For the past few months I’ve been playing the game Katawa Shoujo to practice reading and for vocabulary mining. I gotta say it’s been one of the best resources I’ve used. The variety of adjectives is surprising and I wouldn’t say it’s too difficult for someone of around n3 level to start playing through. Comparing it to other reading resources like Satori Reader and JLPT stuff, I find the dialogue much more natural and it also helped me used to some slang. When I started I was mining around 20 words every 15 minutes but now I hardly ever have to look up words. The story is engaging and you can get the mobile version on android too. There’s also a setting that turns off NSFW content so that’s a bonus. Making this post because reading is a super effective way of building vocabulary but getting your hands on Japanese books can be hard or expensive. Personally it’s been a really good way of the gaps of immersion throughout the day as I’m a student and I’m mostly studying at my computer all day, so I can take a 15 min break and alt + tab into the game. I’d love to hear other people’s opinions on this too! Hope this helps someone.
3 comments
Katawa Shoujo is a great VN, but keep in mind that its Japanese localization was, like the game itself, an amateur endeavor and may not represent good, native-sounding Japanese. As an example (and if you take one thing from this post, let it be this): in Japan, katawa is a slur.
I’m still a beginner in Japanese myself, so I can’t speak with authority, but personally, I’d rather spend my time sentence mining from a Japanese VN.
Every single visual novel can be a great resource, it is the perfect medium to learn japanese, you have the text and the voices, you can read at your own pace and repeat the voices or scroll back the text at your will. Even if you aren’t a begginer it is still pretty good, I’m reading a very difficult visual novel right now and learning many new words.
You should look into Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni.
It’s not only one of the best visual novels it excels even compared to standard books.
It’s Japanese is more on the easy side and not high level prose but it’s contents are very much so. It depicts almost all everyday interactions, is completely voiced and you can even get it in japanese only on IOS/Android.
Each chapter is 5 bucks, the first chapter is free so you don’t loose anything by trying it out.
The IOS version is Japanese only and free as well