Wanting to Understand Video Games in Japanese

[JackiJinx]

Hi there! I've been teaching myself some Japanese for a bit and although I haven't learned very much, I am still loving it.

My motivation for learning Japanese is career/entertainment oriented. I love video games, and there are many titles that are never ported over to North America or the PAL region, so the only options to play them are to get someone else to translate the entire game for you, or just do the translating yourself. I'm going for the latter. I'd like to ultimate work in the gaming industry, possibly in journalism (writing about games, reviews, previews, and the like).

Obviously I'm not going to learn all that I need to read over night. I've gotten down all hiragana and am starting on katakana (I'm starting to learn some kanji as well). I don't know enough grammar to structure anything beyond "Hello," "Nice to meet you," and "ビデオガームがすきます。"

What I'd like help with is this: what common words are used in games, what sort of ideas I should be familiar with, what key grammar points should I absolutely learn, are there any simple games I could try to help build my Japanese, and any other points that might be vital to my success.

I should probably also mention that the specific type of games I am interested in are RPGs, the ones with rather in depth story lines. So if you have no idea what video games usually are like, I can deal with vocabulary and grammar usually associated with fairy tales and medieval chivalry stories. Stuff like that is somewhat close to RPGs.

[Jessi]

Hi JackiJinx!
Video games are good motivation for learning Japanese They were one of the things that initially got me interested in Japanese, so I can definitely see where you are coming from. I will warn you though, that it will require a lot of time and effort, especially for RPGs. The text found in RPGs is loaded with kanji and vocabulary you don't hear everyday (which you know, I'm sure) - you will need to give reading high priority in your studies if you want to be able to understand these kinds of games. Especially the kanji...! That's probably what you should focus on the most. As for vocabulary, I found these handy lists of video game vocabulary: here and here. I found these through a quick search on Google (I knew they had to exist!) so if you look around you might find some more!

As for simple games, if you can I'd try getting a copy of something geared towards kids like Pokemon in Japanese. I can't remember if they even use kanji or not - but once you have all of the hiragana and katakana down it'll make for good reading practice and will get you used to playing through a video game in Japanese.

I hope this helps Feel free to ask any more questions - I recently played all the way through my first RPG in Japanese (FF4) and made it out alive

Oh, and one more thing: I like video games = テレビゲームがすきです。

[QuackingShoe]

Yeah. It's hard to really target your learning, especially in this regard. The thing about RPGs is that they draw from a much wider pool than most other things do. You'll be swapping around between casually talking about the weather, to giving keigo-filled speaches to the king, to reading magic incantions and ancient scrolls written in mock old Japanese, to learning about battle strategies and political maneuverings, to listening to knights/samurai speaking in a different kind of mock old Japanese, to having to deal with that one old guy who speaks some bizzare made-up dialect, to.. well, absolutely whatever else. Your knowledge just needs to be pretty broad (and people think video games rot our brains!).

So, read a lot. And start playing games in Japanese. Nothing will prepare you for playing Japanese RPGs like actually just playing Japanese RPGs. Jump into some of the lighter ones (as long as they're still entertaining) and get a feel for things.

Don't worry about missing a little (or a lot). One problem with video games as opposed to certain other mediums is that they invariable do not have furigana, so unless you actually want to sit there and manually search for every unfamiliar character you find, you're just going to have to take a deep breath and let a lot of it go. You'll learn a lot anyway. Consider playing games you already know and enjoy, so that you're not stressing about not understanding, and already know what to do. Focus on what you do understand rather than what you don't. As a beginner, this will mostly be inter-character dialogue, and not a lot of the plot-related exposition.

I'm near the end of FF9 myself, actually. Good times. That game's cutscene/gameplay ratio is ridiculously skewed to the former! But I'm not complaining; that's why I picked it.

