What are some good entry level Jap practice games?

[Anonymous No.7854107]

Inb4 "you cant learn Japanese" smug bitch

Ive been studying it for a few months now and obviously i have no intents of jumping into most jap games yet, but i know there are some rather simplistic games from the 8bit era that are more or less beginner friendly. I have heard Zelda 1 is such a game and some other Famicom titles, but does anyone know of any others specifically that are good reading practice for a low level moonrune scrub? Doesn't necessarily have to be retro either.

Also any jap "learning games" worth trying? Been thinking of trying that My Japanese Coach shovelware thing on DS Ubisoft released just as an alternative refresher.

[Anonymous No.7854116]

Graduate from college

[Anonymous No.7854217]

>>7854107
I'm going to preface this with insights based on my own experiences. Your results may vary, but I'll say so anyway.

I would not recommend playing games to learn Japanese, at least nothing more than to pick up new kanji or maybe as a status check for how far along you are on your goals. For the most part, I wouldn't bother with games until you finish something like Genki 1 and maybe even further; Games will teach you new words (if you collect them as flash cards and study them), but you'll spend a lot of time likely struggling to read even basic sentences, ones that you'll read much more readily after building a nice foundation of grammar and sentence knowledge.

Now, if you already have grammar down (at least elementary stuff) then you have a few options.

I think that the best option is actually to play newer games which are made for high-resolution screens, specifically ones which are also made for a mixed-age audience of kids/teens/adults. I recommend this for two reasons:

>1. The games will have kanji and kana, instead of being kana only or having only very low-resolution kanji
>2. The games will likely have furigana, so you don't have to struggle to look up kanji every time you see a new one

The most frustrating part of "playing" a game when you are still a beginner is just tripping over every sentence due to lack of knowledge. The second most frustrating part is not being able to look up kanji easily. The above two points will make both problems easier to manage.


tl;dr hit the books until you've got at least N5 knowledge and then stick to modern Nintendo games, nothing older than NDS.

[Anonymous No.7854224]

>>7854217
The other option is to play PC games, or emulators, and use a screen reader software. I haven't really looked into that much, but I am aware of robust and effective software for reading game screens and transliterating it to a readout which allows you to easily read/look up/make flash cards of new vocab. I'd recommend that for more advanced word/sentence mining.

Ultimately though, I don't think games are much good for Japanese unless you want to learn vocabulary. They're easier to read than manga IMO, but not by much.

[Anonymous No.7854258]

>>7854224
Oh yea i dont intend to use games as a replacement for say a text book, just wanted something to "engage" with besides flashcards or whatever, just to keep it fresh in my mind. I actually am progressing pretty well with vocab, its the memorization of symbols in text that i need to do better with which i figured some basic text retro stuff would help as something to play between lessons.

[Anonymous No.7854263]

You probably want a JRPG since most other game types are going to be 5% reading and 95% just playing the game. You'll learn the fuck out of the menu terms but probably not much else.

Pretty much any Dragon Quest is good, though I always recommend 5 in particular. You can play the other pre-7 games, but I would recommend doing the SNES versions of 1 to 3 (4 you have to go for PS1) if you want a better mix of kanji/kana.

[Anonymous No.7854286]

>>7854217
Thanks for the input. When i feel like im ready to tackle games, do you have any recommendations for newer games that you may have played through?

[Anonymous No.7854332]

>>7854286
Two that I'd pick are Tomodachi Life and Animal Crossing. First one in JP is トモダチコレクション新生活

Tomodachi has a lot of interpersonal dialogue and a lot of character personality trait vocab you can pick up, and Animal Crossing can teach you a lot of nouns through fish/bugs/furniture/etc.

The biggest thing to be careful about is that games often use colloquial or slang language that will be difficult to understand from textbook exposure. This will be especially true for games with quirky characters, but also even in places where you don't expect hard language.

