Hi everyone,

I am thinking about getting back into studying japanese more actively again, after it has suffered for several months, due to the frustrating realization how little I could understand after a year of intense learning, finishing RTK1, SRSing a few hundred sentences etc.
Right now I barely get through my reps, I haven't added new material in a long time.

So I am thinking about ways to make studying more fun.

I have always been a huge fan of JRPGs and am thinking of getting a PS4 and FFXV in japanese when it comes out. 
Of course I know that I will understand as little as 5%, but I just wanted to know what you guys think:

- Is it going to be helpful in some way to play an RPG in japanese - even when still understanding so little
- Can it be a fun and rewarding experience, or is it more likely that it is going to be discouraging?

Any thoughts on this are appreciated.

Thank you!

It depends.

There are some people who can read LNs and play games with almost 0 knowledge of the language.

I tried it with around N4 level knowledge, and it was brutally unfun for me. So I put them away and went back to studying. Now I can read LNs and play some games without too much trouble, but I still have to look up stuff every now and then.

If you don't mind not understanding what's going on, or you don't mind breaking the flow to look up 5 words in a row, then you might have the right temperament for it. If that sounds annoying as hell (like me) then I'd lower the bar and study a bit first.

One thing to try: download a game on Steam that has Japanese language support, change the language of the game to Japanese (it's in the settings in your game library in the Steam program), and see how you like it. That's a much cheaper option than buying a PS4 and importing FFXV. If you like SRPGs, I would recommend Disgaea. If you can make it through some of that in full JP, then you should be good to go for FFXV.

maxwell777 Wrote:I haven't added new material in a long time.

On the occasions that I have stopped adding material to let the reviews die down a bit I have felt an awful sense of stagnation and a *decreased* tolerance for reviewing, leading to a vicious cycle of sorts. Trouble is that the questions become tiresomely familiar even if the answers don't, which can get pretty demotivating.

My advice would be to freshen up the material by suspending nuisance cards and adding new stuff that is *easy* and *fast* to review.

(2016-05-23, 1:02 am)maxwell777 Wrote: - Is it going to be helpful in some way to play an RPG in japanese - even when still understanding so little
- Can it be a fun and rewarding experience, or is it more likely that it is going to be discouraging?

If you understand very little then it'll probably be discouraging, especially since JRPG are huge. It's fine to tryhard for a manga chapter or even volume but for anything bigger you need at least 50% of understanding (or I do at least). That said I'm kind of like rich, you can workaround the problem by learning the basic fantasy vocab (armor, bow, kingdom...) while playing another JRPG before FFXV. I'd especially recommend old school JRPG because they used to be simpler (FF6, Breath of Fire 2-3, Dragon  Quests... anything with kanji because kana-only games are a pain at low level). You'd increase your chances to enjoy FFXV manifold.

I think the thing is to make it easy. Even if you're just SRSing stuff - if it's easy, it can be fun, or at least not unfun, which is a good enough substitute most days. For me, the things that killed my efforts have always been difficult - RTK, grammar study, production cards, etc. OTOH, easy things like sentence recognition cards were a breeze and I SRSed many thousands of them.

If you have only done RTK and a few hundred sentences, you are woefully unprepared to tackle JRPGs. If you only understand 5% of it, it will not be fun (to read, anyway - whether the game is fun or not may be another matter, but usually all that text is fairly important and you're not going to actually be reading any of it). More than likely it will frustrating, or boring, depending on how much you skip. I tried playing Pokemon at a low level and don't think it was a very worthwhile experience.

I'll also rate watching incomprehensible TV shows as pretty low on fun. Attempting manga was more worthwhile though.

I think your efforts would be better spent making your study tolerable. For me, making recognition-based cards from anime using subs2srs was what worked. You'll need to find your own way to work that out, but obviously what you're doing now isn't working. Try something new - throw away your old decks if you have to.

(2016-05-23, 5:34 am)EratiK Wrote: you can workaround the problem by learning the basic fantasy vocab (armor, bow, kingdom...) while playing another JRPG before FFXV. I'd especially recommend old school JRPG because they used to be simpler (FF6, Breath of Fire 2-3, Dragon  Quests... anything with kanji because kana-only games are a pain at low level). You'd increase your chances to enjoy FFXV manifold.

I second this part, you should start with something else if you want to have any fun with FFXV.  I also don't think it's a good idea to hinge your enjoyment of Japanese on a single game that isn't released yet.

Why not play something you've already played before and know what's going on?  Then make some cards from that game and then continue onto future games with some relevant vocab.

