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Playing RPGs to improve your reading pace

#76
Yes, it at least has spaces.

(In the research I'm doing for my dissertation I have to read all kinds of garbage like that -- katakana/kanji, Japanese written with no punctuation or dakuten, switching back and forth between classical Chinese and Japanese, etc.)
Edited: 2009-10-07, 4:59 pm
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#77
i don't have that much trouble reading all kana material... i just either understand a word or i don't, if you got your grammar down good, its pretty easy to separate the sentences out while you are reading...
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#78
Yeah, that's how I feel too -- I've seen some people almost consider it a mark of pride when they can't understand kana writing (perhaps feeling that it shows how good their kanji is), but I think a failure to understand all-kana writing probably points to deeper problems with Japanese sentence structure or vocabulary. (Native speakers will sometimes claim that they can't understand all-kana writing but they're exaggerating; they certainly find it annoying and slow to read, but if pressed, I doubt you could find many literate native speakers who would be actually incapable of reading it.)
Edited: 2009-10-07, 5:51 pm
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#79
I find trouble reading all kana sentences... is there something wrong with me!? =O
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#80
It depends. Do you just find it annoying and kind of slow, and do you find yourself having to go back and read things twice to understand it? That's normal, since you probably don't have a whole lot of practice reading kana.

However, if you actually find yourself unable to comprehend things written in kana that you can understand in normal orthography, that can point to a vocabulary or grammar weakness; for instance, being able to piece words together from the kanji but not knowing their pronunciation.
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#81
This post inspired me to attempt to play through Chrono Trigger on the SNES in Japanese. I tried it a long time ago before I started RTK and got nowhere. I'm still nowhere near being finished with RTK1, but I am finding that the grammar that I've picked up since last time, and the huge improvement in kanji recognition is helping me a lot. I've looked things up using my dictionary also, but I don't have to do that anywhere near as often, and relatively often I can guess a most accurate general meaning for compounds, especially if I know all the kanji in it. It's a nice feeling and has definitely reinforced my belief in the Heisig method.
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#82
why don't you copy and paste most of the major stuff in anki from the Chrono Compendium and then play it after you review Wink
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#83
Did anyone play Grandia? It's one of the first Playstation RPGs I've ever played.. and I decided to give it a try again, this time in Japanese. Music is great, characters are still fun and what's most important, there's lots of dialogue. Most NPCs have two or three different lines of dialogue.. which is occasionally pretty fun to read (/listen to) too.
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#84
I love grandia Smile I recently played through about half of Grandia III on PS2 before it got stolen. I kinda didn't train hard enough too and got stuck at one point. Currently working my way through Breath Of Fire 3 Smile

TIP: if you have a deck that has listening comprehension reviews, set the other half the deck to inactive and just do all your listening comprehension reviews while you level up! It works like a charm. Great way to get half ur reviews done whilst getting in the training you need to advance in the game without any trouble or wasted time Smile
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#85
Yea Grandia is great! I played through it (the Japanese version) when I didn't know any Japanese yet, I think it's time to play it again Smile
PS: it's the original version on Saturn Big Grin ...now where did I stuffed my Saturn...
Edited: 2009-10-10, 6:46 am
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#86
I recently started Zelda Phantom Hourglass. It's really gratifying being able to fully read or at least get the gist of entire dialog bubbles from time to time, without revealing the furigana. However, the majority of sentences have many words that I don't know. I play near my PC with a dictionary page open and routinely look almost everything up. If the words are obscure, overly situation-specific, etc., I don't add them at this point since I'm still fairly noob. However, you do pick up lots of basic words and phrases.

I'll probably play Spirit Tracks when I'm done with this, just to continue using the crutch for the time being of having furigana access. Of course that'll be awhile--gameplay is sloooow when you're looking a ton of words up. I'm happy though, knowing that Spirit Tracks will go a decent bit faster, having learned a lot playing through this game.

I've basically stopped buying American DS games at all. I wish WoW was localized in Japanese. :-(
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#87
can any body recommend any gameboy / gameboy color games that are in kanji???
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#88
It's kind of funny when you come across a typo in the games -- I've been playing Ar Tonelico and they had 食べないない; I was trying to figure out what the hell that meant for a few seconds before I figured out it was a typo for 食べていない.
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