i play genshin impact and while i do catch a few words and phrases that i’m familiar with, the japanese in the game is far too advanced for me so i have to have english subs in the game to understand what they’re saying.
are there any games that n4 students can play that’ll help them study as well?
im considering switch my animal crossing language into japanese but i still don’t feel too confident.
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I wouldn’t recommend animal crossing at only N4 level. Except you’re very patient and want to look up a lot of words, slang and grammar.
At N4 you will have a hard time with every game.
Maybe try Ni no kuni, it has furigana.
Paper Mario and the origami king is usually recommended for beginners
Probably pokemon (?)
In my not-so-humble opinion, leaners here worry about this stuff *waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay* too much.
Long story short, no game, novel, anime, anything made for native speakers is meant for any specific JLPT level.
If you’re interested in playing some game, reading some manga, whatever, then just do it.
If it’s too hard for you and you’re completely lost, study the language some more and come back to it.
If you feel like you’re getting something out of it, then keep playing it (but also keep studying the language).
It’s really that simple. There’s no “right answer” to the question of what Japanese media you should consume at what level. Read/watch the stuff you’re interested in and can make some sense out of.
I played Judgment and Lost Judgment arround that level.
I would try a game that doesn’t have a huge amount of story or dialogue to understand, something like Mario Odyssey maybe. Animal crossing is a ton of reading… So when your comprehension isn’t so good, or you just read very slow, it won’t be fun.
I plan to get my feet wet in Japanese gaming soon enough as well. I think that I will start with games like A Short Hike and Alba: Wildlife Adventure. Just supershort simple casual games with very little dialogue, that I’ve played before. Just to try it out.
I think I played Final Fantasy then
It was NES version so, no kanji.
I only played the first 4-5 towns. Basically I took a lot of screenshots of all the dialogue when I was playing. But I didn’t count playing as study-time.
When I *was* studying, I looked at the screenshots and treated them like it was a passage from a book and looked up each word and tried to figure out what everyone was saying.
If I couldn’t figure out what people were saying I posted online.
It was pretty slow and not really “game” like, more like reading.
僕の夏休み might be good fit. I have learned around 3/4 od jlpt4 content, and game was enjoyable for me
You might want to check out Game Gengo and Game Grammar on YouTube. They both focus on learning Japanese by playing games, albeit they focus on different stuff.
Game Gengo would be more helpful to your specific situation because they’ve got videos where they rate games based on how suitable they are for learning Japanese (e.g. Do they have Voice Acting, a log to read past dialog again, furigana for Kanji you might not know yet etc.). They also recently made a video specifically how to study Japanese with games, talking about different tools you can use to help you.
I personally find Game Grammar helpful as well, because while Game Gengo DOES do Let’s Plays, they do more of a “First Hour of…” and also experiment with different formats to cover a wide variety of games. Game Grammar does longer in-depth Let’s Plays, though I was happy to discover that they’ve done a few for Pokémon and Ace Attorney as those are the series I focus on mainly. I feel like it really does help to see someone play who is more advanced cause they might know expressions that you might be completely clueless about as of yet.
For general advice, try to not stress yourself too much trying to understand everything at once. If it takes you 20 minutes trying to figure out what one word means in one sentence, you’re quickly going to burn out. On the contrary, try to focus on Quantity over Quality, and only try to get the gist of it, or only focus on certain parts of the game (e.g. focussing only on the Dex entries in Pokémon, and only doing the bare minimum to get through the games otherwise). Kanji and Vocab are likely to show up time and time again over the course of the game, and if they don’t, they aren’t as important for your understanding of the game anyway.
AYE~ I’m glad to see another Genshin fellow playing the game as a way to learn Japanese along the way. Do you do the same thing as me? Play the game with JP subtitles and focus like crazy when the characters are talking?
Cos I don’t know what your N4 level of learning is but I can approximately understand what the characters in Genshin are saying- plus the Kanji help. Except for Fischl. Hers is hell to vaguely comprehend.
And a real useful way would be to play Visual Novels that offer both english and japanese subtitles so you can refer to both while the characters are reading.
For those that I’m aware of- Riddle Joker and Grisaia spin-offs offer that multi subtitle option. (Shift J/Shift E) for Riddle Joker. There should be a ton more but those two are those that I chanced upon.
Even though Grisaia builds upon the original series. They’re kinda separate and partially episodic so it doesn’t really matter if you’ve yet to play the original.