Here is a video of someone playing the FFXV demo last month in Japanese. If you think you can understand what's going on in the game, then go for it! The video is over an hour btw. The video should give you an idea of what it would be like playing the game in Japanese

That's interesting.... doesn't look anything like Final Fantasy to me, nor to the player... he keeps saying まるでキングダム・ハーツ.
Makes me want to play Kingdom Hearts now which I've heard good things about but never played.

Any-way, I would definitely recommend against FFXV for a beginner since it appears from that video to be played out in real time. One of the great things about Final Fantasy for someone new to playing games in Japanese is that it's very turn based - world stuff only triggers when you move into it or click on it, and the combat is turn-based (or was up until some point. Of course it's real time in the MMO. I'm playing FFX now, and that's turn based.)

Anyway the point is that in older FF titles you can easily take your time to look stuff up in the dictionary whenever you're puzzled. FFXV doesn't have that advantage.

I played the original Kingdom Hearts way back when. Great game!

I posted the video so OP can decide if they are at a level to play a real time game. At least seeing an hour of gameplay will be more than enough to determine this. But I do agree, a turn-based game is better to play for Japanese learning purposes. Finally, here is a forum topic for videogame scripts which contain FF1-12 and Tactics.

There was a short article on Kotaku about XV, and how the producer wants to avoid Final Fantasy 病-- in that he doesn't want the series to get stuck in a rut of "We have to do the game this way, or else it's not a FF game."

It looks interesting to me. As long as it's not on rails as much as 13 was. 13 wasn't fun at all for me.

But yeah, it's in real time. That would be pretty hard for a first game in Japanese. I agree with trying some of the older FF games, or some of the DQ games, or pretty much any turn-based RPGs (there's SO many of them, and so many good ones out there.) You can even find some of them on Steam, as I mentioned before. Phantom Brave is coming out soon, too. That's more of a SRPG (by the same people who made Disgaea), but it's gooood.

(2016-05-24, 11:25 am)RawrPk Wrote:  Finally, here is a forum topic for videogame scripts which contain FF1-12 and Tactics.

Another thing that can help getting into playing games is an emulated game along with the kanjitomo ocr program.  It works very well for a lot of games on every system you can emulate and it's much less of a hassle than keeping a script open and following it.  

One of the scripts with both languages side by side isn't a bad idea for somebody just starting to play games though.

I have started pre-learning vocabulary that is used in material that I want to consume. Doing it this way is more fun to me because instead of learning 1000's of words to maybe use some day, I put them to use right away. I've only been doing it a month or two so far, but I've already learned the lyrics to several songs and learned a bunch of vocabulary for some jpod 101 dialogs that I'm playing in the car. It's empowering to listen to the dialogs at full speed and understand pretty well everything they are saying. I plan on doing this pretty much exclusively in the future for movies, dramas and anime episodes and everything else I can find in electronic text format.

Language learning has been mostly fun for me (except for certain tasks that you just HAVE TO get done, fun or not), but it also takes me five to ten years to get good at a language (in the case of Japanese, it's gonna probably be closer to ten than five). So there's a tradeoff between hard work and time spent. You can't get good fast, without working really hard at it.

As for what makes language learning fun, that's tricky. Early on, not a lot. I can't imagine ever enjoying playing a game with content in it that I don't understand, for instance. In fact, there is ONLY ONE thing I can think of that is truly fun: watching stuff (stuff I enjoy, not stuff I watch out of obligation), with English subtitles. Everything else is a drag to some extent, and all you can do is manage the pain (making sure you don't burn out...and perhaps more importantly, making sure you don't let this one activity take over your whole life...because, frankly, doing nothing but studying languages makes for a pretty empty, meaningless life).

My secret is loooooong breaks between relatively short periods of intensive studying. For instance, with English, I spent a couple of months, one summer break, going through a big fat textbook I found on my uncle's book shelf. I don't even think I finished it all. It didn't teach me English, but that wasn't my goal for doing it...my goal was to allow me to breeze through English tests in high school without having to rely on the teacher. Then, a year went by where all I did was a few classes in school (not particularly useful classes, since no one was paying attention to whatever the incompetent teacher was mumbling about), and watching the Discovery Channel (with subs) and Cartoon Network (it didn't have subs, but it was really fun...this was back when Cartoon Network was good...they had stuff like Ed, Edd & Eddy, Cow & Chicken, The Powerpuff Girls, Dexter's Lab, Courage the Cowardly Dog, etc....you didn't need to understand every word to enjoy it...plus, my friends were watching the same shows, so they were a topic of conversation in school the next day). Then, I spent a few weeks next summer (intensive) reading Alice in Wonderland, and went right back to doing nothing for the next school year. Afterwards, the only other thing that involved effort, that I did, was go through a collection of philosophy essays, and a couple of Joyce novels. Since then, everything I've done in English has been purely for entertainment and relaxation (or for work, once I got fluent). I doubt I've spent more than 300 hours actually studying English.