That's one place where I felt like Game Boy RPGs were a good fit. Games like SaGa, Pokemon, the Picross games, and other RPGs tend to have simpler dialogue in my experience. They are just a pain to read due to them being kana-only. You'll be doing a lot of research to make sure that you don't read it incorrectly.

I'd also strongly recommend looking into graded readers, children's books (Magic Treehouse has Japanese versions and is pretty easy to read), and young children's TV programming. They will be easier than games IMO.

[Anonymous No.7854453]

>>7854107
It wasn't until around 12-18 months in when I started playing games in Japanese with any semblance of proficiency. By that point, I had completed both volumes of Genki, half of AIATIJ, and countless flashcards. But even then, it was still really difficult.

I don't think it matters too much which game you choose. Just make sure it has a decent amount of (not too difficult) text and that you're actually interested in reading it. And don't get lazy. You have to actually TRY understanding it. So bust out that dictionary and get to work.

Personally, I started out with Animal Crossing: City Folk and then later Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. The first one is always the hardest, but it gets easier. Prepare to climb the "impenetrable wall of vocabulary".

[Anonymous No.7854508]

When I started learning 13 years ago I started out with games I had beaten a million times in English so I would have better context for what was being said.

I started with Final Fantasy VI/VII and Tales of Destiny.

Like other Anon, I recommend jrpgs, as they’ll have a lot of reading. Avoid Nintendo ones like Pokémon though, the lack of kanji will not do you any favors. Also be sure to look up and write down words you don’t know. Try to review those words and write them one more time before finishing your session.

[Anonymous No.7854650]

>>7854107
>Ive been studying Japanese for a few months
>I need entry level practice games
>Don't tell me I can't learn Japanese
kwab

[Anonymous No.7854661]

>I only want to learn Japanese audio since if I go there I will be talking/listening to people 99% of the time
>people tell me to just read
>don't want to read, have no interest in reading, explain I just want audio practice
>"no just read"

All I do is flashcards with audio so I can learn words so when I hear them in Japanese animes I can recognize them but even at 2500 words reviewed it's still nowhere near enough to understand anything.

[Anonymous No.7854676]

>>7854107
Near fluent jap speaker and Tokyo resident here. Games should not be your primary method of learning. Put most of your time into taking actual lessons or studying using textbooks and anki for kanji. To supplement, just play whatever Japanese games you want. Pokémon games are easy and enjoyable even at entry level Japanese.

[Anonymous No.7854680]

>>7854661
Why the fuck are you willing to put in all this effort only to end up illiterate??

[Anonymous No.7854684]

>>7854107
>>7854217
I'd recommend OP to read lots of manga, since they have both lots of kanji and furigana.

[Anonymous No.7854689]

>>7854661
I watch raw Shin-chan to help me with audio.

[Anonymous No.7854696]

>>7854107
>few months now
>Zelda 1
After only a few months, you can't do much, but Zelda 1 doesn't have much text, so OK.
Bigger problem is, due to memory limitations, games that old don't use much (if any) kanji. Even natives have a little trouble reading that. I would at least try something 16-bit.
If you're trying to learn Japanese without learning kanji first, I would suggest you're doing it wrong. Check out Heisig.

[Anonymous No.7854716]

>>7854107
Avoid kana only games for now. A reminder that even young Japanese people have a problem with them:
>138 :NAME OVER:2006/11/11(土) 23:58:37 ID:???
>小学生の頃ラゴスで詰まったら近所の中学生になぜか教えてもらった
>初代イース(FC)のミネアの街の扉が5箇所ある所の抜け方は誰にも分からなかった
>143 :NAME OVER:2006/11/12(日) 11:45:29 ID:???
>>>138
>イースのあれはそんなに難しくなかったような
>147 :NAME OVER:2006/11/12(日) 20:26:19 ID:???
>>>143
>「朽ちたる扉くぐり、守りの手の示す一つ目の扉を抜け 攻撃の手の示す二つ目の扉抜けよ」
>漢字ならまだいいがFCにはそんな親切なことはないので
>「くちたるとびらくぐり まもりのてのしめすひとつめのとびらをぬけ こうげきのてしめす ふたつめのとびらぬけよ」
>小学生にどう理解しろってんだよヽ(`Д´)ﾉ
>しかもその「とびら」がどこの事を言ってるのかも分からんし

