for those of you who have played the pokemon games, what grade level do you think you have to be to understand the text? I just want to assess how far I've gotten so far.

I just finished rtk 1, and tae kim's grammar, so I decided to see if I could play any games in japanese. I find that I can understand the gist of the conversations from the kanji but I can't read the sentence because I don't know the readings.

so I'm currently using core 2k to add those vocab words, and was wondering if anyone has any suggestions as far as games to play?

I know people suggest the usual, dobutsu no mori, golden sun, zelda, etc
but ideally it would be a game that has everyday vocab instead of fantasy vocab, and sort of easy kanji so I can ease myself into it.

Pokemon is pretty easy. The older games are all in kana, but from Black/White onward they added a kanji mode I think. You might want to watch some playthroughs on Youtube or something to get a feel for the level.

I've played pokemon X in Japanese, and I can confirm it has a kanji mode. No furigana, but the japanese is indeed fairly easy with very basic kanjis. Sentences are also fully spaced between words, which is always a plus.

As for game suggestions, well, it depends on what you want to play really. You're not going to stick with a game you don't enjoy simply because the japanese is easy, and thanks to Nintendo's retarded policies on import, the 3DS is region-locked... so better not be too picky if you don't own a japanese 3DS :p

As far as vocabulary go, "fantasy" vocabulary only make a tiny percentage of any game's vocab'. And by learning "attacking the green blob", you learn "attacking" and "green" plus the sentence pattern, which is not that bad =).

I'm not a big fan of the series (I'm more of a Atlus / square without the enix kind of guy ), but Dragon quest has some furigana and some pretty easy dialogues, why not give those a whirl ?

The difficulty of native materials for foreigners in the beginning is often in grammar, not vocab or kanji. Even very young children can deal with complicated grammatical structures that are hard to parse if you don't know what's there. But you can always try it and see what you think.

Not all DQ games have furigana; I think it's only the DS ones that do.

Linval Wrote:I'm not a big fan of the series (I'm more of a Atlus / square without the enix kind of guy ), but Dragon quest has some furigana and some pretty easy dialogues, why not give those a whirl ?

I'm a big fan of SMT games and stuff too but I was really surprised with how good the storytelling in the DQ games is. It's a pretty underrated series in English for how good it actually is.

Also I mentioned this in another thread but emulation + kanjitomo is pretty good for readings.

Pokemon is pretty hard if you are just starting out in Japanese.
One of my most highly recommended beginner games is Little Charo for nintendo DS.
Its a bilingual adventure game designed for teaching english, but it works almost just as well for teaching Japanese!
I posted another thread somewhere on this forum where I had ripped some of the scripts from the game, but I never did the whole thing because I don't believe anyone used it.

I think the suggestion to look at gameplay videos on Youtube is a good idea, to make sure what it's like before making a commitment or spending money on something.

yudantaiteki Wrote:The difficulty of native materials for foreigners in the beginning is often in grammar, not vocab or kanji. Even very young children can deal with complicated grammatical structures that are hard to parse if you don't know what's there. But you can always try it and see what you think.

I don't really agree with that...
Most of the stuff I've read aimed at children has very simple grammar, with the grammar getting harder as the target audience gets older. It's always vocabulary that's the problem because children know and have been exposed to far more words than I have.

OP: I tried playing Pokemon White as a beginner and it was too hard, basically because of vocabulary. I had to play in front of the computer looking up everything in a dictionary with one hand and ended up giving up and skipping a heap of text. It wasn't a very worthwhile or enjoyable experience. This was maybe a year and a half ago? A bit more?
Recently I played a bit of Pokemon Silver and found it extremely easy. I doubt it's actually any easier than White though.
I don't know about JPLT levels, but to read Pokemon (actually read it - without a dictionary and with a high level of comprehension) I'd say you'd have to be at least at a lower intermediate level.

Quote:I find that I can understand the gist of the conversations from the kanji but I can't read the sentence because I don't know the readings.

Is it that you don't know the readings or don't know the words? If you read the same thing in kana (which I think you can - IIRC you can change to kana-mode by talking to your mother in Black/White, anyway), would you know the word? Guessing from the kanji isn't really the same thing...

