Has anyone played Pokemon Green and is able to comment regarding the level of comprehension needed to play?

9 comments

1. It’s hard as shit to understand if you’re not a native speaker cuz everything is in hiragana.

   Having no kanji and no spaces and fuck tons of homonyms makes reading through only hiragana difficult AF for new learners.

   Edit: it’s been a long time since I played. I forgot it has spaces.

2. It’s simple enough. If you’ve played through the original basic games before, then you have all the basic context you need to understand the non-story stuff, and that’s good practice in and of itself.

   The game is hiragana / katakana with spaces, similar to how Japanese children’s books are formatted. This is true for every game in the series up through Black/White, by the way (Gen 5 gave the option to switch between kana-only and kanji-included).

   Will you understand everything? Definitely not. Will it give you plenty of practice in reading basic kana for item and Pokémon names? Definitely yes. It can also help with basic sentence and syntax comprehension, since you’ll be seeing a lot of basic sentences in the battle narration.

   For what it’s worth, this is basically how I practiced kana reading back in 1999, when I *ahem* “acquired” a Japanese copy of Pokémon Silver to play through prior to its English release.

3. I’ve been playing through bdsp this way, with kanji switched off. It’s easy enough to get through it if you have an idea of the flow of the story. It’s definitely been helping with my reading speed and vocabulary.

4. Its pokemon blue but in green.

5. Idk about green but I’ve played x, alpha Sapphire, and sword in Japanese and they weren’t too terrible. For the 3ds games I recommend playing on citra so you can increase the resolution, otherwise the kanji will be tough to read. You can also find a cheat code to remove the black outlines and make the game look way better.

6. I’d say N3 is probably the sweet spot where it’s not too discouragingly difficult but there’s enough unfamiliar stuff that you’ll learn something

7. i played the game without reading japanese. as long as you know pokémon well, it shouldn’t be too bad.
   it was actually a fun challenge for me, it was fun trying to memorize everything lol

8. Played it as a kid with zero understanding of the japanese language through trial and error. You’d be surprised how fast you start memorizing words through their combination of shapes without even knowing how to read them.

9. Most annoying thing for me was not knowing any of the move names in japanese and being like “wtf does this do”

   And since theyre in katakana you cant just guess the meaning from the kanji

   Otherwise since youre familiar with the game already i think it would be fun to try it out in Japanese 🙂 when studying japanese the best way to study is the funnest way (joking but you know what i mean i think)