The best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in it. That can be tricky when you’re not living in a country where they speak the language you want to hear. In this post I’ll be showing you how you can study Japanese using video games - and learn while having fun! Using this method I’ve successfully been playing Final Fantasy X without the language barrier - and it’s been great!
The first step is to choose the game you want to play in Japanese. Be realistic - can you access the Japanese copy of this game? Is your console region-free? Can you change the language settings on your console to Japanese? Most importantly, can you locate the Japanese script online? … That leads us to step two.
Step 2: Locate the Japanese Script
Locating the Japanese script can be easy if it’s a popular game. A simple google of ‘[Title] Japanese Script’ can normally bring up the result you want. Usually the script will only contain character’s spoken text, and not include information such as menu items and options. You may need to research this vocabulary separately through playing the game or observing screenshots. A list of popular RPG titles and Japanese subtitles can be found on this reddit thread and KanjiKoohii here.
Step 3: Text Mining with User Local
UserLocal is an incredible website that analyses text for you. You can input a massive amount of text, and in a few seconds you will have downloadable, analysed data. The best part is… it’s free! Paste your whole game script into the box as detailed below and click ‘テキストマイニングする’.
Once UserLocal has analysed your text, it provides a bunch of useful charts and data for you to browse and utilize. First, it provides a spider-web graph which shows the relationship between vocabulary used in the game. Second is a word cloud of the most-used vocabulary words. I have anaylsed ‘Final Fantasy X’, and below you can see that the most used words are character names ‘ ’ユウナ’ (Yuna) ‘ティーダ’ (Tidus), and so on. This is the document you want to download by pressing the green button next to ‘ワードクラウド’.
The website organizes vocabulary into Nouns, Verbs and Adjectives, whilst showing the amount of times the vocabulary is used. You may find that you recognise a lot of the commonly used verbs, ‘する, ‘くる’ ’思う’ and so on. However, in order to progress through the game in Japanese it’s the less-frequently used vocabulary that you have to study!
Step 5: Figure out What You Need to Know
On downloading the data, I open it with Numbers (Mac OS) or Excel (Windows OS). I then go through the list and highlight what words I know and can read with ease (Green), words that I think I know but I’m not 100% (orange), and words I can’t read or I’ve never seen before (Red). Some of the most frequently used words in games aren’t words you’ll often see in daily Japanese, ‘召喚’ for example means ‘summon’ and is used when talking about summoner spirits in Final Fantasy… despite not being used often in daily life, it is in the top 10 nouns of the Final Fantasy X script, so I gotta know it!
Step 6: Learn your Vocabulary!
You will need a good concept of grammar to understand the game, however if you’re looking to play a whole game in Japanese I have to assume you already have your grammar down! The main step is learning the vocabulary, which you can do using SRS software such as Anki.
I don’t recommend starting to play the game until you have the most-used vocabulary memorized. This could be as much or as little as the top 200 nouns/verbs. Nothing is more soul-destroying than thinking your Japanese is incredible, only to play a game or watch a film for 2 minutes before realising you know nothing!
Remember: this isn’t necessarily an indication of your ability, it just may be that your video game has very specific vocabulary!
Step 8: Enjoy Learning while Having Fun!
That’s it! You can also apply this method to movies, anime, and any other material you can get an online script for.
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