/vr/ - Retro Games

>>8621195
Xenogears.

None. You should have 1000 hours of studying before even touching a game or you will be wasting your time.

None. You should have 1000 hours of studying before even touching a game or you will be wasting your time.

>>8621195
You can switch between English and Japanese on the fly in the mangagamer's Higurashi release.

None. You should have over 9000 hours of studying before even touching a game or you will be wasting your time.

Most Famicom and Games Boy games are kana-only. Start with an RPG or adventure game, like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy.

If you don't mind emulators, there is a SNES 9x plugin that allows you to translate japanese text on the fly if you need it.

>>8621195
Pokemon is all hiragana and katakana. You should be completely fine playing through that, especially the early gens.

Later Nintendo games tend to have furigana because they're aimed at 8 year olds.

Emit.

Don't bother with games that don't have kanji. Learning kanji and vocabulary is the main part of learning Japanese and those come hand in hand.
Kana only games don't train your kanji ability and they are poor for learning vocabulary.
Cover the most basic kanji and play SFC or PCE-CD games.

If japanese isn't your first language kanji rich text is actually way easier than kana only. The language has way too many homonyms for straight kana.

super mario picross

Dragon Quest VIII has furigana.

why is Japanese so complicated bros

>>8621195
Just an FYI.

Retro gaming is shit for learning because like manga it is inconsistent on what it uses.

It has gotten better with Seinen/josei being relegated to harder to figure out characters. Though there are plenty of people leaving high school that do not know half of the information needed to communicate or understand all eras of gaming text. After 8 years I still see new things all of the time.

>>8621512
FILTERED

>>8621512
It's a test from god, I think.

>>8621512
Knowing English is a gift. Not only is it the lingua franca of the planet, but think about how many rules and conventions and spellings in English either make no sense or are applied in one context but not another. If you can learn English, you can learn Japanese well enough to play an RPG from the late 90s about killing God.

>>8621559
I suspect the success rate for achieving fluency after starting is less than 1%.

>>8621561
Just another trap for weebs and NEETs to fall into. Maybe he's trying to strengthen the gene pool for the coming apocalypse.

>>8621591
As a genuine weeb I'm pretty happy to fall into the trap, personally. I'd like to work in localization someday or just translate some stuff. Pay it forward or whatever

>>8621604
Godspeed, Anon. I learned Norwegian because I know a bunch of them and it's essentially English with a silly accent. I wouldn't wish Japanese or Arabic on anyone who isn't both intelligent and highly motivated.

>>8621195
M8 kanji is what makes moon readable. There are so many words with the exact same pronunciation but different meanings, you'll just end up worse off unless you've been speaking it for a long time like a Japanese child.
However to help with I'd recommend either getting a cheap drawing tablet so (so you can draw the characters when putting them into a translate app), or playing a game with furigana (kana underneath the kanji), but that would limit to almost exclusively 6th gen.

>>8621195
I wouldn't bother desu OP, playing games in JP when you don't know much JP is an exercise in frustration. I strongly recommend you instead read books, web articles, news stories, things like that, and get the easiest kanji lookup tools you can (yomichan for example). You're going to be doing a LOT of lookup and it will take forever. Games just add another level of complexity on top of often using unconventional Japanese, meaning you spend more time wondering what the fuck someone just said than you do actually playing the game.

tl;dr don't play games in japanese until you are further along. Use books or other literature to build your vocabulary instead.

>>8621512
I always thought Japanese learning textbooks aimed at foreigners over-complicate things by forcing European concepts into the Japanese language rather than explaining Japanese as its own language. Watch a Youtube channel called Cure Dolly (RIP) and you'll see what I mean.

Always wondered, shouldn't these sushiheads have edutainment games for kids learning their god damn scribbles in the same way there is shit like Reader Rabbit and Word Munchers?

>>8622138
There's plenty of Kanji-learning titles for the Nintendo DS if you're genuinely interested.

>>8621590
> RPG from the late 90s about killing God.

What game is this referencing? Excuse my lack of JRPG knowledge.

>>8622045
>Cure Dolly (RIP
Really? When?

>>8622263
Not them, but it was pretty recently. I heard about it on /vt/ last month. Last I read there was no explicit confirmation but someone found an obituary that seemed to line up with one of her previous aliases

>>8621195
I played a lot of old nintendo games based on jap childrens shows when I was first learning Japanese and I picked up a good bit of vocabulary from it.
something like Crayon Shin Chan games are good because it's meant for kids and uses all or mostly kana but it's not so juvenile where it's like preschool shit

>>8621512
Because Asian are insane. The Japs stole Kanji from Chinese, then redefined every word. Afterwards, they took a good long look at the writing system and said. "Nope, not hard enough." then invented katakana, hiragana. Then just to fuck with people they made furigana. Fuck the Japanese writing systems.

