/vr/ - Retro Games

>>4732987
Do you know Japanese?

>it's a "babby thinks he will become technically proficient enough to hack roms and fluent enough in japanese to translate them all while having time to spare" episode

>>4732987
Assuming you're already proficient in Japanese, I would get proficient with a hex editor.

>>4733007
>>4732994
Im not, is it hard to translate without knowing the language. I would assume game text isn't that perplexing.

>>4733012
You would be incorrect. Try google translating the text dump of a game and see if you would enjoy playing a game that reads like that.

>>4733012
Oh, in that case just make shit up. The only people that will know are those than know runes. Make sure you throw in a couple necessary plotpoints and some funnies and you'll be on your way to being Ted Woolsey. And get someone to code for you, you can't fake your way through those langauges.

>>4732987
I know /vg/s /hgg/ has some tools for machine translating games that works better than regular google translate. I would look into that, but I would certainly advocate not releasing a romhack translation from it. So many nuances to the language that much tone and emotion would be lost in translation. It's mainly for just understanding what's going on as you play.
Just try learning japanese for yourself. It's not easy at all, but could be an enjoyable experience. Especially if you're interested in playing japanese games, you'll have a stronger motivation to keep studying.

But this isn't /vr/ related and I'm surprised this thread is still up.
1.
2.
3.

>>4733017
How bad of a translator was Ted?

>>4732987
Learn the skills required to do it?

Japanese is a class-5 language requiring a minimum of 2,220 study hours. I hope your chair has a safety harness. If you really want it: you already know what to do.

>>4733029
Here's one of the dohickeys domabobs.
http://neko.works/index.php?static=fbcr

Once you learn Japanese you realize that it's so easy that everybody can just do that and nobody has bother with translation or hacking.

>>4732987
>英語はできますか
>Not 英語は話せますか

That pic is dumb.

>>4733764
Honestly this
"Japanese is hard" is a meme. Whoever's telling you that probably doesn't know it.

>>4733012
>is it hard to translate without knowing the language?
oh, not at all

it's like riding a bike, a really special bike! but you have to pedal with your eyeballs. oh1 oh! and it also takes several days to get anywhere

>>4733012
Depends. Translating menus you can probably do with the translate app on your phone by taking a picture.

If you're planning to translate RPGs, you're gonna have to learn Japanese or find someone willing to translate text while you take care of the programming part. Even though many RPGs are written for children they contain a lot of grammar which doesn't translate well using translation bots, and you'll be missing a lot of nuance. In general you can make the game 'playable' but you might as well just make shit up and interpret from context.

On the plus side, retro games are often very light on kanji due to resolution constraints, so you're fine with just learning hiragana and katakana. On the downside, you'll learn exactly why Japs bother learning thousands of complicated Chinese symbols because you'll encounter so many words which have the same spelling in kana but mean completely different things.

>>4733970
"Japanese is impossible" is a meme. "Japanese is hard" is not, it's definitely a difficult language for Westerners. Unlike languages like Spanish or German, many of the principles behind it are different from what we're used to, plus there's a whole slew of characters to remember.

I'm about half a year in myself and although I can play retro games fine I still have to look up a *lot*, and visual novels often still look like Chinese to me because their vocabulary and grammatical constructs can be so different to what I'm used to.

But if you just want to play kids games like Pokémon in their native language then yeah Japanese is easy.

>>4732987
no need to thank me

I think I might be too much of a brainlet to get into hex editing for hacking scripts into old games.

>>4733993
English is one of the hardest languages to learn, and most Europeans from non-English-speaking countries learn it to the point they're near fluent.

>>4734512
Anyone who complains about English has never tried to learn Russian. I don't understand how Russians can even communicate with each other using that shit.

The problem with translating Japanese text as a Japanese noob is kanji. Hiragana and katakana characters are easy enough to learn as they're essentially just an alphabet, by kanji is complicated and takes years of study to understand. Even native-born Japanese people don't generally become literate in kanji until around middle school. Kanji characters have multiple meanings and complex structures.

Unless you plan to dedicate 4-6 years of intense study along with a couple trips to Japan to practice your dialect on the locals, don't bother attempting to translate Japanese games.

>>4733961
This is the new teaching standard.

>>4734512
Just because you failed jr high English last year doesn't mean it's hard.

