I know that a good technique used around here is using subs2srs to "process" an anime or a drama. Theoretically, could one "process" a visual novel in the same way, at least when there's dialogue? When you have a lot of dialogue in a VN, spoken of course, it's almost akin to anime dialogue, except without the, you know, animation. If I could make a deck using the dialogue, screenshots, and audio clips from a VN, would that work? Of course, the more..."adult" ones wouldn't really help much since the dialogue is...not really dialogue *wink wink*. OK, now I look like a pervert.

There are usually ways to extract the script and the audio from the games. I'm not really sure how you could go about automating the process for each line of dialogue though. It's a good idea, because there is usually tons and tons of dialogue in those things.

Well, I'm not really talking about the technical aspects, since if worse comes to worse, I can just try to type in what I see on screen and record the dialogue.

And I see tons of dialogue as a potentially good thing: instead of having to download multiple video files and having to search for multiple sub files in English and Japanese, all I need is the one visual novel and its translation, and if the visual novel is long, I can get a solid amount from it.

So let me get this straight:

You're asking if reading Japanese material written for Japanese people would be effective.
I'm pretty sure this is a big step in learning languages.

Are you sure you're asking if as opposed to how to process the novel? Because if you are actually asking whether or not it is worthwhile, then I say yes!

But I don't know how to extract/process anything, so all I can do is help you google things.

Thing is, I don't really know how complex the "novel" actually is, since a large part of VN's is unspoken thought. Is that different, grammar-wise, from dialogue? I'm guessing the reason you begin with processing anime and dramas is because dialogue is fairly simple structure-wise, so I'm just wondering if I would be going over my head to try and process novels, dialogue and non-dialogue, instead of just simple dialogue in anime or dramas.

Oh I see what you're saying.

To be honest, I don't have much/any experience with VNs, so I can't help you too much about that kind of thing.
However, depending on your level, you may want to start out with anime/drama. The reason being that even if you don't understand each line of dialogue, you can still follow along by watching what's happening, whereas in novels you have to be following what's written down to know what's going on. In VNs, the visual aspect is mainly facial expressions/posture, right? Probably a bit tough depending on the level.

On second thought, I'd imagine the grammar would be similar to spoken dialogue. Just think about the way you think in real life:
You think: "What, this burger is $10? Hell no I won't wanna eat that"
Not: "Due to the surprising revelation that the price of the burger is $10, I shall decline the opportunity to consume it. "

When I "processed" 5cm per Second 秒速5センチメートル anime, it became difficult because of the large amount of inner dialogue. Yeah, one should reach that level but there's probably a lot of useful intermediate steps prior to that.

Still, it may just depend on the level of the novel. If it feels like you're grinding your way through it, you may need to back off and find easier material.

Asriel Wrote:On second thought, I'd imagine the grammar would be similar to spoken dialogue. Just think about the way you think in real life:
You think: "What, this burger is $10? Hell no I won't wanna eat that"
Not: "Due to the surprising revelation that the price of the burger is $10, I shall decline the opportunity to consume it. "

Hmm, I never thought of that. Now that you bring it up, most of the unspoken, nondialogue parts are just a person thinking, and usually that's similar to dialogue except they don't say it our loud.

Nukemarine Wrote:When I "processed" 5cm per Second 秒速5センチメートル anime, it became difficult because of the large amount of inner dialogue. Yeah, one should reach that level but there's probably a lot of useful intermediate steps prior to that.

Still, it may just depend on the level of the novel. If it feels like you're grinding your way through it, you may need to back off and find easier material.

Hmm, well, I'll look into some of the shorter ones that aren't really fantasy-related, and if it turns out that they're a bit too complex, I'll just put it off until I'm a bit better.

I've always found Japanese material in General--anime, dramas, etc, to have significantly more "thought" than American media. So, it's certainly not something unique to VNs, so I think they would be just as useful to SRS as any other kind of Japanese material.

Well, I don't know anything that can easily automate the process of tearing apart a visual novel like you want. I've seen Japanese tools for getting at the data, mind you, but the whole process isn't what I'd call user-friendly, and the huge variety of formats that developers use apparently makes things a rather big headache.

I can recommend using the Anime Game Text Hooker, though, instead of trying to type out everything you see yourself. All you have to do is run the game through it, and it will automagically copy all the text that pops up to your clipboard. It makes looking up unknown words leagues easier. Just copy and paste into the dictionary of your choice.

The site for it seems to be down, though, unfortunately, but I found a forum post here that has it in a megaupload link. Just... ignore the Atlas part of it, okay? Machine translation is poison for learning.

Well, I managed to use AGTH to extract a lot of text from the Japanese and the English translations, but now I need to look into extracting the audio.

*Edit* I managed to extract the audio into OGG files, but they're not in order T__T. So now I have to covert them into MP3's and find which audio goes with what.

*Edit 2* They're actually in order, so I guess this was easier than I though. Thanks for all the help!

I might be coming back here in a while asking about how you did all the technical stuff.
It turns out my girlfriend has/knows someone who has some of these, and said that I would probably like them (since she knows I like reading Japanese).

Sure, it didn't seem too hard when I did it. Are you translating, or are you going to use English and Japanese text?

I'm not translating or using the English text.
I'm just going to play it, and use the extracted files to look up words and import things into Anki.

Hmm, I don't know if you can actually just extract the text from the game files, but since you're actually playing, you probably don't need to worry about that. It's just as simple as running a program as you play, and then copying the text that shows up to either Anki cards or a Word doc.

Problem comes in when I don't know a kanji or something -- It's kind of annoying to have to go and search up the kanji.

What I would ideally like is to have the text in one big text file, so then I can just search for the line that I want, when I need it.

Even if it saved it to they clipboard, it would hardly be an obstacle to set something up to automatically paste it into a file.
So how'd you extract the text/audio?

Well, most visual novels have a button you can hold down to scroll quickly through the text. You can go through pages of dialogue from holding the quick-scroll button for maybe a few seconds, and then you'll have loads of text to be able to copy over. Of course, there can be the problem of spoilers. But, since it's in Japanese, it'd be more the pictures that spoil you, and I don't think that's too big a problem.

I've successfully extracted audio, and that's easy. I have not actually extracted text, but I think you can use the same tools to extract text. The thing is, each visual novel has a different kind of archive formats, so you need separate tools for each type of format, and that can get confusing.

http://www.solelo.com/p4s/#arctool

That has a list of different visual novel archive formats, and they give you the tools needed to extract the audio. And if you do just end up holding down the autoscroll button to copy the text, Anime Game Text Hooker is the program you want. Here's a thread for download and basic use:

http://www.hongfire.com/forum/showthread.php?t=36807

>So how'd you extract the text/audio?
it really depends on what engine the VN is using.