>>8622263
>>8622268
Her "death" was announced on her Patreon page, but it's hard to tell if she's genuinely dead or she's merely retiring from making videos by killing off her persona. The announcement insists on keeping her in character.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/r-i-p-cure-dolly-57100247

How the fuck are you supposed to read low-res pixel kanji anyway

>>8622276
The kanji are still very close to the hanzi, sort of a middle ground between traditional and simpified. Many compounds are the same in Japanese and Chinese and even the onyomi is close to the Mandarin pronunciation.
Hiragana and Katakana aren't hard to learn. Hiragana make texts more readable by providing particles and declination while Katakana do a better job for loanwords and foreign names than ateji.
What's your problem with furigana?

>>8622523
play on a crt

>>8622276
kind of begging the question there anon

>>8622523
Most low res games only have kanji with small stroke counts, both because they can't display higher ones and because they are intended for children that haven't learned them yet.

>>8622534
Kind of fellating thy penis there anon

>>8622523
That's the best part - if you don't know it, you have an extremely low chance of finding it. If you DO know it, you'll read it like it's literally nothing. Very few in betweens.

>>8622232
Does Kanken really count as edutainment?
That stuff is aimed at adults.

>>8622536
Go for it, I'll tell you when to stop.

>>8621195
>recently
How many days? If more than a few you might want to give up now.
>that can help me a bit with learning that language
Potentially games designed to help foreigners learn the language. Although since you lack the mental capacity to figure that out on your own even that might be too much for you. Anything more complicated than that is well beyond your current capabilities.

>>8622538
I can read that but those characters blending into each other is annoying.
Recognizing that 対戦 in the second line for instance is largely guesswork.

If I can learn to read 2000 kanji just from drilling flash cards multiple times a day for 6 months, so can you

>>8622564
Yeah but how many are there bro

>>8622243
It's a fairly common JRPG trope popularized by Shin Megami Tensei I guess

>>8622565
Kanji are formed by combination of 300 radicals. Rikaisama can break them down for you, then just look the radicals up on jisho.org
My advice is instead of memorizing kanji get good at breaking down radicals.
Get really good at transcribing speech and text. Advanced grammar is rarely found and can be correctly guessed most of the time, get really, really good at the basics. Without the basics you can't put a single sentence together.

>>8622612
Actually I was more asking if you've walked the first hundred metres of the Kilimanjaro climb, not fishing for tips.

Even if kanji are formed by combining just two radicals, that's 90,000 possibilities. I'm assuming that in reality there are fewer.

>>8622631
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hy%C5%8Dgai_kanji

>>8622631
You can combine the same radicals in different ways such as side by side or top/bottom. A character can also have more than 2 radicals.
Practically you'll only encounter 3000-4000 kanji in normal use and only 2000 are part of compulsory education.
There's a ton of kanji for things like fish species that are rather irrelevant.

>>8622631
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hy%C5%8Dgai_kanji

>>8621195
Read yotsubato instead, that was the first thing I could read and understand in Japanese.

>>8622651
Trust the Japanese to have a million words for fish. So you have 4000 more to go?

>>8622658
Bit late there, Anon.

>>8622670
*2000, my bad.

>>8622670
>Bit late there, Anon.
Forgive me, sire. For I was asleep. I usually also don't post in cringe threads so don't reply don't me again faggot.

>>8622659
Based.

>>8621219
>>8621221
satpbp
But really, it's true, OP. Study a lot more. By all means, you can learn from games, but it will be a slog.
You're better off jumping right into kanji with Wanikani or your own SRS flashcards. Memorize a bunch of vocab at the same time and learn grammar from textbooks.
In between long, serious bouts of studying, jumping into a game can be a fun way to see how much you've progressed, but that's about it.
You could frame your learning around games, but it's much more efficient to just use real learning materials.
Once you've attained a working proficiency, then games can become a nice source of reading practice, but there are no shortcuts to reaching that point.

>>8622670
Do you know every fish name in English?
At most you might need to learn 鯖 since it's ironically used to write server.
The rest of 魴鮎鮒鮖鮃鮗鮑鮟鮴鮪鮠鮫鮭鯉鯒鯊鯏鮹鯑鯆鯛鯨鯵鯱鯖鯣鯰鯔鯲鯢鯡鰊鰓鰛鰈鰔鰄鰌鰍鰒鰉鰆鰕鰯鰡鰰鰮鰤鱇鰻鱈鰺鰲癬鱆鱒鱚鰹鱧鱶鱸 is forgettable since normally you'll use Katakana for animals.