[Anonymous No.7854723]

>>7854661
this hobby makes people go absolute retard for some reason, no one can ever answer questions straight out or just have a normal, fun conversation about things. on 4chan half the posters will just act smug while the other half will (as you can see from this thread) do this irritating if well-meaning thing where they try to tell you "no, this is shit, do this instead" followed by someone contradicting that person, and so on, not realizing that they are most likely alienating the learner who has already figured out their best method of learning. what's always funny is how the smug ones will often try to shit-talk you in japanese and their manner is stiff as FUCK with their writing sounding kind of like the writing of some older native japs i've corresponded with, perhaps with the added flavor of having taken too many blows to the head.

on other sites there tends to be more gatekeeping and "corrective" behavior, people will argue with you at the drop of a hat over trifling differences in meaning for things, despite the fact that japanese is one of the more vague and flexible languages overall. the worst thing i see people doing even among advanced/fluent people is being rigid as fuck with the language and its mannerisms rather than feeling it out for themselves and developing their own sort of personality with it all. in fairness spanish and to some degree french also have this problem where no one can see outside of their own little purview, though for kind of a different reason where it's spoken in wildly different parts of the world. the result is the more or less the same where people just see the way they speak it or understand it as correct and are super arrogant about it because they made it like 9/10 of their identity

awful, awful hobby to get into if you spend most of your time on the web/social networks, but great if you're willing to go out and meet people and do isolated study

[Anonymous No.7854803]

>>7854107
The PC engine has a lot of Japanese exclusive titles, be our hero and start working on translation patches.

[Anonymous No.7854818]

>>7854803
Not OP but, I looked into the PC Engine scene to see if doing a Tokimeki Memorial translation was feasible (technically the PCE CD) and apparently no one wants to touch the thing. Would do it if someone wanted to partner for all the technical work, though I imagine that's not a great deal for whoever that person might be (seems like the tech side of these things is usually in higher demand than translators).

[Anonymous No.7854880]

>>7854723
Internet communities in general killed my interest in a lot of hobbies I used to like, it's not exclusive to learning Japanese

[Anonymous No.7854943]

>>7854723
>people
No. Just subhumans who attention whore about shit on the web/social networks.

[Anonymous No.7854954]

Tales are great for beginners. Play one and mine it for vocabulary and you get a great starting bank for playing other JRPGs, great set of fantasy related words and so on. Plus if you played one Tales games you could understand all of them so that's another plus.

Disregarding the occasional info dump you should be able to understand most of it. I say emulate the PSP version of the game and maybe use KanjiTomo to make things easier.

>>7854723
Internet in general is bonked but even on 4chan you can find good advice and well-meaning people. Just gotta be able to filter out a lot of posts.

[Anonymous No.7854973]

>>7854954
I'm pretty sure Textractor has support for PPSSPP, it might work on those Tales games.

[Anonymous No.7854990]

>>7854973
>Textractor
First I hear of this, but it sounds amazing. I say OP should use this and whenever he finds a word he doesn't know he can check the meaning of it, and add it to an Anki deck.

Also, in general I recommend replaying old games you already beat too. That way you can take your time learning words and enjoying the game without feeling like you might be missing out on something.

[Anonymous No.7854992]

>>7854990
Textractor only mostly works with native PC games. Visual novels are pretty much guaranteed to work, the success rate is pretty awful with "regular" games. Neko Project 2TH (PC-98 emulator) is hookable and so is PPSSPP, though not a lot of games with the latter.

[Anonymous No.7855013]

>>7854992
Well, the PSP has a huge amount of visual novels so it could work I guess. For anything else you can use KanjiTomo which uses image OCR. I remember using it for games where I couldn't make out the Kanji or for manga.

