laner36 Wrote:Let me see if I understand right. You tap the kanji for the kana? so it doesn't have it in furigana?

You tap the kanji to see the furigana.

When I was in Japan I bought a copy of Final Fantasy XII, but I never played it becous I cannot understand the Japanese... My friend was playing and he used to say "This game is very good, if you can play and understand everything in the game, your Japanese will be very good, almost like a japanese".

I think playing vidogames can be a great way to learn Japanese, since we are learning doing things that we like. I don't think we need understand everything in the game, but if we just play a game, finish it and go to another one, our skills will naturally improve. We know that games share a lot of vocabulary (how play RPG without know 敵), so playing videogames we are doing what linguists like Stephen Krashen mean by "NARROW INPUT".

I absolutely disagree with people who say thing like "You don't use thing like 'this potion will restore your char HP' in real life". Even we learn words that aren't used, we still learning the LANGUAGE, we still learning how to say thing and the correct way, we learn kanji readings, etc.

mairov Wrote:I absolutely disagree with people who say thing like "You don't use thing like 'this potion will restore your char HP' in real life"..

johnzep Wrote:if sentences like "you have been attacked by a green slime." or "This potion will restore your magical energy during battle" are useful to you in daily conversation, then you live a very exciting life ^__^

To clarify what I wrote before, I didn't say using video games was a bad idea or useless...merely if you could use the phrases your life would be exciting.

I certainly think battling slime, taking magic potions, and trying to rescue the princess even though she might in another castle would be exciting. definately more exciting than my ALT gig!

The furigana on zelda sounds useful. Does anybody know any other games with furigana? Also how about games with a lot of voice acting? I found out something that could be useful to somebody, pretty much all the final fantasy ports on gameboy advance can be played with kanji or in complete hiragana.

Not only the games, but having the instructions in Japanese is pretty good. Obviously I don't read the instructions before playing! But sometimes it is necessary to work out what's going on!

I noticed quite a nice sentence on the back of 'Rainbow Six Vegas':

オマエの背中は俺が守る！

mixi seems to be a good place to find playing partners too.

Sounds like a good idea. I was toying with doing the same for FFXII, but I've never played it, and transferring sentences to anki would be like pulling teeth!

Perhaps one I've already played would be a good place to start!

Amazon.jp Wrote:この商品は選択された住所には発送できません。お届け先を変更するか、数量を「0」に変更後、下の「更新｣ボタンをクリックして商品をキャンセルしてください。

My meagre reading skills tell me they're not allowing me to post DS games to my address, presumably because I'm outside of Japan. Does that sound right? It didn't complain about the DVD's though.

it doesn't state the reason as being that you live outside of Japan, but I would assume that that is the problem. It basically is asking you to:
1. change the forwarding address or
2. reduce the number of the product to "0" and press "update" (更新) to cancel the order.

Amazon will not ship any type of electronics to addresses outside of Japan.

I see... cheers.

Will try play-asia instead.

Bought a PS3 last week. It can be run in a variety of languages that can be switched very easily. Is this the same with ones you buy in Europe or the US?

Anyway, I had my first night of online "study" last night. Previously I had been gaming with Brits and Yanks. But last night I hooked up with some Japanese guys I met through the mixi 'Rainbow Six Vegas' community.

Obviously one doesn't have to be in Japan to do any of this. In fact the benefits are probably greater if you don't live in Japan.

If anyone here plays Vegas on PS3, perhaps we should start a Japanese learners clan!

So I went and did it. Got the International Zodiac Edition of FFXII. Bad point; the voices are English. Good point, I found this.

http://ff12trans.pbwiki.com/TextbookAfterMovie
A whole translation wiki, which should help. Still I remember FFXII being pretty wordy in the Eng. version...

I have been thinking about find some good MMORPG in japanese and start to play it, so I searched for "mmorpg" in Google Japan and f found out this website http://momogames.net/

They have a list of free MMORPG, all in japanese versions. I think I will download some and give it a try. I just want to know how much japanese one can learn playing a game like this. I don't if I learn soo much japanese as I learn playing classical RPG games, like Final Fantasy, etc...