It may have simple grammar in the sense that it doesn't use literary, archaic, or formal grammar (although sometimes children's material does use those). But assuming we're not talking about "see spot run" level, it will have sentence structures and grammar points that are challenging for beginning level foreign learners.

Here's a random line I pulled off the net from Pokemon Black or White (one of the two):
今よりも強くなるために必要なこと？
それは　ずっとずっとポケモンを好きでいることかな
自分がそうだったからこんなことしかいえないけど

Nothing in here is super advanced in terms of grammar, but a long string of kana like that last sentence is hard to parse if you're still at the basic level. I don't mean to say it's impossible but at least when I was at the early level of study, I found that I could look up words easily but the grammar was sometimes impossible for me to figure out.

Zarxrax Wrote:Pokemon is pretty hard if you are just starting out in Japanese.
One of my most highly recommended beginner games is Little Charo for nintendo DS.
Its a bilingual adventure game designed for teaching english, but it works almost just as well for teaching Japanese!
I posted another thread somewhere on this forum where I had ripped some of the scripts from the game, but I never did the whole thing because I don't believe anyone used it.

I did.

[RawToast]

yudantaiteki Wrote:Here's a random line I pulled off the net from Pokemon Black or White (one of the two):
自分がそうだったからこんなことしかいえないけど

Nothing in here is super advanced in terms of grammar, but a long string of kana like that last sentence is hard to parse if you're still at the basic level.

Aren't the sentences spaced like in Pokemon X? I do agree that so many kana without spaces is difficult at the beginner level.

RawToast Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:Here's a random line I pulled off the net from Pokemon Black or White (one of the two):
自分がそうだったからこんなことしかいえないけど

Nothing in here is super advanced in terms of grammar, but a long string of kana like that last sentence is hard to parse if you're still at the basic level.

Aren't the sentences spaced like in Pokemon X? I do agree that so many kana without spaces is difficult at the beginner level.

I just checked, they are also spaced, whether kana or kanji.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Here's a random line I pulled off the net from Pokemon Black or White (one of the two):
今よりも強くなるために必要なこと?
それは　ずっとずっとポケモンを好きでいることかな
自分がそうだったからこんなことしかいえないけど

I don't care for pokemon but let me take a bad guess:

今よりも強くなるために必要なこと?
Thing needed to become stronger than even now/the current state?

それは
That

ずっとずっとポケモンを好きでいること
The state of liking every pokemon
or
The state of liking pokemon forever/long time

かな
"I wonder if"
or
"How! What!" as in EG. "Oh my, you certainly like pokemon!"

自分がそうだったから

自分がそうだったから
Myself...ga...was so...because

こんなことしかいえないけど
I can say nothing except this thing but...

Overall, based only on those sentences, I have no idea what's being talked about, what the situation is, and whether its a conversation between two people or one person talking to himself.

I guess Pokemon is harder for beginners than I thought..

@qwertyytrewq
It seems more like

"What's needed to become stronger than you currently are? Keep liking Pokemon for a long time I guess...It was like that for me though, so I can't say much else."

to me, though I agree it would be hard to parse all that kana in a row as a beginner.

Bokusenou Wrote:Keep liking Pokemon for a long time I guess...

Oh so it was こと as in "command" not generic thing.

Bokusenou Wrote:I guess

How did you get that from かな? Never mind, guess and wonder is the same thing. It's just that I burned かな = wonder into my brain (or "how" "what") when in reality it is more flexible than that. I wonder if the meaning would change if the か (question) and な (gobi/sentence suffix) was separate?

@qwertyytrewq
Yeah, かな shows uncertainty, although there are definitely many ways to translate it into English.

yudantaiteki Wrote:ずっとずっとポケモンを好きでいること

Sounds like brainwashing...sounds like chinpokomon!

I can only tell you about the green edition, but that one is all in kana and fairly easy. As you can see there are spaces between the words, so it's no problem to distinguish them from each other.

qwertyytrewq Wrote:

Bokusenou Wrote:Keep liking Pokemon for a long time I guess...

Oh so it was こと as in "command"

No, it's こと as "abstract thing". In this case the thing that you need is to like Pokemon. The "command" こと is only found in very restricted contexts, usually lists of rules.

Are people saying that the newer Pokemon games that have kanji (with furigana) still have spaces? I'm not sure I've ever seen spaces used outside of all-kana writing.