[Anonymous No.7855017]

>>7855013
I don't have good experiences with OCR and low resolution games. I found that it is better to write the kanji yourself on Google Translate or use a radical dictionary when with those cases.

[Anonymous No.7855032]

OP here, thanks for all the responses and advice, game recommendations or just overall learning recommends
>>7854332
>>7854453
As far as Animal Crossing is concerned, would the N64 version be a viable version to try? I know the GameCube version is based off it, but not sure if its still in that era as warned above of older games not being the best practice experience compared to newer, but would be cool to have a reason to try out that version if it was viable. I am also familiar with the Cube version so if they are fairly similar it should help with text comprehension.
>>7854508
Is the lack of Kanji in Pokemon just something kind of known about those games, or are a lot of "kids games" over there similar in being "basic" for text?
I will probably give Mother 2 a shot as far as replaying games ive gone through many times in English before.
>>7854954
Cool, i will definitely give those a try.
>>7854973
Going to look into this, is this basically like just something that will translate text on screen on a PC in a separate window? I actually have some Japanese PC games (not porn, Falcom stuff) that I could test it out with.

[Anonymous No.7855036]

>>7855032
Machine translation is optional, but it hooks the text from the game so you can just copy-paste it into Anki/your dictionary/whatever. Some people use a clipboard inserter addon, a blank html page and a mouseover browser dictionary to check words.

[Anonymous No.7855046]

>>7855017
True. Jisho.org has the best radical search I've encountered.

>>7855032
Some older games also had kana only and no Kanji because of size restrictions I think. Honestly even as someone who's already pretty good at Japanese kana only can throw me off sometimes. Makes you understand how important Kanji are to the language.

It's actually interesting to see how some old games used various tricks and hacks to get past character and space limitations, like Pokemon TCG GB.

>>7855036
Just a personal advice but I'd avoid machine translation and instead just extract the words and check up in Jisho. It makes remembering them easier, at least for me.

[Radiochan !FhErN6z1NQ No.7855064]

>>7854107
EMIT series, it was made for nips learning English

[Anonymous No.7855286]

>Jap

[Anonymous No.7855873]

>>7854661
if you want audio practice then the best bet is to hire a tutor. I'd try italki, not bad prices.

[Anonymous No.7855886]

>>7854803
If the language comprehension were the gateway, then there wouldn't be untranslated old games. This shit isn't hard to read, it's hard to re-engineer.

[Anonymous No.7856204]

>>7854107
Starting with Wind Waker, Zelda games started including furigana, and the dialogues aren't complex, so it's pretty accessible for your level.

[Anonymous No.7856425]

>>7854224
I wouldn't recommend PC games. They are aimed at an adult audience and therefore feature more complex kanji and sentence structures. Adventures will also dump tons of text at once which can be too much to chew.
Text hooking doesn't always include everything you know.
Low resolution kanji on systems like PCE-CD, SFC, PS1 or SS aren't that bad and if you want to play retro games then you'll have to get used to them at some point anyway.
Begin with RPGs aimed at high grade elementary schoolers. They'll be easier to handle than pure kana games and help you get used to kanji. The games also require you to comprehend the text in order to get to the next objective.

[Anonymous No.7856453]

>>7854107
I was about a year into actual studying and went with persona 4, beat it well before it was released in the US but it was a struggle. A lot of fun, has a good amount of voice acting to help but yeah it is difficult. I'd recommend to skip most famicom games because reading Japanese that's only kana is awful and pretty pointless. SFC and later are good, JRPGs will go a long way for learning, and yeah not retro but the more modern you go, there is a higher percentage of voice acting, which will help tremendously with kanji recognition.

Either way, I just recommend picking something you enjoy and are excited to play. If you enjoy it, you'll have more patience to learn as you play. Having a kanji dictionary on the side / phone app dictionary ready while playing helps a lot.