By now I just have to download the games, what takes a lot of time since my conection is veryyyy slow.

Anybody know a good japanese online game?

smithem Wrote:Good point, I found this.
http://ff12trans.pbwiki.com/TextbookAfterMovie
A whole translation wiki, which should help.

Another very good website! Know we have FF7 and FFXII transcripts!

Yeah, well the dialogue seems a lot more.. modern? ばか, instead of "You fool" I've detected, but so far it seems alright. I'm no expert though!

So far, its been difficult. I'm quite a beginner so everything is being mined.
(As long as I understand it, but most of which I do...)

It's proving very good for using plain form and colloq. speech, which I really need practice with, being brought up on the JFBP tosh until now.

Hi everyone...
I just finished Mario & Luigi RPG for GBA. It was the first RPG that I played all in Japanese! I am very proud of myself, since I could play without looking at the dictionary and getting a lot of things by context. I needed to use a dictionary just one or two times ind order to find kind of secret itens. Now I am thinking what game should I play...

I think video games are a very good way to learn japanese.Have you tried watch japanese anime with English subtitles on as one way of increasing your vocab? It's a really great way in my opinion as you learn abaout japanese culture as well.
A great movie to watch would be ohayo (ozu) or i really recommend going to your nearest DVD rental store and renting some studio ghibli films.For starts try spirited away it's a great movie.
here are all the studio ghibli movies i really recommend them!
http://www.onlineghibli.com/films.php
(just paste that into the long box on the top of your browser and hit enter!)
^_^

oh yeah, I forgot to tell you guys, Some anime movies don't have English subtitles and unless its a dvd you won't be able to select the English subtitles option.
I also recommend The movie Howls Moving Castle heres the link.
http://www.onlineghibli.com/howls_castle/

I feel that I'd end up merely reading the eng. subtitles, and not getting much Japanese from that! Japanese subtitles though...

On the subject of video games, I recently bought myself a Sony PSP. Would anyone be able to recommend a few games for this console? Obviously, I am mainly interested in text-intensive games such as RPGs and (non-エロゲー) visual novels. It is also important that the text "waits" for the player (i.e. doesn't automatically change after a set amount of time), as I still read Japanese very, very slowly.

Thanks in advance. ツ

I like the Japanese version of Final Fantasy Anniversary for the PSP, because not only does it look pretty compared to the old games, the dialog is fairly simple and you can choose between Kanji, Kana, and English text. As for kanji learning games for the PSP, I can't believe I've never even thought about it. A quick Google search yields "Kanji Trainer Portable", though.

wzafran Wrote:I am testing one other path to Japanese fluency right now; through videogames. Or more specifically, through Japanese RPGs, beginning with an old classic, Final Fantasy VII. I'm slowly working my way through it, taking note of all new words and grammatical forms, then memorizing and injecting them into my spreadsheet notes and SRS collections. (I must personally thank whoever created ePSXe.)

Well, that makes me feel old.
I've done it with a lot of games, so far mostly games I've already completed in English. This gives freedom to not worry about what they're exactly saying (as I already know what to do) and just take in what I can.

Lately I've had an inkling to play video games, but in addition to learning Japanese and dental school (low priority... just kidding), I started to think I didn't have time for it all. Then I realized I could kill two birds with one stone and import a Japanese console to play some sweet new Japanese games...

Several questions:
1. Has anybody tried this with Xbox360/PS3, and will it work with American power/tv hookups (I think Japan has NTSC and 110V/60Hz power... does this mean compatible)?
2. Which system would you recommend (I worry about Xbox360's longevity in 日本)?
3. Do English made games (specifically Assassins Creed), usually have 日本語 audio/text when released in Japan?

Thanks for your help!

I might have found my answer... PS3 does not enforce region lockout on games, so I could get an American PS3 and just import the games. That avoids most potential import headaches, plus I would have proper DVD/Blu-ray region playback.

But I did see some cool games for Xbox360... Torn!