[kageri]

I'm also slowly collecting a few PS2 j-rpg's for later times when I'll be able to play them. So it's good to know that I'm not the only one^^. The problem is that the dialogs in the games sometimes go very fast. I would recommend you to start with manga. There are a lot of manga that cover the same topics and vocabulary as the rpg-games, for many games there are even manga implementations.

[Taurus]

I have mentioned Barry Farber's approach before on the forum, but maybe you'll find it useful for videogames. He suggests going through a newspaper in your target language. Pick a story and read it. Highlight anything you don't understand with a big highlighter pen. Then use dictionaries, friends, phrasebooks, grammar books - anything - to translate these bits, and put them on flashcards, and use those flashcards to learn it all. Then repeat. Eventually you'll be highlighting less and less and understanding more and more.

I think you could easily adapt this to Japanese videogames. Just pick a game that uses lots of dialogue box text instead of cut-scenes, and use SRS flashcard software such as Anki. It will be laborious at first, but gradually the process will speed up. And the advantage of this method is that it takes care of word frequency: If there are words that come up again and again in videogames you will learn them more quickly because you'll be using them all the time.

Ganbatte kudasai!

[JackiJinx]

Wow. You guys sure are resourceful! I went and ordered Giftpia last night before going to bed (my first import, hopefully not a bad choice in regards to learning). This is going to be such a delightful challenge. Thank you very much, and thanks for the correction, Jessi =)

[Bulstrode]

Just a quick question since it's related to this topic.

Is it true that all Super Famicom (Super Nintendo in U.S.) games use only Hiragana and Katakana and not Kanji due to the system not being able to support the resolution needed to show Kanji? I suppose this would go for systems of comparable technology as well.

Anyway, I was just wandering; thanks in advance.

[Taurus]

I'm pretty sure that's not true. There's a screenshot of one of the SNES Fire Emblem games here, for example, that has a couple of kanji. I'm pretty sure you could find more by searching that site for SNES games...

[QuackingShoe]

It was only the Famicom games that were all hiragana/katakana. Super is normal.
You might notice that Japanese games suddenly got a lot more wordy once they hit the SNES. I wonder why that could be?

[Psy]

Tons and tons of games for the SNES use full blown kanji, particularly RPGs. If you're first starting out, though, you might try something like Zelda 3, which uses plenty of kanji but is light enough on text not to be so overwhelming. Still, to do just about anything you're going to have to draw a line between enjoyment and comprehension-- if you try to learn everything, your progress will be so slow that you'll cease enjoying the game. If you speed through and ignore much, you won't learn. What I've been doing is writing down every word I don't understand into a text file, which at some point down will be added to my anki study deck-- there's no huge concern about memorizing it (or even reviewing it) at the time I encounter it, so that keeps the enjoyment level up. Still, it is certainly not easy.

And for fun: Though I'm hardly well versed in old titles, Rockman 4 is one of the few Famicom (NES) titles that I've seen that uses kanji in regular game text.

[Bulstrode]

Thanks for the clarification, guys; I'm glad I now know that. I heard that from some random guy on a GameFAQs forum so I guess I shouldn't have believed it in the first place

[slehner]

I personally could not give you much direction for your studies but I did find a neat tool on itunes for use with the iPhone and iPod Touch if your interested.

The tool is called "Kotoba!" and it is a "multilingual dictionary based on Jim Breen's JMdict" (that's what the splash screen for the app states).

You may be able to use it when u get stuck on something you don't know, I know since I found it I've just started randomly looking words up. Using the traditional Chinese keyboard you can even try to enter the kanji characters (have to turn it on from iPod settings).

[wasabinoise]

I found this thread googling for learn japanese with videogames.

At the same time, lately, I'm using smart.fm to learn more vocabulary and review what I knew. Is like Anki but a little bit different, well, I will not use this thread to talk about it, you can check it for yourself, but I found a RPG Vocabulary list on smart.fm and I wanted to share it with you:

http://smart.fm/lists/33592-rpg-vocabulary

I found it searching "games" at the search box but I didn't tried it, I want to learn more "normal" vocab before these kind of lists.