Same with Japanese (except Japanese is about twice as hard, so double all the numbers from the previous paragraph): I did RtK, and a few hundred sentences (much like you, it seems), for about three months, and then took a long break of just watching stuff with subs. I would occasionally do small things, like go through some song lyrics, or rip audio from my favorite variety/comedy shows and listen to it repeatedly, half paying attention, but it was mostly just time spent with subtitled stuff, or Japanese in the background, while doing something else. Then, after a year or so, I SRSd RtK again (this time, the Light version, and really fast), and a couple thousand sentences, for a few months, and then went right back to not really studying for almost two years...but, in those two years, materials that weren't subtitled have also started becoming accessible to some extent. So it was a useful two years of not studying. More recently, I've set aside another three months, this time I SRSd through about 7-8 thousand audio sentences, for listening comprehension. I've spent about 120 hours/month either SRS-ing, or doing some other kind of actual studying (be it watching vids on Nihongomori, reading manga, song lyrics, blogs, radio show transcripts...I consider all that studying, because, even though it's not very difficult to do, it involves conscious mental effort and the use of willpower to keep your ass in the seat for a few hours/day).

But now I'm pretty much done with studying, and I'm at a point where I don't foresee having to put any more effort into Japanese...I expect that I'll just get good at it naturally. I can watch stuff on TV, I can even listen to easy radio, I understand most songs, so I'm all set to just rely on immersion. But, like I said: my method is mostly fun (with short intermissions of studying), but it takes a long time. It took me over five years each to get really good at a couple of European languages, and it's been four or five years since I learned my first Japanese word (it's going to be another 4-5 before I will be able to use Japanese the way I can use English for instance). If you want to get it done faster, you're going to have to work harder for it. And, if you intend to put even less than the give or take 750 hours of total study time I put into it, you should be prepared to accept that it's going to take you even longer before your Japanese is fully functional.

(2016-05-24, 12:40 pm)cracky Wrote:

(2016-05-24, 11:25 am)RawrPk Wrote:  Finally, here is a forum topic for videogame scripts which contain FF1-12 and Tactics.

Another thing that can help getting into playing games is an emulated game along with the kanjitomo ocr program.  It works very well for a lot of games on every system you can emulate and it's much less of a hassle than keeping a script open and following it.  

One of the scripts with both languages side by side isn't a bad idea for somebody just starting to play games though.

The DS is a great system to emulate with a lot of Japanese titles. Emuparadise is a good place to start looking.

I think it depends much on our priorities and objectives.
If for example your main goal is to converse with japanese people, then you don't necessarely need as many words as those you need in order to understands light-novels. And you definitely don't need kanji, or at least it's not an imperative, at least in the beginning.
When I started my main goal was to be able to read, and SRSing words was the most frustrating thing. But if my main goal was to be able to converse with japanese people, I would have done so:

1) an intuitive course like Assimil;

2) an audio based daily routine like Jpod101: listening with the help of hiragana transcription and english translation, until I am able to understand the audio without relying on transcription and translation. No need to SRS anything;

3) save the words and phrases/structures I feel I'll want to use in future conversation, to use as a reference while I speak on Skype and the like;

4) shadow the audio when I feel confortable, and then start to use the words and structures I learned with Assimil first and then with Jpod101;

5) as Luca Lampariello suggested, prepare beforehand a list of possible words and phrases to use based on the topic you want to discuss with your speaking partner. Use a dictionary to find how to say new words you still don't know.

Assimil and Jpod101 are based on conversational japanese, and obviously you can jump words you don't need like "telephone booth".

What I see on youtube is that many poliglots, to be able do speak many languages, they are very selective about what words to study and review. For example Luca Lampariello and Vladimir Skultety keep a notebook with all those words and phrases and they review it. It's basically as a phrasebook but made of thing you say or want to say.
Even Moses (Laoshu) has a similar way of training his language, with his FLR metod which is basically a collection of possible questions and answers which are likely to pop up in conversations. Then he uses a couple of E-J dictionaries to find new words to say based on what he want to say.

I'm not sure but it seems that in order to be conversational you need less words than the ones you need in order to understand native media like books and movies. I'm not saying you won't ever need more words but you can reach a fun stage in conversation with the need of less words and without any kanji at first.

