So I don’t know alot of words really and if there’s one thing I do in my spare time is play video games. But when I fired up Japanese Super Mario World (all hiragana and katakana) I froze at the first text box. So when I play the video game for learning purposes should I try translate as I go taking pauses to sound out and translate? Would you consider just picking out what you know and then continuing on and learning slowly?
5 comments
People do both approaches, but 99.99% of my time I prefer to translate all unknown words. If you use right tools, translation is extremely fast and convenient. It’s case by case, the best if you can extract text from the game. If not, then OCR works fine too.
I would actually study the language (writing system, vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation etc.) before tackling video games
Then later on when your Japanese is more advanced you can use the games as supplementary learning
If you want it to feel “good”, you should start at a level where you already gained some knowledge.
See, N5 is something you could reach almost within days. N4 and N3 will take somewhat longer, but at N3 most people can do whatever they want and still enjoy it because it will be words / Kanji you look for, hardly ever grammar. Not to say you might not find new grammar points, but everything “difficult and complex” generally will have been covered already.
So my advice: If you enjoy gaming as a tool for learning, go for it. Just try push for at least N3 with more regular methods so you have the basics with you as well before you shift your focus primary to games.
Would still work however even without textbooks, in the end it is all about motivation, consistency and your ressources.
If you have the patience, it is ok to jump straight into gaming right after learning both hiragana and katakana…I did…that was my way of learning words at the beginning…started with Luigi’s mansion 3 where it was all basically kana and moved up from there…of course, study grammar and kanji on the side, but if you have the patience stop at enough words you don’t know, look em up and put them in anki..when you feel you have enough to understand enough of the sentence, move on…you don’t have to translate every single word if you dont want to…as long as you understand enough of a sentence, you can move on to the next
My second game was paper Mario origami king…which took 135 hours to complete…when according to HLTB, it should take around 30 hours for the average player to beat…patience is a virtue😅, but the suspend feature on the switch was definitely my friend as sometimes I wouldn’t have any gameplay and would spend my time studying a few lines of dialog while I try to get through a cutscene
first of all, you can’t just skip learning the language and just pick out words in a game, so pick up genki1 or tae kim or something and start actually learning the grammar
but as for immersion, sure, engage in any media you like to any degree that you like. don’t frustrate yourself with too much incomprehensible immersion. you can either skip what you don’t know or stop and focus. you’ll probably cycle back and forth many times. the best one for today is the one you feel like doing today