I have been studying Japanese for some time, til n5 by myself and later with a teacher. Tbh, I don’t really like using jlpt for measurement because I don’t really intend to take it, but if I had to describe my approximate level (according to my teacher), it’s n4-n3-ish. Yes, I know it’s not that high, but it is what it is for now.
Overall, my brain is pretty good at understanding and, as a result, memorising grammar. However vocab is a giant pain. Vocab lists don’t work for me, anki doesn’t work too, I’ve tried. What does work is associations and putting a word in a certain context. So, playing games being my goal of learning the language and a big hobby of mine in general, I decided to try that. Besides, they give me a picture to remember with the word and more often than not even let me interact with the object the word is used for. Specifically I tried to play 牧場物語やすらぎの樹. I have played this game before, so I figured it would be easier. Plus lines of text don’t disappear until I press the button, so it gives me more time to write stuff down and look it up and whatnot. Additionally I decided to read all lines aloud to remember words better. And while it did work, I remembered the words pretty well, I ended up replaying just the prologue five times on different days to check if I actually remembered the words and how quick I was to recognise them. Needless to say, that burned me out pretty quickly. I had to do A LOT of looking up words. The grammar, tho, didn’t pose much of a challenge, so that’s something.
In any case, I want to ask – is this approach worth going on with? If so, how do I avoid burning out? Should I just move on past parts of the game once I have an overall passable understanding and knowledge of it rather than near perfect? Or is there something else I should change? I know there aren’t that many shortcuts to vocab and I’ll have to do a lot of looking up, but I am wondering if I can make it a little less tiring for my brain.
Thanks)
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I wouldn’t recommend trying to label yourself with an N level unless you’ve taken the test. You’d be surprised at how much Japanese you can know and STILL not know a lot of JLPT N3 things.
And no one takes a self proclaimed N anything, let alone an N3 seriously.
**but on to your question**
> Vocab lists don’t work for me, anki doesn’t work too
Same, that’s why I went to Duolingo. New vocab is taught in the context of sentences, which helped me learn larger amounts of words faster and easier.
> Specifically I tried to play 牧場物語やすらぎの樹. I have played this game before, so I figured it would be easier. Plus lines of text don’t disappear until I press the button, so it gives me more time to write stuff down and look it up and whatnot.
This is good. This is what I do. Sometimes I don’t bother to write anything down though. It depends on my mood.
> I ended up replaying just the prologue five times on different days to check if I actually remembered the words and how quick I was to recognise them. Needless to say, that burned me out pretty quickly.
This was a bad idea. But I think you got that.
> In any case, I want to ask – is this approach worth going on with? [and all other questions]
So, the nice thing about media, is each piece of media contains a finite amount of core vocabulary that will repeat early and often.
What this means is, you don’t have to repeat the prologue until you remember all the words with ease, as a lot of the words will appear again and again and again on their own over the course of gameplay. Just look them up as you run into them until you don’t have to look them up anymore.
It’s a little bit of a slog at the beginning. For me the process is, at the start of a game I’m looking up a ton, and translating several sentences even… but it doesn’t take long into gameplay before I don’t have to translate much if anything, and I can just look up words quickly… if at all.
Though I recommend looking up everything new, I wouldn’t be concerned with trying to retain it first try or anything. There’s going to be a TON of words you’re going to look up and see only once or twice. Just let them go. The important ones will repeat themselves, and those are the ones you’re really going to be trying to gain from this experience.
I wouldn’t recommend trying to sus out those words pre-emptively either… it’s a hassle and then you end up with Anki decks of “common words” for the game and less retention than you get just plowing through and looking them up a dozen or so times.
And a dozen or so look ups of the same words sounds bad but it can take only a few seconds and eventually you can at least pinpoint the meaning when you see it if not the sound which makes the lookup faster. Just look up and go and it’s a pretty quick method.
That and just plowing ahead gives you that dopamine hit of actually progressing through the game and getting new experiences. And puts you less at a risk of your brain going “yeah yeah the line is blah blah blah” and not letting you actually try and understand each word.
🙂 Hope that helps. It’s a lot of word look up at the start, but you’ll see a HUGE decrease in lookups and an increase in reading and enjoyment pretty quickly.
Games are decent for advancing with language acquisition – with some being better and some worse.
Generally speaking: if a game lets you browse specific content at any time in any language of your choosing or even allows to replay past texts, this is an ideal scenario. One that is pretty rare however.
However, with gaming as the primary learning source and depending on the games you choose, you might not have a lot of fun for quiet some time. Let me iterate: take a simple game like Overwatch. Playing, translating and understanding everything there is doesn’t take too much effort. But it will not really advance you in the language. More classic RPG-focused titles however might swiftly overwhelm you with a lot of vocabulary and kanji you likely will not yet be familiar yet.
My suggestion thus is rather simple. Mix some approaches, instead of games try to go with some easier Manga first. As for vocab in context, that might be something your teacher could help you with. Create your lists, give those to you teacher and ask him if he can’t maybe come up with some content around those words?
Then – as I said, mix approaches, try to see everything from a whole different perspective. Try breaking down those words into Kanji. Break down those Kanji into shapes. Try to recognize those, maybe even try drawing them. A different approach, different goals and the possibility to actually “gamify” Kanji learning to some extend if you go for the approach of drawing kanji in a app that asks you to do so based on readings or meanings or a combination of both can lead surprising success.
We need different kinds of input and should vary the way we study for optimal results. Input based learning is fine, but you need to always keep it fresh and fun.
I’m just curious mostly, but what about anki didn’t work for you? I know not everyone likes it, but I’ve been really happy with it.
Personally, my approach to vocab started with doing Core2k to get a baseline vocabulary, and then I’ve just been adding new vocab/sentences I come across to my own deck I made. This year, I’ve been getting serious about it, so I’ve been doing 30-50 new words a day. Without anki, I really doubt my retention would be nearly as good.
Something else I’m curious about is what’s your method for learning kanji? For me, doing kanjidamage and learning the general meanings and useful readings made learning vocab a lot easier for me.
I think anything you can use [yomichan](https://foosoft.net/projects/yomichan/) with could be very helpful since you don’t need to worry about searching manually for kanji or use OCR. (don’t know if there’s any way to really use it with games other than visual novels though). Having the ability to just instantly get a definition pulled up for anything is so useful and saves a lot of time (not to mention using it for adding cards to anki in an instant).
Not trying to convince you to use anki or anything and I don’t know if I really have any good advice on burnout, but I really would recommend yomichan in any case.
Preload on vocab with 攻略 sites (walkthrough) e.g. https://wikiwiki.jp/yasuraginoki/
You can also use this while playing the game. Can’t remember that crafting recipe or how to solve that puzzle? Look it up on the Japanese site first.
Or watch 実況プレー videos if you’re into that (some youtubers will read all the dialogue aloud)
Personally I would hate having to stop multiple times and it would make actually playing the game less fun.