Not sure if this is what you need/want but it's definitely a good route to avoid the boring and frustrating Anki-based study.

This is of common JRPG words will help as well. Something to take a look at and maybe pre-learn.

https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Japanese.../Videogame

I began doing fun things in Japanese from an early stage. It does require tolerance of looking up (and Anki-ing in my case) a lot of  words as you go along. Whether you find that too troublesome and would prefer to pre-learn specific vocabulary like yogert909-san is a matter of temperament I think. Personally I prefer to just do it as I go along, though it is a slog at first.

But a much more interesting slog than just doing general reps in the hope of one day getting good enough to read something real. Words are actual living beings in stories rather than things in Anki.

I did play Japanese RPGs from early on but I would have to say I didn't find them the best early-learning material. If you can stand it I would go for some child (not pre-school stuff) directed anime with Japanese subtitles. Or else simple manga. I am lucky in that I actually like relatively childlike material - I am thinking Precure, Totoro and Heidi (the first two were among my earliest when I only had very shaky grammar and a tiny vocabulary Heidi would probably have been my first if I had known about it back then as it has Japanese subs with furigana). More about this approach here.

I definitely agree that kana-only material is a pain even when one is beginning. It is ok for Japanese children because they have a very large (compared to a foreign beginner) audially-acquired vocabulary.

My recommendation would be to approach the simplest-level anime (or manga) that you can actually enjoy to begin with. And bear in mind that it will be a slog at first. Try it and see if it is the kind of slog you can enjoy. 

Any method is a slog in the early stages, but I know I really couldn't have stuck to brute study. Hacking my way through the jungle of real use was absolutely necessary in my case.

(2016-05-25, 11:11 am)CureDolly Wrote: But a much more interesting slog than just doing general reps in the hope of one day getting good enough to read something real. Words are actual living beings in stories rather than things in Anki.

Words can be both.  I still think a hybrid of these approaches is the most effective.  I personally add new words as I come across them to help with retention of the word.  Then when I come across them again it deepens my understanding of the word.  If I was relying on just reading then I wouldn't remember the word when I ran into it again, this has been my experience with a lot of words I didn't put into Anki.

I agree with the rest though.  I also would, again, like to stress that I think it's a bad idea to make such a large investment into a single game.  If it turns out you don't have fun with the game then it will crush your motivation even more.  Not much more else I can add, a lot of good ideas are covered already.  I think the key is to find something that is more enjoyable than frustrating and stick with that

(2016-05-25, 7:17 pm)cracky Wrote:

(2016-05-25, 11:11 am)CureDolly Wrote: But a much more interesting slog than just doing general reps in the hope of one day getting good enough to read something real. Words are actual living beings in stories rather than things in Anki.

Words can be both.  I still think a hybrid of these approaches is the most effective.  I personally add new words as I come across them to help with retention of the word.  Then when I come across them again it deepens my understanding of the word.  If I was relying on just reading then I wouldn't remember the word when I ran into it again, this has been my experience with a lot of words I didn't put into Anki.

This is what I do too. I am sorry if I wasn't clear about that (I did mention Anki-ing them in the first paragraph).

My procedure is exactly what you describe. I do enter words into Anki when I encounter them live, for exactly the reason you state. I don't enter everything, but I enter a lot. 

(2016-05-25, 7:17 pm)cracky Wrote: I agree with the rest though.  I also would, again, like to stress that I think it's a bad idea to make such a large investment into a single game.  If it turns out you don't have fun with the game then it will crush your motivation even more.  Not much more else I can add, a lot of good ideas are covered already.  I think the key is to find something that is more enjoyable than frustrating and stick with that

Yes. This is one reason (not the only one) that I don't like the idea of pre-learning vocabulary. It makes another abstract learning task, and one that will only be useful if you turn out to get on well with the game (or whatever media it is).

(2016-05-25, 8:26 pm)CureDolly Wrote: Yes. This is one reason (not the only one) that I don't like the idea of pre-learning vocabulary. It makes another abstract learning task, and one that will only be useful if you turn out to get on well with the game (or whatever media it is).

For me it depends on the vocabulary on whether I want/need to pre-learn. I'll give a few examples. Words I'd want to pre-learn are words that I will encounter a bunch of times that I do not want to have to look them up so damn much. These words would be like JRPG vocabulary like: menu screen, save screen, items, names of the main character(s), etc. I put a link of those common JRPG words in my past post here. These types of words I want to learn in advanced otherwise I spend more time looking up words than actually playing the game! Especially knowing how to save a file!   I think this is a fair reason to pre-learn basic mechanic vocab for sanity functional reasons.

