(deleted)

It's a beaten path, alright.

Stopping to write down those sentences must be tremendously tedious. Surely, you'd still be getting a learning experience if you just read the dialog as it came along, figuring out what it meant from the situation?

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 ^__^

There's another thread on this topic. I'll ignore it.

FFVII? Blasphemy...real men play FFVI. But if you want to go down that route, you could probably dump the text yourself from the ISO's. It can be done with English games, so I'll imply that it can be done with Japanese ones.

@JimmySeal: I'm not sure if you referring to the inherent repetitiveness of video game text or the AJATT method in general.

@johnzep: That's a very good point, but the idea is to somehow practice Japanese in a manner that is more engaging than, say, dull reading. All work and no play make Jack a dull boy...

I wasn't thinking about the inherent repetitiveness of video games. I have qualms with the AJATT method. I think copying all those sentences is, in a large part, a frustrating waste of time, but it's especially true in the case of a video game, which is supposed to be, above all, relaxing and enjoyable.

Learning through video games...what a philosopy

So good in fact that I'm giving up on trying not to buy a PS3.

My mate was telling me about joining a team of online Japanese commandos who were shouting instructions down the line at him. Killing baddies and learning 日本語 at the same time :mad::mad::mad:

The MMO Guild Wars lets you set its language to Japanese.
And a whole host of other languages (Chinese, Korean, German, Spanish, etc.)

Since it's in English too you can simply switch languages to find the translation.

Videogames are a great way to learn languages!
I have been playing videogames since I was 13-14 (now I am 24). I think I started to play RPG games in english at the age of 15-16. At that time I didn't know any english at all. Since I just wanted to play, I just played. Not becous I wanted to learn english, but becous I wanted to go through the game... Fortunately, I noticed that english was really necessary if I wanted to understand the game history, and if I wanted to find all the secrete characters and weapons...But in fact I never studied english while playing. I just guessed the meaning and rarely used a dictionary. I did it for years... and I learned a lot of vocabulary. As you can see my english is not perfect, I made mistakes, lots of... BUT, I think my english is good for someone who lives in a non-english speaker country (Brazil) and never studied english at all. I just was expose to a lot of input, mainly through video-games.

Now, I am learning Japanese, and I am trying to do the same. But it a bit different now....
English and Portuguese, although are completely different languages, there are lots of transparent words and you can guess the meaning of lots of words. Japanese is diferente, you cannot guess anything! I have been studying Japanese for 4 years, I lived in Japan for 10 mouths last year, and just now I am starting to feel a bit more comfortable when facing a japanese game.

But I agree with the idea of keep track on your progress taking notes of words and senteces you don't know. But if you don't more then 50% of what is written it will be complicated to play comfortably... I believe that you have to have a strong base at japanese language to play video-games and learn with them.Heisig can a great tool for that! But you also need some gramatical, structural base of the language.

I am playing Mario & Luigi RPG for GBA, it seems easy, there not so many Kanji, but there is a lot of spoken japanese. I think beginners will not understant lots of things and will waste a lot of time searching things that have no meaning at all... That way it is easy, but it is difficult xD

In order to keep track of my progress I play using a emulador. I use a ps2 joystick pluged in the pc and set one of the control keys to take snapshots. As long as I play, I take snapshots of things I don't understand. I don't stop the game to search word in dictionary.. I will do it rarely when I really need understand everthing that is beeing said in order to find some item, path, etc...

I play, enjoy the game and pratice my japanese... After that, I take some time to look my snapshots, study them and create flashcards for my SRS (Anki). I do it until I get tired... I have LOTS of snapshots, but I probably will study a few of them per day and create perhaps 10 new cards.... my objective is not input all the I-dont-know-sentences in the game into the SRS. I will play the game and put how many sentences I could in the SRS. And I will learn enjoying my game....
I think a good advice is: don't try to learn every word and sentence in the game, book, movies, etc... If you do this this you will get tired and give up the game.

I had a topic about this in my blog... unfortunately my blog is in Portuguese, but you can just have a look at the pictures: http://mairoblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/pa...-para.html

Weel, my topic is getting biiig..so I will stop here.
See ya

Wow, that site is definitely a great find. For some reason when I try to view it though, it is just gibberish. I have had a similar problem with a couple other Japanese sites. Pretty much everything else I try to view is fine but there are a select few that don't work. Any thoughts on a fix?

Also, any suggestions on finding a reasonably priced copy of Final Fantasy VII for Mac? I think your method sounds like a lot of fun and I definitely want to give it a try

fingerscrossed Wrote:Wow, that site is definitely a great find. For some reason when I try to view it though, it is just gibberish. I have had a similar problem with a couple other Japanese sites. Pretty much everything else I try to view is fine but there are a select few that don't work. Any thoughts on a fix?

Also, any suggestions on finding a reasonably priced copy of Final Fantasy VII for Mac? I think your method sounds like a lot of fun and I definitely want to give it a try

It's your character encoding settings, you can change it in your browser.

