I have been thinking about playing Ni no Kuni 2 in japanese.
I was just wondering how you who have done this to learn, how do you approach words that you don’t know in the game?
Cuz, obviously, you don’t have tools like Yomichan in games, so I’m not quite sure what to do when I come across a word I don’t know. Especially in text based dialogue, where you don’t have someone saying the word.
Any tips would be appreciated!
12 comments
Take a picture of it on your phone and use a dictionary or even put it in google images to see the meaning of the word
I’ve been playing Japanese games since the 32 bit era.
What I’ve done is just flat out write words down on paper and look them up, and rewrite it a bunch of times, like a homework assignment. It was a bigger pain in the ass 25 years ago when looking things up wasn’t as easy to do without a smartphone, and rather using an actual physical dictionary. But I did it.
Google translate works with photos
Yep. This is helped me go from N2 to N1
Write them down then look them up
Free writing practice
Depends on the game and whether or not you’re playing on PC; for games with a lot of text and dialogue (namely visual novels), there are tutorials to set up a number of tools to extract the text from the game in real time, paste it in the clipboard on your web browser and use yomichan from there, google “the moe way” if you’re interested, obviously this is PC only.
If you play on consoles, I’m afraid your options are rather limited to what the game offers you; some games in Japanese give you the option to add furigana, which is great for intermediate learners. Other games have a gallery and/or a text log where you can revisit cut scenes and dialogs, giving you time to figure out and search words/grammar you’re not familiar with. There’s a YouTube channel called “gamer gengo” made by an English native guy who teaches english in Japan, that’s all about learning Japanese through video games, google it if you’re interested.
Good luck!
I’ll second everything in here and also recommend if you want to play Japanese games for language practice, I quite like mobile games from Kairosoft for that purpose. They are simulation games and don’t really have complicated plots and tend to be fairly easy to figure out what’s going on even if you don’t know all the words.
I take a picture of the kanji and look up the radicals. If the kanji is too pixelated then… Well GL. You’ll have an easier time with that part by getting use to things. This’ll help you with finding radicals in a kanji so it’ll be easier to look other kanji up later. (I use Jisho for searching a kanji up by it’s radicals and kanji.sljfaq .org for drawing the kanji if I couldn’t figure out the radicals)
I use OCR software that scans the text on my screen and copies it to my clipboard. It’s a lot more efficient than taking pictures and sending it to google translate or clicking the radicals in an online dictionary.
This doesn’t work on consoles however. It can also be a little glitchy in full screen depending on the game and sometimes the text may be too blurry for the OCR software to read it. It still works great overall.
Yomichan should also have a feature where it will immediately pop up any time you copy something to your clipboard. So you can scan some text and right away a Yomichan pop up will appear. So fast and efficient.
Midori dictionary! But it can be rough trying to play games like that if they are too far above your level. Not saying don’t try, but I would go in with the mindset to study!
If you have Windows 11, you can use snipping tool and the OCR in there. I’m building a more dedicated version of an OCR right now, but it’s not ready for release yet
Take screenshots and dump them in paint on top of each other. After each playing session, I copy the picture from paint and paste it on yandex ocr > see original text. Press undo on paint to see the ‘next’ (chronologically previous) screenshot. Rinse and repeat.
It works fairly well most of the time as long as the text is clear. I’ve done it with star rail but I do run into trouble with older, emulated games like snes games where the text can be blurry and pixellated. Your game is pretty modern so it should be fine, maybe fiddle around with text box opacity.