Another scenario that I would pre-learn vocab is learning a set of words for a particular skill or hobby. For me, this is cooking/recipe terms and in the near future, tennis terms as I am planning to read Baby Steps as my next manga series. Especially for Baby Steps, I actually have to learn both English and Japanese tennis terminology as I don't actually know too much besides the point system. I could learn the tennis terms organically too but I rather pre-learn that and focus on the storyline instead.

TD;LR : I pre-learn non story related vocab for my sanity lol

I should say (because I think I sometimes come across as more prescriptive than I actually intend to be) that I am not against people pre-learning vocabulary. It is just something I don't personally like the idea of. People work differently, and if something helps someone I am all for it even if it isn't the way I go about it.

Personally I have never had any trouble finding menus and things in games, or learning characters' names as I went along but that may be because I did a fair amount of pretty intensive J-subbed anime work before I got to games (thinking about it I didn't start on games till I got back from my first time in Japan - because that is where I got my Japanese 3DS - that was a bit over a year into learning and I had by then spent two months in Japan without using a word of English, managing clumsily, but managing). Of course I didn't pre-learn anything for the animes either, but that's just how I am.

I can definitely see a case for learning in advance in the case of technical vocabulary that you don't know in either language.

I guess my feeling is that a there seems to be almost a "work ethic" in some cases about doing a lot of study before you enjoy anything. But if pre-learning works for you and makes playing the games a more pleasurable experience, then absolutely it is the right thing for you.

I suppose I like to get it out there that you don't have to do it that way if it doesn't appeal, because that point of view is sometimes under-represented, I feel.

In the end though, getting to enjoy things in Japanese as early as possible is the goal, and whatever facilitates that best for a given individual is what she should be doing.

If anyone is interested, here are some tennis terms in Japanese:

http://www.sports-rule.com/tennis/words/
Glossary really with Japanese explanations

http://www.homemate.co.jp/useful/english...nnis/word/
J-E translation of terms

I have a couple English resources but those are easy enough to find and seem rather useless here xD The vocab doesn't seem to difficult to read, it's just I have no clue what they mean in either language.

(2016-05-25, 8:26 pm)CureDolly Wrote: Yes. This is one reason (not the only one) that I don't like the idea of pre-learning vocabulary. It makes another abstract learning task, and one that will only be useful if you turn out to get on well with the game (or whatever media it is).

For sure this. I wouldn't want to pre-learn 1000s of words without first reading a few pages. That's why I pre-learn in small chunks - like a song is ~30 words, or a few pages of a book is probably under 100 unique words and I likely know half of them. I wouldn't pre-learn more than 200 words before reading, listening or watching and more likely keep it under 100 words.

(2016-05-25, 10:04 pm)CureDolly Wrote: I should say (because I think I sometimes come across as more prescriptive than I actually intend to be) that I am not against people pre-learning vocabulary. It is just something I don't personally like the idea of. People work differently, and if something helps someone I am all for it even if it isn't the way I go about it.

I read everything with idea that what you said is implied, but sometimes it is good for it to be said occasionally to lighten the mood. Thank you for that. For the record, your posts are some of the least prescriptive and generally among the most thoughtful posts on this forum.

Thank you so much for your kind words. I really appreciate them.

Pre-learning small chunks seems like a good idea.

Thinking about it, I think one part of why I don't like pre-learning myself is that very often my first association with a word sticks in my mind, even a long time later. "Ah that was the word X character said on Y occasion".

Sometimes, of course, a new association takes the foreground but often it is the first encounter that sticks. Part of the reason for that, I suspect, is that the first encounter was in my mind throughout its early Anki-consolidation period.

For me that is a good reason to have encountered the word live before learning it in Anki; so that it enters my consciousness as a live word with associations rather than a list-word and Anki then consolidates that.

As said, that is just my personal take.

(2016-05-26, 4:16 pm)CureDolly Wrote: Thinking about it, I think one part of why I don't like pre-learning myself is that very often my first association with a word sticks in my mind, even a long time later. "Ah that was the word X character said on Y occasion".

That makes sense. I am usually learning on anki mobile while out on a lunch break or walking somewhere, so locations are often associated with words. I can still remember where I was when I learned a word after more than a year. I should figure out how to exploit this better.

My problem with adding as I go is that it's not a technique that lends itself to studying on a 4" screen. Also, I've read a bit using wakaru(mobile pop-up dictionary) but at my level about 50% of the words require a lookup, so it kind of kills my flow/enjoyment. As you say, it's a bit of a slog. When the level of look-ups goes down a bit, adding as I go will probably be much more tenable.