I used RPG games to learn Japanese. I would just play for enjoyment reading the hiragana whether I understood what they were talking about or not, but when I got stuck I would look up all the words so I could figure out what to do next. I would also write down words I saw over and over again just because "It must be a useful word if they keep saying it so much!" I didn't know any kanji when I started and by the end of my first game I could read a few hundred. That doesn't really sound like much, but when I started I only knew hiragana (no katakana), a few particles, and maybe 20-30 words... And I learned many new words and how to conjugate. (As in -te form, past tense, causative, passive, conditionals, potential, volitional... I really didn't know that much at all when I started....)

I guess a book would be a better tool for learning in some ways depending on what your goals are, but for me it would have been less enjoyable at my level of Japanese at the time and I wouldn't have felt the motivation to keep trying. The most important thing is that you are interested in what you are reading. And trying to look up every single word you don't know is tedious and boring. Just enjoy the game. If you are really wanting to know what someone said, look it up. If you see an unfamiliar word appear often, look it up. Later you can start looking up all the words because there will be less and less words you don't know. But then, you're probably farther along with Japanese than I was back then.

PrettyKitty Wrote:I guess a book would be a better tool for learning in some ways depending on what your goals are, but for me it would have been less enjoyable at my level of Japanese at the time and I wouldn't have felt the motivation to keep trying.

Nonsense! I think the approach you took was awesome, and I think a lot more people should learn languages that way.

fingerscrossed Wrote:Wow, that site is definitely a great find. For some reason when I try to view it though, it is just gibberish. I have had a similar problem with a couple other Japanese sites. Pretty much everything else I try to view is fine but there are a select few that don't work. Any thoughts on a fix?

Also, any suggestions on finding a reasonably priced copy of Final Fantasy VII for Mac? I think your method sounds like a lot of fun and I definitely want to give it a try

Try manually selecting the encoding scheme. This is usually in the View menu of the browser under Character Encoding. Try the following ones in this order:
Japanese Auto-Detect
Japanese (Shift-JIS)
Japanese (EUC-JP)
Unicode (UTF-8)

One of those should usually work most of the time.

PrettyKitty Wrote:The most important thing is that you are interested in what you are reading. And trying to look up every single word you don't know is tedious and boring. Just enjoy the game. If you are really wanting to know what someone said, look it up. If you see an unfamiliar word appear often, look it up. Later you can start looking up all the words because there will be less and less words you don't know. But then, you're probably farther along with Japanese than I was back then.

Absolutely right! Enjoy what you are doing is the most important thing in language learning! You don't need search every word or sentence, just search what you want to search and keep playing... The more you play the more you still in touch with the language! Of course, it is good to do a formal study, like putting senteces into a SRS. But don't spend 4 hours studying and 1 hour playing, spend 4 hours playing and 1 hour studying xD

Mario & Luigi RPG is the first RPG that I am going to play entirely in Japanese. I used to start japanese RPGs but never finished any one... Now I know I am going to finish it and it will be a great advance in my studies.

And about the FF7 website, IT IS AMAZING! Maybe soon we will have Final Fantasy 7 specialists (in japanese of course...).

I will tell you my biggest objective... play all Metal Gear Series in Japanese. I have the games, but it is REALLY tough!

narafan Wrote:The MMO Guild Wars lets you set its language to Japanese.
And a whole host of other languages (Chinese, Korean, German, Spanish, etc.)

Don't forget Bork! Bork! Bork! Tons of educational value there.

mairov Wrote:I use a ps2 joystick pluged in the pc and set one of the control keys to take snapshots. As long as I play, I take snapshots of things I don't understand. I don't stop the game to search word in dictionary..

Wow, that's a great idea! That way you can still look up things as need be, but you get the advantage of figuring out things in context. Very nice. Considering your education, you have good English skills.

wzafran Wrote:Whoa! You seem fairly fluent in English yourself, so when you mention that you've never studied it properly and acquired fluency through playing videogames, that's amazing.

The translator (Russian, I believe) for Elemental Games (Space Rangers series, among other things, awesome PC RPG's in the vein of Star Control) learned English entirely through PC RPG's, which is wholly possible, considering the text density of Planescape: Torment and any of the Ultima games.

fingerscrossed Wrote:Also, any suggestions on finding a reasonably priced copy of Final Fantasy VII for Mac?

You are infinitely better off buying a copy of the PS1 game and emulating it. I know that there is a Windows version of FFVII, but that would cost a lot as Eidos only printed a few copies of it.

synewave Wrote:My mate was telling me about joining a team of online Japanese commandos who were shouting instructions down the line at him. Killing baddies and learning 日本語 at the same time :mad::mad::mad:

I was thinking of playing Japanese MMO's for the same reason: at least I can rest easy in the thought that if I ever pursue Korean, there will always be a pretty open field to practice on (ZOMG, preposition!)

