I am a first year Uni student and my major is in Japanese, I am always wanting to find fun ways in which I can learn more Japanese as well as practice what I do know. That is when I got the idea of playing online games with Japanese people, I had many friends back in my gamer days who had learned English from games so I guess this could work for me in Japanese.
Just to give context, I do not mean playing the games in Japanese (well not at the start atleast bc of kanji), I mean learning through playing with Japanese speakers e.g playing minecraft on a Japanese server + joining a discord.
Does anyone have any experience in learning Japanese through gaming? And if so, do you think this system would work for me?
3 comments
I would think that it depends on your level right now. I do agree that it is good to have real life practice. However, my concern would be that the pace will be too fast for most beginners and the amount of slang will be very high. Not that I discourage the idea – I think it is a great way to practice. But just with some caveats.
Absolutely. I played JP MMO and made a lot of JP friends. My JP improved a lot since. You can actually learn alot of stuff outside of just plain JP lessons. Be curious and ask them what you don’t understand. And when you’re a bit closer to them, you can ask them to tell you where you’re using JP wrong or unnaturally. However, you should remember that not all Japanese are the welcome type. Some can get annoyed if you’re too pushy or talkative. Pick your friends carefully. I recently learned why “ゲームをしたい” is wrong but “ゲームがしたい” is right by playing around with my JP friends.
I tried this method before. I was playing Genshin impact with some Japanese friends I met at an asian discord server. It was fun at first however there are some language barrier challenges and sometimes you can feel left out. If you’d like to learn Japanese and meet new friends I would recommend trying an Online class. You might want to try Speedtalk Language Training Center. The classes are conversation based and highly interactive. 🙂
https://www.facebook.com/speedtalkcenter.