, the more you know means less looking up stuff.

But there is a point where you need to read in order to get used to the langauge and I want to do this while playing games.

I see no one is giving a fuck huh?

You got plenty of useful answers, what more do you want?

steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=838113091

it looks like absolute shit but hey one can dream

Not at the beginning, or at least it's super inefficient.
Man up and spend half a year going through a book like Genki 1-2 or Tae Kim's, grind the kanji, pick up some vocab and then start with vidya or VNs.

I generally recommend against manga because you spend so much time manually looking up. For vidya, not that much time is spent through reading.

The fastest way if you want to actually learn are VNs. At first pick one that works with text hookers so you spend as little time looking up words when you don't know shit as possible, but after a while be sure to throw away that crutch since it will start to hold you back.

Vidya is a supplemental material for expanding your vocabulary. You still need to study the grammar like you'd normally do in school/uni with any other foreign language.

I think you are getting the wrong Idea, I'm the OP and I actually did learn Jap for a while and can read easy stuff.
I'm at the point where I simply need to read more to practice, and since I started learning for video games I want to do my reading practice through video games.

I'm just unsure whether or not it's a viable method.

Do you have grammar down? Are you sure you understand what you read, instead of just try to play with the words in your head until it makes sense?
It's very much possible to completely misunderstand a piece of text and be in the illusion that you could read it.

Back when I learned Jap what I did was that I played a VN in two instances at the same time, one in Japanese, one in English. I read a line in Japanese, translated it on my own, then I advanced the line in the English window and compared. This was the first VN I read and I got a LOT of things completely wrong, even when it felt like I got it right.

Yes, you can learn vocab and kanji through games, but you really need at least a solid grammar foundation first. Which is why I said spend half a year on Genki or Tae Kim so you get that down, then you can learn through reading.

New leaf has furigana as well. I dunno how much you can get out of a game in terms of learning a language but since animal crossing has a lot of everyday items, holidays and events, it could be a helpful teaching tool

I'm rather confident after reading a VN, the games I tested thus far were way easier.

Well, I learned english entirely through vidya, so it should be possible.

But i think you need to know at very least the symbols and basic sounds before, otherwise its like trying to learn english when you dont know the alphabet.

>it's a "weeaboos trying to learn japanese through their weebshit" episode

why don't you just take Japanese classes, or if you're too poor for that pirate rosetta stone you lazy little turkey.

>>I'm just unsure whether or not it's a viable method.
You can learn a language from fucking infomercials if you really want.

The key is doing something you enjoy, if games hold your attention more than VNs, then go for it. You're going to be learning "sub-optimally" compared to a VN, but it really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.

I guess didn't really answer your original question. Yeah, it's possible if you learned Japanese for a while and got the basics down.

I started with VNs after I got to intermediate level. Started with an easy school slice of life moe game. It went really slow, but I learned so much and my Japanese was skyrocketing. The second game went about 10 times faster. Be sure to check if you are unsure about something, 80% of the time it's a new grammar construct you never heard about.

I started reading progressively harder games, like scifi and fantasy instead of just school everydays. At first I relied on text hookers, but now I have enough vocab that I can read without it and it only slows me down a little.
I read Utawarerumono 2-3 on the PS3, it has a LOT of shitty vocab like formal words that's only used in context with the Emperor, but it went reasonably well without a text hooker since I knew most of the kanji already and could look up easily.

So yes, if you can read a VN by now keep going and you'll just get better and better. It does slow down after a while which /djt/ calls intermediate hell. It feels like you learned 2000 new words and barely got any better, since you're now learning less frequently used words. Just keep at it, it should be something you enjoy doing by that time anyway.

How long do you think it took you to get to this "intermediate" level?

>Japanese classes

Yeah, cause I really want to waste my money spending a whole quarter learning hiragana and katanaka when I could do the same in three days for free.

>it's another frogposter who doesn't want to be here episode
why don't you just gb2 and make a cuck thread, or if you're too dumb for that just off yourself you sad green amphibian.

Took me like 2 years, but I was very half assed about it. Only really studied during summers when there was no school. It can be done in half a year if you take it seriously.

Instead of theorycrafting how to optimally learn the language, why not actually study the fucking language

this is bad and dumb, do not do this.

>taking three days to learn kana