>>4734594
Kanji is only a problem if you learn the wrong way. Many people, and also weebs, do, so that's why this myth exists. It's compounded by weebs usually being autistic. The fact that a character can represent a broad or vague concept when they were specifically taught that kanji are logograms and absoloutly not Ideograms grates on the soul of their tism and causes their brain to shut itself off from that train of thought. If you learn the right way you can often work out the rough meaning and original reading of any character even if you've never seen it before, provided it hasn't been deformed too much through simplification.

>>4733051
Given the strict deadlines, he was not bad at all.

>>4734638
Saying that something hard is actually easy "If you do it the right way" is a copout. There is no special secret way to make complex linguistic an easy task.

And please, don't try to claim you know anything about Japanese. You clearly don't if you think you can determine kanji without ever seeing it.

>>4734638
And what is the "right way"?

>>4734594
as somebody who makes a living by translating Japanese to English and sometimes the other way around, I can assure you that reading and understanding the Japanese is maybe 30% of the difficulty of translating. Consistency of terminology, differing types of information conveyed in a Japanese sentence (is this object singular or plural? Haha go fuck yourself), converting long and rambling Japanese into comprehensible English despite the totally different sentence structures and a client who somehow expects a 1:1 word match... I could go on for hours.
I would expect that in translating games a major major issue is the fact that you can't fit 3 lines of Japanese text into 3 lines of English, you often double the length. If you're putting a presentation together this is a pain in the ass but you can solve it with smaller text and narrow fonts, but for a game cartridge with hard coded graphics and character sizes you are going to have a mess no matter what you do

>>4734670
Sorry meant to address this too but you can often guess at least the reading of an unfamiliar kanji because Kenji with similar radicals are often pronounced the same. As for the meaning, sometimes you can make an educated guess
for example if you're seeing the kanji for kumo which can mean "cloud" or "spider", 雲 has rain at the top and 蜘蛛 has bug in it twice
You can use this kind of method to guess-read Chinese text even if you can't speak Chinese since the kanji meanings are similar

>>4734670
Top kek kid. Nearly everything is harder if you do it the wrong way and easier if you do it the right way. You'd know this if you'd ever tried to achieve anything in your life. You're a shining example of an angry little weeb who learned what little he did the wrong way and is so brainwashed by the cult of weeb that he can't even imagine anything else. Stay mad little bitch.

>>4734679
The right way is to learn how Chinese characters are constructed. With this knowledge you can use a dictionary to look up characters you don't know the meaning or pronunciation of. You can also make a good guess at the original pronunciation. But this requires more than just rote memorizing pictures of words in comics and does almost nothing to help with watching toons so weebs ignore it, pretend it doesn't exist, and get seriously assmad when it's brought up.

>>4735042
Do you have any resources to learn kanji that way? I tried memorizing them with anki flashcards but I can barely remember ~100 of them

>>4735042
You got surprisingly aggressive to someone who made a fairly neutral-sounding statement. You keep talking about 'the right way' but there are several approaches which may work for different people.

You're right that learning kanji radicals helps in determining a kanji's meaning, but how does it help you figure out the reading unless you've already heard words with this guessed meaning before? Honest question.

>>4733961
Not fluent enough with kanji yet to know the difference in saying it that way but that pic is also missing all of the r katakana. Also why the fuck wouldn’t you just say わかりません?

>>4734638
>Just because you failed jr high English last year doesn't mean it's hard.
The fact that you apparently took me for a native English speaker means I managed to learn it well enough to pass as fluent. And I still say it's a fucking difficult language to learn.

>>4732987
>Please = Douzo
>My name is = だ
hovercraft status: full of eels

>>4735073
The study material I used is long gone and I don't remember what it was called. I'll have a look and see if I can google something.

>>4735083
I'm sorry. Was my failure to award a participation trophy and accept that doing things the wrong way is just as good as doing them the right way a microaggression that severely triggered you? There's only one right way to learn how to understanding the meaning and reading of kanji by understanding how the character is constructed. That's to learn how to understanding the meaning and reading of kanji by understanding how the character is constructed. The way a character is constructed determines the meaning as well as the original pronunciation, for the most part. It's literally that simple.

>>4735156
You passed as an underage /v/tard. It's nothing to be proud of.

