I wish I could read the Japanese text above. (Go Go Nippon ver. 2015)
Like sometimes when I see a Japanese word in some manga or anime, especially titles that sometimes left untranslated. I'll try to find it's meaning before going on. So yeah, Anime did help, but I was more focused on subtitles than my hearing.
I learned the Kana letters a bit early in my learning time, I memorized them all in few months (But actually only few hours really trying to memorize them.)
It's like Hell!!
The protagonist sums it all up. (Tokyo School Life)
Despite learning hiragana and katakana, everytime I want to start learning Kanji I feel discouraged... Well, my learning style nor goal did help any. (I want to learn Japanese to "read," not to "interact" so I don't plan to learn writing even though I think it's the wrong way to go.)
I feel like I improved a bit, I memorize many words, and I can guess some words I don't. Partly because I started to actually hear what Anime characters are saying now, and because I memorized the particles between the words so I know when a part of the sentence ends now. (As they don't use spaces.)
は, が (wa, ga) Topic markers. well, it's the first thing you learn in Japanese.
も (mo) means "too, also."
の (no) means ("the word after" of/belongs to "the word before")
から (kara) means "from (the word before it)."
Bear in mind, I'm still learning and might be wrong above,
if you know better tell me.
So I became good enough to finally be able to play Japanese games with help of translator, but looking up Kanji's in the translator without having an idea what is it, takes too much time. So I went to the next best option:
Recently there are many Visual Novels that allow Language switching on the fly, but the ones I liked are those Three:
Go Go Nippon!! My first Trip to Japan
This game is flawed, and more of wikipedia article with dating-sim elements, than an actual visual novel. But I love it, and characters while too generic are still fun to read and see. Sadly there are no character voices. (Oh, it has a very stupid protagonist too.)Tokyo School Life
As far as I played It's a generic dating sim and the protagonist isn't better than Go Go Nippon game. This game has the best Live2D character animation I've seen. And actually it's one of the few PC games that include Furigana.
- KaraKara
A story about the post-apocalypse world where humanity gained, Animal EARS? actually I'm not sure, I haven't played enough... But character interaction is too interesting, and the game is way less predictable than the previous ones.
"Your heaven isn't that hard to reach isn't it?" (Karakara)
All the three Visual Novels above
allow you to read Japanese & English at the same time.
I first got Go Go Nippon in 2016 so I couldn't follow the Japanese text at the time, but now I can read it better, I still won't recommend it to a newbie as it lacks Voices.
- Tokyo School Life is the easiest to read since it the Japanese text is accompanied with Furigana, so it's the one of the three I'm playing to finish right now, maybe by the time I finish all the routes I'll be good enough to read the Go Go Nippon without much use of the translator.
Karakara is harder to read (well, because of voices it's still easier than Go Go Nippon.) But it actually has interesting story (It's supposed to be short but I'm still at the beginning.) Instead of half-edutainment half-dating sim game.
If, I persisted, That is.
"Yaaay, I'm part of a family now." (Tokyo School Life)
Meet you in another
I used Knuckles in China Land to learn hiragana and katakana years ago. Looks like the site went down ages ago, but the archive seems to have the original download file.
Nowadays, you should probably check out Memrise for learning vocabulary/alphabet. Since I already know the hiragana and katakana alphabets, I'm using the Genki 1 course to bolster my vocab. But they have others for learning the hiragana and katakana alphabets. What's nice about Memrise is that they have a mobile app that you can take with you. It's meant to be used for about 5 minutes per day, just as a quick refresher thing.
Thanks for the websites, #Memrise seems like #Duolingo which I used for a while, maybe I should try Genki course too (I heard about it before.)
The only bits of Japanese I've learned is through anime. I've learnt to associate how some words sound to the direct translation (I watch anime with spanish subtitles) so I kindof have a basic idea of what are the basic words and how basic introductions work. Stuff like "Uhh Watashi wa Volder-kun" OR SOMETHING LIKE THAt, I DON'T KNOW.
Whenever I try to speak japanese I just get weirded out because it literally sounds like anime... This happens with French too but it's because I think French sounds dumb gjfkdlñ.
Greato posto!
For a while I was like that too~
Gureito Kommento!
Ah yes, if I think of it, Visual Novel maybe the best way to learn Japanese from games because the main ingredient of a VN is dialogue... lots and lots of dialogues from the beginning to the end credit. And VNs that allow "language switching on the fly" are I suppose the best ones. I hope Steins;Gate has this feature as well because I want to buy it, would be great if it does.
I slipped this neat post into my Gaming Posts of the Week...
Wow, this is very cute! It definitely seems like an interesting way to learn Japanese. I'll try it one day, thanks for sharing!