[Anonymous No.7856454]

>>7854107
>>7854217

I agree that you need to hit the books hard first, but would recommend getting even further than N5..
Playing games in Japanese is not fun until you have the basics down.
If you want to be able to read, kanji is a must and WaniKani is the most efficient way to learn to read kanji.
I wasn't really able to enjoy games in Japanese until I was around high N3 / low N2 level.
First games I played and enjoyed were Dragon Quest 1&2 for Super Famicom and Dragon Quest VII for iOS.
Before I reached that level I would get very burnt out very quickly trying to play games, but it at least served as a indicator of progress and a good motivator to get back to my book studies.

[Anonymous No.7856478]

>>7856425
>Begin with RPGs aimed at high grade elementary schoolers. They'll be easier to handle than pure kana games and help you get used to kanji. The games also require you to comprehend the text in order to get to the next objective.

Any suggestions as what would fall into that age/grade range? I am assuming most Pokemon/pokemon type games would fall into that category or is that still considered young child games as far as those franchises are concerned in Japan?

[Anonymous No.7856486]

>>7856478
>Any suggestions as what would fall into that age/grade range?
Mostly SNES jrpgs fall into that.

[Anonymous No.7856507]

>>7856478
Dragon Quest 1-3 on SFC, DQ4-6 on DS, DQ5 on PS2, DQ6 on SFC
FF1,2 on PS1, FF5,6 on SFC.
Handheld games like Pocket Monsters have even lower resolution and more space restrictions. You need something like 256 kB to include Kanji. That's why most FC, MD and PCE-HuCard games and early SFC games don't have kanji either.

[Anonymous No.7857171]

>>7854107
I just played through the Switch port of Dragon Quest 1 and I think it’s a pretty good practice game.

Don’t do the Famicom version because all hiragana isn’t great practice. Try either the Switch port or the Super Famicom remake.

[Anonymous No.7857195]

>>7854107
I’m doing the same thing and here is my advice:

Ichi.moe is the best site for translation, because instead of giving you a translated sentence it defines each word, and tells you the tense of any verbs.

You still have to figure out the sentence yourself, but it helps you with vocab you don’t know.

To look up kanji, if you have a smartphone or tablet, add a keyboard for Traditional Chinese - Handwriting. This has worked better for me than any radical search, and it’s fairly good at recognizing kanji when you draw them out.

[Anonymous No.7857229]

Play anything that's hookable, including PC98 stuff.
That way you can get the characters out in a readable font automatically.

[Anonymous No.7858880]

>>7854689
I've been watching Shin-chan with Japanese subtitles from Kitsunekko to help reinforce kanji that I'm learning and it's been pretty helpful thus far. If anyone knows of any other sites that host Japanese subtitles I still have plenty of gaps that need to be filled.

[Anonymous No.7858918]

>>7858880
>Japanese subtitles from Kitsunekko
wow thank you. I was going full on no subtitles, but some things Misae(Shin-chan's mother) talks is hard to understand.

[Anonymous No.7858954]

>>7854696
>>7854107
From personal experience Zelda 1 was damn horrible because of how much dialect there is along with no kanji. I'm on L16 of Genki and I do outside reading like Yotsubato, but I could not understand more than a few words in Zelda 1.
My two cents.

[Anonymous No.7859870]

>>7858918
No problem, Japanese subtitles help a ton when it comes to listening comprehension, especially considering how many homophones the language has. Kitsunekko has a great collection of subtitles for episodes in the 300-900 range but unfortunately subs for earlier seasons are a real crapshoot. If anyone knows of other places I could find reliable subs it would be a huge help.

[Anonymous No.7860632]

>>7854661
>ask stupid question
>get unwanted answers
May as well just google "how to ask where the bathroom is in Japanese" and memorize that.

[Anonymous No.7862794]

>>7855032
If you're going to emulate the PSP version of Tales of Phantasia, as an added note: Get Narikiri Dungeon X, which contains Tales of Phantasia X. There are two PSP versions and that one is better.