>>8622679
>I usually also don't post in cringe threads
Bit late there, Anon.

>>8622695
>Do you know every fish name in English?
No, but I'm neither Norwegian nor Japanese.

>>8622695
Forgettable is one thing, but a decent chunk of those are common knowledge like 鮫, 鯨, 鱈, 鮭, 鱒, 鰤, just to pick out extremely obvious ones. But that's the sort of shit you end up acquiring from really stupid shit like anime tier attack names that use them in RPGs (well, more likely for birds than fish), or by getting bored and repping Animal Crossing fish flash cards for shit like that.

>>8621195

I played through the first three Dragon Quests in Japanese. I’m not sure if it actually helped me very much… I got burned out partway through 4. Definitely do the newer ports that have Kanji, since that will help you more in the long run. A good way to look up kanji you don’t know is to use a traditional Chinese keyboard on your phone where you can draw the characters. Use that keyboard to input the character in Jisho or a similar website and you can look up the kanji there. If your phone has a Japanese drawing based keyboard that’s better but mine only had Chinese.

I’m about a third through WaniKani which I wholeheartedly recommend for learning Kanji. Bunpro seems like a good resource for grammar but I’ve only done the free trial.

>>8622565
That's like asking how many words are in the dictionary

>>8622564
Don't know the answer for Japanese but for Mandarin you need to learn at least 3000 characters before being able to read a newspaper. I'm guessing it's the same for Japanese (they share a lot of the same characters after all). Video games often have extremely simplistic language so OP should be able to learn from them. But I agree with the other anons that vidya can never be a substitute for actual book studying.

>>8622879
The only bird kanji you need to know is 儂 for eagle.
Otherwise you just note that it has a 鳥 particle and therefore is some kind of bird or birdlike thing. Same as if you see those animals in the wild.

>>8622659
god no it’s so fucking tiresome with all the baby talk and slang

op the main issue with learning from retro games is not easily being able to use text hookers for word lookups. you can ofc use the google translate app on your phone to take a picture of the text on the screen but that quickly becomes extremely tiresome. so for now I’d recommend getting a core vocab deck for Anki and cramming the first 1000-2000 words while skim reading a grammar guide such as Tae Kim (or the aforementioned Cure Dolly videos if you can get past the horrible presentation). after that you can try immersing with games, it’s still going to be a slog mind but will be significantly easier than just diving in cold.

>>8622939
What I tended to do is take a screenshot of words I didn't know and then look them up after I was done playing.

>>8622897
Yup: usually quote 50,000 for English. Notice how he had an answer, too.

>>8622946
another strategy is to see if the game text has been dumped anywhere online then read it alongside the game using a browser extension like yomichan for lookups

>>8622631
Is this the most embarrassing post ITT?

>>8621283
>Learning kanji and vocabulary is the main part of learning Japanese
I would even just limit that to vocabulary. You can pretty reasonable have learned all the kanji in modern common usage within a year, but I imagine it would take the average learner six or seven years to have a vocabulary even comparable to a middle schooler.

>>8621195
As other anons have said, games are one of the harder things to learn japanese with because there's (usually) no way to copy and paste from dialogue boxes to look things up.

Any form of written content on the internet is probably easiest thanks to stuff like yomichan. Aside from that, e-books etc. can copy and paste from. perhaps some VNs can be copy-pasted form too? I am not sure.

However, if you want to ignore all that and just play some games in Japanese anyways, then there are a few options. Mother 1+2+3 is all Kana. This is both good and bad, as without kanji the homophones and particles can be harder to spot. It is good in taht it's far, far less discouraging.

Any of the mario RPGs have very few, very basic Kanji to work with. The Legen dof Zelda games are a slight step up. More mature JRPGs are the next level from there.

VNs (arguably not games but I don't care) are also very good since, well, they are visual "novels" and typically are very dialouge focused. There are also a TON which take place in modern/realistic settings so you are learning Kanji for train stations instead of castles and junk like that.

Give up. You won't amount to anything.

>>8623680
This thread is at least a 7.2 on the Richter scale of embarrassment. That post doesn't stick out that much.

>>8623680
No, you just surpassed it.

>>8624152
>how to learn Japanese:
>1) learn kana
>2) DRAW THE REST OF THE FUCKING OWL

>>8624129
We're talking about that first real steps. I agree that at some point you're largely done learning new kanji while your vocabulary will keep growing as long as you keep reading.