>>4735512
>microaggression
>triggered
>>/pol/

It's handy that you guys have this typical vocabulary that lets everyone else know that nothing you say is worth listening to. Feel free to call me a beta cuck, a basedboy, or an SJW in your reply to this post, as you project your own frustrations onto strangers on the internet.

>>4735585
to be fair he doesn't really sound like a /pol/ poster because if someone wrote something this cringe
>I'm sorry. Was my failure to award a participation trophy and accept that doing things the wrong way is just as good as doing them the right way a microaggression that severely triggered you?
on /pol/ they would immediately be told to fuck off back to r/the_donald

>>4734860
Holy shit thank god a person of reason with experience. I tired to explain the same thing multiple times here and everyone got pissed off.

>>4735117
Because then you'd be saying "Do you understand English?" instead of "Do you speak English?"

英語はできますか would literally translate to "Can you English?" or depending on interpretation, "Are you good with English?". The picture however insinuates that it means "Do you speak English?". In that case, the term they used was wrong. 話せます literally means "To be able to speak", so therefore you'd probably be better off saying that and not confusing the shit out of the Japanese person you need help from.

>>4736213
>t. armchair japanese expert
I work with Japanese people every day, you can use dekiru when talking about a language, it's perfectly normal. stop thinking of stupid literal translations; i pray to go that you don't actually do any kind of teaching or translation.

>man japanese is easy guys
>haha why would you use できる and not 分かる
You can [not] learn japanese

>>4733961
>>4732987

Pretty sure in both situations you would say

英語ができますか?
英語が話せますか?

Also, this isn't necessarily incorrect:
英語ができますか、

>>4733012
I can guarantee you will find it beyond perplexing.

>>4733051
>>4734650
I like him, it was just a pot shot. He worked with what he had, which is more than just 1 guy who got inspired to help with translations. Everyone starts somewhere.

>>4735512

You don't study japanese do you

>>4736213
I wrote that post really shittily. The kanji remark was separate from the わかりません comment. That graphic lists "I don't understand" as わからない. Is the difference between these two just formality? Haven't quite cracked the code on verb conjugations.

>>4736756
Spot on. わからない is informal, わかりません is more formal but not as formal as possible. Once you get into keigo you might want to tear your own eyes out.

>>4734594
Kanji isn't as hard as most people make it out to be. Conjugation is where Japanese gets complex. If I already have previous experience learning Japanese (4 years in high school passed straight A's and was considered high school fluent but it's been over a decade since I graduated) what would be the best way to relearn the language? Audit classes at a University or is there a good alternative?

Jesus Christ there's so many armchair experts and know-it-alls on this board.

Learn ASM if you want to insert translations.
Learn Japanese if you want to make translations.
If you'll do both - you are amazing and I'm jealous of your abilities.

>>4735073
I had a quick look and didn't see anything. It was mostly "there are things called radicals but 2deep4me and useless for watching animu lol xd". Finding useful information on the subject is much easier for Chinese. Keeping in mind that the original reading in Japanese is basically the Chinese pronuciation, or close to it, that might even be useful beyond just working out the meaning of new characters.

>>4735585
>I'm shining example of an angry little weeb who learned what little he did the wrong way and is so brainwashed by the cult of weeb that he can't even imagine anything else
kek

>>4736407
Not much. I learned to speak, read and write well enough in the 80's and don't really have any need to progress further. I moved to China in the 90's and learned Mandarin and Cantonese so I know more characters than there even are in the Japanese language. Kinda hard to improve on that.

>>4732987
If you don't know japanese don't try to translate, but there are lots of /vr/ games which have an external .txt translation but nobody has managed to hack the translation into the game. Figure out how to do that instead.

>tells everyone they're studying Japanese wrong
>hasn't studied Japanese for years

Do you also go to high schools and make fun of kids studying maths because they can't do quadratic equations yet? If your only contribution to the thread is "I'm amazing and you guys suck for not being amazing immediately after attempting something" you can kindly fuck off.

