Reading Moon Runes

[Anonymous No.5162179]

What are some good games to practice reading Japanese? Simple grammar, basic kanji, light text, but with enough variety to actually learn something would be ideal.

[Anonymous No.5162180]

Paper Mario.

[Anonymous No.5162191]

>>5162180
Only problem is the shitty low resolution text might be a bit hard to read.

[Anonymous No.5162245]

>>5162179
I'd be interested in this too. Doing this in a group would probably be more conducive to learning.

[Anonymous No.5162246]

Any Dragon Quest game

[Anonymous No.5162248]

I never studied japanese seriously, but I have some basic knowledge and by now I can make out phrases if I read or listen to them.
But for some reason, reading old games with only hiragana confuses me a lot. It's technically the same as listening, but I have to make an extra effort. Kanji is easier to identify words or concepts.
I should study though.

[Anonymous No.5162265]

Alex kidd, the one in the castle

[Anonymous No.5162281]

[Anonymous No.5162298]

>>5162180
>>5162191
Not OP but this is a good idea for me to use that game to help learn Japanese. I could actually understand that sentence Luigi said.

I read an article that when you first begin to use games as a way to learn and consolidate your Japanese you should use a game where you already know the story.

[Anonymous No.5162313]

NES games rarely have kanji.
The first Pokémon games also don't.
Later games have furigana too.

[Anonymous No.5162316]

EMIT for nearly any disc based system. It's supposed to be an English learning game but those features like switching between Japenese and English text, repeating audio for each sentence and easily going back to previous sentences make it well suites to learn Japanese.
There's also a SFC port but it requires a special hardware to interface with a CD player for the audio.

[Anonymous No.5162342]

>>5162179
Why not going for Japanese textbooks instead?
Want some?

[Anonymous No.5162343]

>>5162313
As a beginner you want kanji. They help to structure the text and remove ambiguities.
Additionally practicing your kanji knowledge is a fundamental step in learning Japanese. Trying to skip that by playing Kana-only games doesn't do any good.

>>5162191
That's something in common with practically all retro console games. Computer games will feature more readable text but typically demand higher linguistic skills.
Some games tried to use bigger kanji but they end up making things worse.
Ultimately you get used to the standard fonts.

[Anonymous No.5162365]

>>5162342
https://www103.zippyshare.com/v/WwfjbqLs/file.html
Can't make it smaller than 5.7 MB, so go figure

[Anonymous No.5162389]

>>5162365
Thanks anon

This will help me in my studies

Got any more?

[Anonymous No.5162401]

>>5162191
This looks like my speed.

>>5162248
>>5162343
Agreed, kanji is a must. I'm familiar with several hundred, so I don't have to go running to the dictionary every other one (just every other other one).

>>5162365
Thanks. I'll check these out.

The reason why I want to play some retro games to practice is two fold: 1) it opens the doors to otherwise inaccessible games, and 2) for some reason my recall is better when learning from media rather than a text book (at the current time, of course a text book is the better resource in the long run).

[Anonymous No.5162408]

Any game you know well is a good place to start I think. Or a game that interests you. Just be willing to put forth the effort to look words up and then study those words.

[Anonymous No.5162428]

>>5162408
What's the best way to look up Kanji? Sometimes I can make an educated guess based on the situation, but alot of the times, I have no idea what that kanji would be.

[Anonymous No.5162437]

>>5162428
I've been using the camera function on the Google Translate app to identify the kanji then sending myself that kanji then searching it in Jisho on PC.

[Anonymous No.5162440]

>>5162428
try the multi radical search of jisho/tangorin. The former has an android app, too.

[Anonymous No.5162448]

>>5162428
That depends on the situation. I typically use 3 different methods:
1) OCR. Quick to execute and yields decent results.
2) Looking up based on context. If the unknown kanji is part of a compound and you recognize the rest, try to look it up via wildcards.
3) Radical decomposition. Takes a bit practice to get used to and is somewhat restricted for retro games but it can be useful where the others fail.

[Anonymous No.5162494]

>>5162389
The others I've got are in Polish. Will have to dig out old supplies, this one was on desktop solely because friend needed it for freshmen,

[Anonymous No.5162515]

>>5162389
here are some more resources
https://mega.nz/#F!OAYmVBAD!aDrHQTRfKoqWYYZFP2-N9w

[Anonymous No.5162573]

>>5162298
>I read an article that when you first begin to use games as a way to learn and consolidate your Japanese you should use a game where you already know the story.
Absolutely. It's easier to parse text if you already have a rough idea of what it's supposed to be saying.

[Anonymous No.5162583]

>>5162343
I tried playing through Ninja Ryukenden a while ago, and those goddamn pixel messes they call kanji are so impossible to make out it was hard even when I had a rough idea of what they could potentially mean.

[Anonymous No.5162623]

Friendly reminder that the Famicom has the same resolution as the Super Famicom so if you can't read Kanji on Fami games don't think that Sufami games are going to be any easier.

[Anonymous No.5162640]

>>5162623
SFC games tend to use bigger fonts.

[Anonymous No.5162649]

>>5162265
Man, loved that one as a kid!

[Anonymous No.5162659]

>>5162343
>Some games tried to use bigger kanji but they end up making things worse.
I dunno. The constantly changing text size is a bit annoying, but the text in your example is very very easy to read. It's better for a beginner than playing "what the fuck kind of kanji is that?" with tiny ass fonts.

[Anonymous No.5162667]

>>5162623
Most text that lies in a sprite table for a famicom game is constrained to an 8x8 size because of memory constraints. The super fami has ALOT more memory to work with, which means that text doesn't absolutely need to perfectly fit inside an 8x8 sprite. The screen output resolution isn't much of a problem if you can make the resolution of the text itself be larger.