>>8621512
it's not, only the written language is.

>>8624154
I'm going to fuck you.

if anyone is wondering why kana games are bad for JSL learners yet somehow the standard for Japanese children, it's because 90% of the language exposure children get is typically listening. and once you have enough listening under your belt, putting the pieces together with just kana to recognize words you've heard before and what they mean in context is actually pretty easy

>>8625416
kind of begging the question there, anon.

>>8622276
Anon, you have no idea what the hell you're talking about.

>>8625971
I have a suspicion that he might not have been entirely serious.

>>8626000
Is that allowed? Mods?

>>8621195
8-bit games (NES, SMS) usually have little to no kanji. But then, they usually have little to no text anyway.
I would say: get Remembering the Kanji volume 1, get through that as quickly as you can (took me 2 months), and then start playing some simple games with a normal amount of kanji. Like my first game in Japanese was Tokimeki Memorial. SNES RPGs are pretty easy too.

>>8625835
Yeah, this was really the case for me. I started really practicing my listening and speaking a lot more, and then kana-only text wasn't so hard anymore.

>>8626029
How do you type kanji without knowing the readings?
Japanese doesn't have an input method like Cangjie as far as I know.

>>8626038
I had ten years of intense anime and drama experience when I started learning Japanese for real and I found kana only stuff annoying.

>>8621197
kek

>>8621407
A newb like OP may be capable of "reading" furigana, but that shit is only understandable if you're already fluent with the spoken language. Pure furigana is harder to understand than kanji.

>>8622045
>I always thought Japanese learning textbooks aimed at foreigners over-complicate things

It's all textbooks. I speak 4 foreign languages(English, Spanish, Japanese, German) on top of my native Russian and they all their text books are shit. The best way is traveling. Spend 3 months in a relatively small town and I guarantee you that you'll learn the any language no problem.

When the chink flu FUD ends, I'm spending a few month either in Israel or Shit Korea.

>>8626086
>Pure furigana is harder to understand than kanji.
???

>>8621195
The most important thing is to pick something you'll stick with. You can absorb a lot through reading if you're willing to go slow and look things up. Making your own flashcards using captures of what you're reading isn't a bad idea either.

>>8626043
Memorize radicals, then use a radical lookup website or phone app to find the kanji meaning/readings. Sometimes you can guess the reading based on the radicals used, but that comes with increased exposure of kanji, and it doesn't work very often anyway

There's also kanji search by stroke order lookup, which is how you used to find kanji in paper dictionaries. But I never learned stroke count/order

>>8624362

>>8626086
Any advice for Russian? It's not too bad I've been studying for about 3 months now, I'm in about 1000 words mostly high-frequency
Oh and any games for Russian? Classics or patches or whatever, I'm good for what you recommend

>>8626292
>Oh and any games for Russian?
Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and Jagged Alliance 2.

>>8626136
>皮膚の色
I've only ever seen that with 肌.

>>8626314
Wait seriously might and magic 3? I had no idea it had a big Russian community, definitely giving it a shot, thanks

>>8626012
Relax, I've already reported him several times with different IP addresses. The SWAT team will be kicking down his front door any minute now.

>>8626246
Whoops, you did it again.

>>8626574
No, Heroes of Might and Magic: the Restoration of Erathia.
There's tons of Russian mods and extra content.

>>8626327
>I've never seen this before.
Wow! No way! Really? Tell me which of these you also haven't seen yet.

>>8626858
As you can see most of those are medical terms, not something you'd use in a normal conversation.

>>8626871
I talk about the hypodermis all the time, boy. It's my favorite.

>>8626881
You do strike me as a senile pruritus type of anon.

>>8626692

>>8626136
What's with all the Linda posting lately?
Keep it up, that shit's great.

>>8621195
SD Gundam G Generation F. Works best if you know Gundam. You'll get a workout reading all the MS names, it's decent. And it's a very fun game.

>>8626858
I learned 皮膚 myself from playing Snatcher. The term 人工皮膚 shows up a lot in that game.

>>8626974
For a while now I've been working on a deep dive translation of Scenario A to improve my vocab. I should finish soon and then I'm taking a break before I hit Scenario B so I imagine the Linda posting will go down somewhat.

>>8627476
Which version are you playing?

>>8627486
Saturn

>>8627559
Good since the PS1 version is censored.

>>8626952
Why are you crying, zoomiejak?

>>8628034
I bet it really sucks to be a zoomer in all honesty.