>>4737185
while I agree that he's unbelievably condescending and is a wanker, he's right in that kanji isn't as hard as it seems especially now in the age of word processors since you don't need to remember how to write each and every character, in fact many Japanese are getting kind of shit at handwriting kanji.
Also there are shortcuts you can take to memorizing kanji, personally when I was studying many years ago I found Heisig's Remembering The Kanji to be very helpful in giving a framework to use mnemonics to memorize them.
Henshall wrote a similar book that uses the actual ancient forms of the kanji to attempt to do the same thing but in my opinion his book wasn't very useful because original kanji etymology is in many cases only tangentially connected to the current meaning of the character.
tldr the goat of heisig's book is that you create a one-line story in your head for each character using specific meanings for the radicals that you devise (though it's best if you try to use something close to the real meaning of the radical)
many people say it's a shit method but in my experience it works

>>4737514
What did you use to supplement Heisig for the readings? I have the book but I wasn’t aware that it’s ONLY the characters. I know that for my learning style I’ll have a hard time retaining the information without the readings. Not sure if you used Genki but I really like how the kanji information is presented in the writing sections of the book showing stroke order and readings in a straightforward way.

>>4737636
I went to school to get basic and intermediate Japanese language proficiency but beyond that I mostly learned from reading and daily use.
the kanji readings I mostly just learned seat-of-the-pants I guess. I live in Japan and work in a Japanese office environment so after a while you just see kanji so many times that you recognize the words that they're in without necessarily having a mental list of each possible reading
I should probably go back and study more to fill in all the little gaps here and there but it's difficult to find time between work, family life and the sheer number of boards that need to be shitposted on

Heisig's book is itself really just a supplement to aid in memorization rather than a core textbook

>>4737514
That's a constructive and helpful post which contributes to the thread, contrary to what the other guy was posting, which was literally just self-praise without any actual contribution to the thread, so thanks for that.

I don't think isolated kanji study a method which works for everyone but I've also heard that it's worked for some. I personally can't motivate myself to read a book on *only* kanji since, at the end of the day, you'll have spent a lot of time but still don't know Japanese. But that's just me - I tend to study vocabulary and read stuff rather than studying isolated kanji because context helps me a lot, but I have to admit that it can get me into trouble when I see something unfamiliar. Also, many kanji have a very abstract meaning that can change a lot depending on the context it's used in.

>>4737682
I try to split the time more or less evenly between kanji study, vocabulary review and reading practice. Though I ultimately opted for KKLC instead of rtk or kd.

>>4736807
Japanese conjugation is a lot more sensible than shit like German.

>>4737694
I’m not familiar with KKLC, what book is that?

>>4737865
Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course, see https://djtguide.neocities.org/resource%20guide.html

>>4737875
Wow thanks, this looks like a great resource. It looks like that book is exactly what I was wanting for kanji. I’ll definitely get that over RTK. I’m surprised imabi isn’t higher up on that resources list. Personally I’ve found it very helpful. It is really dense compared to other materials. I suppose it’s personal preference but I need a lot of in depth details for my own learning.

>>4736807
Conjugation is easy as hell. I learned it in less than two weeks at an international center. The beauty of Japanese conjugation is that once you learn then 10-15 forms you can automatically use new verbs that you learn. Of course there are ones that you have to learn special conjugations for but those are only a handful comepared to the massive amount of regular verbs. Old Japanese and more advanced grammar can be difficult but if you read enough novels, especially of early 20th century writers, you’ll get the idea of how to use it pretty easily.

>>4737963
The tricky part can be when a verb's ending is twice as long as the actual word, which sometimes happens. Especially when it's in the 'must' or 'can't' form it can get complex because you have to keep track of how many negations there are.

I'm sure it becomes more natural when you read more but that's currently one of my issues.

>>4738110
This throws me quite a bit as well. It's almost like learning an entire phrase. I've found learning verbs and conjugation to be quite rewarding though as it helps me to get a deeper understanding of various words I've picked up.

>>4732987
All you need to know is the characters that look like a smiley face

ツツツ シシシシ

>>4738110
An easy way to cut the endings on verbs is just use んです and it still retains the politeness of the ます verbs. Wait until you get into actually not just reading but actually speaking keigo in a real life setting it gets ridiculous that no only you are using a whole new verb set, some companies even have a manual on what you have to use. For example, something I often use at work, you might say “I’m taking a break” (as in a break from work) you could just say 休憩を取ります but if I’m talking to my 先輩 I would say お先に休憩を取らせていただきます or if I wanted to make it more polite I would phrase it as a question like お先に休憩を取らせていただいてもよろしいでしょうか。anyway it can be tonight at times and everyone has their own way of doing it, I just had the advantage of being able to speak with Japanese people at work and play often, but don’t give up man.