Pokemon Black 2 has spaces between words with Kanji at least. It doesn't have furigana though.

I also agree with the general opinion here. That Pokemon is pretty tough for a beginner.
As for myself, I bought Black 2 in September 2012, at which point I was much more of a beginner than I would have wanted to admit. With a vocabulary of ~1000 words Pokemon wasn't that much fun.
Now that I am 1500 into Core6k, I'm starting to get a lot more out of it.
I bet someone who has finished Core6000 would understand most of the words in Pokemon.

I know you said that you'd prefer less fantasy settings, but the Zelda games are pretty good for early on. They are a little more difficult than Pokemon, but Wind Waker (and later console games, I'd assume) has furigana and the DS games have a tap-to-get-furigana system. If you enjoy these games, I highly recommend playing them in Japanese, but I would suggest increasing your vocabulary first, just so you're not looking up nearly every word.

thanks everyone for your responses. I do really want to play fantasy games in japanese but at this point I really can't understand much of the vocab.

for whoever asked about whether I understood the word or kanji earlier, I found that I get a lot of vocab out of listening to anime/other japanese dialogue. Sometimes I will know a word but not know how to read it. It really doesn't help that core2k/6k has words like 綺麗　and 駄目 which I don't really see the kanji for commonly. And these card are mixed into the beginning of the deck :/

Anyway I think at this point I am more of an advanced beginner in all areas. Need more vocab, and even though I kind of know the grammar rules, I might be able to pronounce the whole sentence (kanji and all) and still not know what it means.

I'm gonna think about getting the other games you guys recommended, but it's definitely still too early to play these games except maybe "little charo."

for those of you who don't know anything about pokemon, there is a huge list of moves that sometimes are just made up words, not that I can tell the difference between the fake and real words but... I totally did not know たいあたり　in hiragana, and that is one of the first attacks you must know how to read apparently.

anki_evryday Wrote:for those of you who don't know anything about pokemon, there is a huge list of moves that sometimes are just made up words, not that I can tell the difference between the fake and real words but... I totally did not know たいあたり　in hiragana, and that is one of the first attacks you must know how to read apparently.

I haven't played too many of the games in Japanese, but most of them seem to be real words or otherwise make plenty of sense. I can't say if they're comparable to the English move names (most of which, as far as I remember, are real words used in fantastical phrases, or not so fantastical, depending on the move), but I'd assume so.

For your example: 体当たり is translated as 'tackle' in the English versions. When looking at it with kanji, it makes much more sense (and is actually a word), being that it's just 'body' and 'hit'.

Another example I can think of at the moment is 毒針 (どくばり); again, it's a word ('stinger' or 'poison needle'), but in the English versions, it's translated as 'poison sting' (possibly for clarity, or possibly for ambiguity, since some non-bug types can use it), which makes sense, since it's the kanji for 'poison' and 'needle'.

As for the kanji-fied 綺麗 and 駄目, they are commonly written both with and without kanji, so it's worth it to learn them with kanji.

If you work on your vocab, you'll be fine. Personally, I mostly just play games for fun and to see how much of the script I understand.

sholum Wrote:If you work on your vocab, you'll be fine. Personally, I mostly just play games for fun and to see how much of the script I understand.

I tend to agree with that, just give a game you like a spin, even if you have to look up a fair amount of word, it's the best way to actually learn this specific kind of vocabulary. If one of the reasons you're learning japanese is to play video games, then just try it.

Why not trying out a game you've already played, but this time in japanese ? It's fairly easy to find a japanese rom or iso these days, especially for older consoles & handheld devices.

edit : typo

http://wiki.xn--rckteqa2e.com/wiki/%E3%8...%E4%BB%A3)

Looking at this list, you can see words (or combinations of words) you might not need much in real life except maybe in the context of product names or something (you're probably not going to see アクアテール as a whole come up a lot day-to-day, but アクア might appear in a name somewhere). But others are common enough words (あくび). Plus if this is the kind of stuff you want to use Japanese form, then at some point you'll probably want to learn the uncommon words as well.

You might considering reading a script for a game you've already played in English, to see how you get along with it and what the difficulty is like. It is easier to look up words from a written script online, and you can look (subject to availability) a number of different games to compare without having to actually spend a lot of time playing through each to get an idea of what it's like.