Hi,
At around N2, I play a lot of JRPG video games in Japanese (occasionally dabble in anime), but sometimes I just get really lost, especially when it comes to political dialogue, dialogue with a lot of taigendome or yojijukugo, or where the subjects are all characters that have not been seen yet.
Games like Trails of Cold Steel or Persona 5, which are dialogue heavy, offer an English dub to be played along side Japanese text. It is also nice because while the majority of the games don't have voice acting, the important parts do.
Lately, I have been thinking that this may be what I need because unless I'm practicing Kanji or listening as a skill in itself, Japanese is relatively phonemic, and what I am lacking really is meaning or understanding. I find it a little frustrating when I get to an important scene that only has Japanese text and I don't understand what is happening, I don't understand the jokes, I don't understand the motivations or the context.
Does anyone else have experience doing this and think whether it builds bad habits? I am wondering if the non-listening learning is offset by the learning gained by back reducing the 80% comprehensible input hypothesis.
I guess this is a question I should ask myself, but I find that psychology and learning are actually scientific and what people say regarding learning a language, I often find true, and I definitely don't want to stay frustrated or get comfortable with bad habits, especially since the sessions I play are rather long (a few hours of video game audio, being lost for this amount of time may not be effective).
by BlueLensFlares