>>4738495
The most important part of learning politeness forms and conjugations is that you can immediately relay the relationship between you and the speakers, but if you are just beginning it’s best thing to do is stick with set phrases.

>>4739354
Ah crab I meant to say “it can be tough” not “tonight” hahaha sorry

>>4737185
>quadratic equations
That's an excellent example. I would certainly make fun of anyone who claims to understand them because they memorized an equation but doesn't know how to derive it, or better yet claims it can't be derived. That's the exact same type of retarded mindset as weebs who refuse to believe you can derive the meaning of Kanji from how it's constructed. You'll never be amazing, or even proficient at anything if you insist on doing it wrong. And you'll continue to do it wrong as long as you continue clinging to your flashcards and weeb cult.

Meh, I did remember the kanji and core2k for 2 years and I can already play any games I want and watch virtual youtubers. You don't need to very git gud in order to enjoy entertainment.

>>4740384
>you don't need to git very gud
Fixed

Here's a tip for EOPs like OP who want to get epic e-peen by translating old games.

Don't. If by some miracle you reach a decent level of Japanese, you'll lose all desire to translate anything for free anyway.

>>4740420
truth

>>4740420
If you're learning the language to play games and that's it, then yeah this is true. There's still a few out there like Tom who really just want to share stuff with people that would never be able to play it otherwise (or without effort). So that's not totally true for everyone, but probably true for a lot of people I guess.

>>4740825
The people that want to share/gain e-cred don't have the skills. Look at the awful level of manga translations.

>>4740836
Or eroge fantranslations.

>>4740836
I mean, if you want skilled results you should probably be paying for it. If you just want to understand then unskilled free labor (for ecred) is probably going to be good enough. Your best hope for quality is people that do it as their own personal hobby and then share the results with everyone, but they usually take a while.

I guess what I'm saying here is generalizing is retarded.

>>4740854
The terrible thing is that paid translators aren't much better, partly because some of them used to be fan translators.

>>4733012
>is it hard to translate without knowing the language.

【基本原則】

表現の自由は最大限保障されるべきものである。
ただし、表現の自由も絶対無制限のものではなく、他人の権利を侵害するものについては削除を行う。削除理由については具体的には明示しないこともあります。
ただし、異議を申し立てる機会を与え審議の結果、削除された記事が再掲載される可能性はある。

【削除フロー】

権利侵害を主張する者は、メール(meiyokison@5ch.net)で削除要請を出すことができる。

↓

削除要請の際には、
件名 削除申し立て
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削除理由
理由を根拠付ける資料があれば添付
本人確認のための資料
を添付するものとする。

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理由及び資料を踏まえ削除の是非を判断する。

メール(meiyokison@5ch.net)にて異議を申し立てる機会を与える。異議申し立て期間は記事が削除されてから7日間とする。

異議申し立てに際しては、
件名 削除異議申し立て
内容 URL
レス番号
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を添付するものとする。

>>4742151
件名 削除申し立て
内容 >>4732987
レス番号 all
削除理由 thread and all posters should be gassed
理由を根拠付ける資料があれば添付
本人確認のための資料
を添付するものとする。credentials for making judgement attached

>>4735042

Why bother looking up kanji in a dictionary when you can just draw it with your finger on a smartphone then have it tell you what it is. you can then copy paste it into jisho.org or google

>>4742557
Stroke order. You haven't actually tried drawing on your phone have you. I mean aside form the first 3 numbers of whatever,

>>4742151
>a bunch of shit about "free expression ≠ copyright infringement"
You're a faggot and have added nothing to this thread.

>>4742584
Not him but actually it's an infringement policy and explains how to have infringing content removed and how to appeal the removal in the designated period, basically the equivalent of a DMCA takedown / appeal process

>>4742592
I got that, hence why it's nonsense in the context of this thread.

>>4742598
That N2-kun wanted to trip up local N3-kuns.

>>4742598
I was using the first example of a sizeable text dump I found to make a point about translating Japanese without knowing the language.