There's also an endless supply of voiced visual novels and RPGs on the computer, if that's your thing. It's less tedious to look up words since you can hear the reading anyway.

Also it doesn't work for everything, but there's a couple of programs that can hook directly to the games to dump the text or even translate it for you: 'AGTH' and 'Oh! Text hooker'. There's more info on Google and the Hongfire forums. Using this you can fill up your sentence quota much more easily

Basically the program constantly watches the game's output and copies the text to the clipboard. From there you can use a translation program that displays an english version while you're playing, or just paste the words as needed into a web dictionary.

Unfortunately I think it's much more complicated to dump the text from an emulated game. They don't use standard encodings like the PC games.

megaqwerty Wrote:You are infinitely better off buying a copy of the PS1 game and emulating it. I know that there is a Windows version of FFVII, but that would cost a lot as Eidos only printed a few copies of it.

O man, I didn't even think about that. The Japanese ps version is pretty cheap on play-asia.com if I remember correctly. Sorry to continue asking questions but any idea if the emulators are region specific? I've never used one before.

Any Super Famicom fans out there? I'm playing through FF6 again in Japanese right now...懐かしい、、、

shaydwyrm Wrote:Any Super Famicom fans out there? I'm playing through FF6 again in Japanese right now...懐かしい、、、

No console since has satisfied me quite like the SNES in terms of quality and gameplay.

Some favorites are Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Seiken Densetsu 3 (聖剣伝説3), and Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

Some of my friends prefer FFIV or, heaven forbid, FFVII, but FFVI is my all-time favorite.

-- Daniel

Ramchip Wrote:Basically the program constantly watches the game's output and copies the text to the clipboard. From there you can use a translation program that displays an english version while you're playing, or just paste the words as needed into a web dictionary.

Or paste the sentence into Anki. That's very cool: I'll have to check that out. Admittedly, the only visual novels I have ever played (read?) are Tsukihime and (cough) Bible Black. Apparently the Japanese market produces a billion of the things daily.

fingerscrossed Wrote:Sorry to continue asking questions but any idea if the emulators are region specific? I've never used one before.

No. For further information on PS1 emulating, I would recommend contacting wzafran or myself privately.

On the topic of Japanese with videogames:

I'd highly recommend picking up a copy of ????????????? (Japanese version of Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass) for the Nintendo DS?This game features pop-up ?????That's right - all you do is tap your stylus on the kanji that you don't know and the ???? pops up right above it. It's amazingly useful, and hey, you'll learn the word for "ghost ship" very quickly.

But really, the game is great - it's fun (as those who have played any Legend of Zelda games know), funny, and the puzzles in the game force you to really try to at least get the gist of what is going on. There are plenty of kanji that would be in my "I have no bloody idea" stack were it not for this game's constant reinforcement.

And it's not so hard - my level ain't that high, and I'm progressing nicely. And if you get stuck, use your AJATT and look up a walkthrough in Japanese.

About that FFVII script, are some lines left out? Some whole sentences are listed in the Japanese script that are missing in the English one and vice-versa. So I guess what I'm asking is, is that script missing some sentences or does the English version of the game delete/add sentences?

And I agree with dihutenosa. ゼルダの伝説～夢幻の砂時計 is great!

wzafran Wrote:Either way, I am planning to make a new thread, which will discuss the conversations of Final Fantasy VII and their finer grammatical points, that will be further expanded as I go along the game. I'll imbue it with screenshots, etc. Therefore there'll be an avenue for the discussion of colloquial grammar used in games, and everyone gets to learn better. (And those who already know get to impart knowledge to us as well smile)

Good idea! Some time ago I was thinking about making Anki Decks specifically for some games like Zelda or Final Fantasy. Unfortunately I gave up the idea becous it need effort and time. A deck cannot contain all the game sentences or words, there are so many! It needs only the more important words and senteces, and play the game and decide between what is important and what isn't important is not easy work.

So now I am just playing and recording what is important for me. But a thread here about Final Fantasy VII dialogs would be great! It is a good idea.

dihutenosa Wrote:I'd highly recommend picking up a copy of ????????????? (Japanese version of Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass) for the Nintendo DS

Thanks for the recommendation! I was just gonna ask what people recommend for the DS, but you beat me to it.
Let me see if I understand right. You tap the kanji for the kana? so it doesn't have it in furigana? So would this game be too difficult for someone just finishing RTK1? (What level are you at more specifically?) Should I learn some readings first or just go for it?

dihutenosa Wrote:And if you get stuck, use your AJATT and look up a walkthrough in Japanese.

What does this mean?

Terhorst Wrote:Some favorites are Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Seiken Densetsu 3 (聖剣伝説3), and Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

Aha, a kindred spirit! Chrono Trigger is next on my list. I could never really get into A Link to the Past though. I may give it another try in Japanese.