Learn Japanese kanji and vocab with RPG video game

Dragg Member

From: Sacramento, California Registered: 2007-09-21 Posts: 369

In case you guys don't already know, there is a free computer game called Knuckles in Chinaland that teaches Japanese. Never mind the strange name; besides being surprisingly well-made, the game is also highly customizable and features full support for use with JLPT kanji lists, Heisig kanji lists, 1 thru 6th grade elementary school kanji lists, etc. I use this game along with the Heisig books, and it works great. A fun way to learn or reinforce both pronunciation and character meanings.

www.tbns.net/knuckles/

laner36 Member

From: Miyagi Registered: 2007-05-20 Posts: 162

How does this compare to slime forest adventure?

Last edited by laner36 (2007 November 06, 12:06 am)

Dragg Member

From: Sacramento, California Registered: 2007-09-21 Posts: 369

I haven't personally played Slime Forest Adventure yet, but some people seem to prefer Knuckles because of the plot, what appear to be slightly better graphics, and the fact that it is completely free, whereas you need to register Slime for 20 bucks to get the full version. However, they look very similar so I guess its mostly a matter of personal preference.
Here's a forum thread that I found:

http://www.phpbbplanet.com/forum/viewto … =chinaland

Have you tried SFA? How is it?

JapanesePod101 Sponsor

yorkii Member

From: Moriya, Ibaraki Registered: 2005-10-26 Posts: 408 Website

oh man.... you two are both talking about the worst RPG's I have ever played. regardless of their relation to japanese, these games should be banned. they are that poor. you'll learn hiragana and katakana better with "remembering the kana" and you can study words faster and more efficiently with spaced repetition software. Play a game because you want to, not because you think it will help you with your studies, cos in both of these cases, it probably won't. you will eventually put of playing it because it is so stupid. get into the Final Fantasy series like some of the guys on the board are doing here or play Zelda for the DS and study like you got a pair!!

Dragg Member

From: Sacramento, California Registered: 2007-09-21 Posts: 369

Repetition software has its place but it isn't very fun.. I don't play Knuckles because its an efficient way to learn, I play to mix things up for a while as a new way to sustain my interest on the long arduous road to kanji fluency.. I mean, granted, it doesn't hold up to today's rpgs, but as homebrew retro game, I think it stands up pretty well on its own.

laner36 Member

From: Miyagi Registered: 2007-05-20 Posts: 162

Hey Yorkii, I agree that I need to grow a pair (thanks for the good laugh).
Zelda just seems like it would be way over my head. It is actually more of a long term goal to play it...
I know kana so I think the slime game looks pretty annoying starting out with kana. But it seems that knuckles game you can start straight with kanji readings or perhaps Heisig kanji. Seems like a good warm-up for DS Zelda. Am I wrong?

Jarvik7 Member

From: 名古屋 Registered: 2007-03-05 Posts: 3946

You can tap words in DS Zelda for furigana. The game seems to be made for fairly young kids. The Japanese isn't that hard and the game is ridiculously easy - I beat most of the bosses without losing a single heart.

laner36 Member

From: Miyagi Registered: 2007-05-20 Posts: 162

Furigana is good for learning the readings but will RTK 1 be enough to know what is going on in Zelda? It still seems like I would be able to read it but not know what is going on with my abysmally low vocabulary...
I bought なおっておぼえる　for the DS a while back and haven't touched it since because it was over my head.

mairov Member

From: Brazil Registered: 2007-07-06 Posts: 43 Website

Final Fantasy 6 is a retro game and is better than Knuckles.
I downloaded Knuckles and played a bit... it is terrible. Lets go back to FF and Zelda.

yukamina Member

From: Canada Registered: 2006-01-09 Posts: 761

I tried that Knuckes game....it was sooooo sloooooow. After a couple battles I couldn't take it and stopped. The graphics were old fashioned, I don't know why people like that. I guess it's an excuse for poor quality. I can't say anything about plot, since I didn't get far.

SFA...I played this game to. I didn't like the plot or graphics, but the slime battles were very effective for me. I finished learning all the kanji meanings this way, in a very short time. It's not a good game, but it was much better than dry slow flashcards. The member ship was different when I signed up, $2/month. So that wasn't a problem then.

Playing games IN Japanese is good. But it doesn't directly teach you anything, it's up to you to look up words and remember them.

Jarvik7 Member

From: 名古屋 Registered: 2007-03-05 Posts: 3946

I never liked Slime Forest Adventure very much. It took too long to get to the Japanese learning bit, and the free version has so few kanji that it's pointless.

cracky Member

From: Las Vegas Registered: 2007-06-25 Posts: 260

Dragg wrote:
I mean, granted, it doesn't hold up to today's rpgs, but as homebrew retro game, I think it stands up pretty well on its own.

This is slightly off-topic, but every time I hear about retro homebrew games I think of this game:
http://www.wesnoth.org/

It has nothing to do with teaching you Japanese(though you can play it in Japanese), but it's a cool game based off stuff like the langrisser games. I'm mainly just posting it to show all retro homebrew games don't have to be as bad as these two.

Last edited by cracky (2007 November 06, 3:44 pm)

Jarvik7 Member

From: 名古屋 Registered: 2007-03-05 Posts: 3946

One of my friends made a build of Nethack (oldschool rpg) that both has lots of kanji quiz based combat /w little dead time, AND follows Heisig. The question database is apparently just a plain text file so you can add/remove kanji as you see fit. It's also open source so you could make it drill vocab or whatever you want with some simple changes. He said he was going to release it last weekend so I'll ask him about a url.

Dragg Member

From: Sacramento, California Registered: 2007-09-21 Posts: 369

LOL, I didn't expect you guys to be so hard on this game! Its true that it is very slow (I wish you could speed the battles up), but I really do think its more fun than just sitting around with flashcards for hours on end. I don't think the graphics are an "excuse for poor quality".... But rather, I think its about what you would expect from a lone individual making a game in his basement on zero budget and expecting no money for it... I can't play games like FF 6 or Zelda in Japanese because I have very little grasp on the vocab and grammar. Not understanding the details of the plot would just be too frustrating for me. Furthermore, aside from the slowness of the game, Knuckles basically IS repetition flashcard software... The battles occur quite frequently... you walk around for just a couple econds and bam!... I just think its kind of neat to have a fairly interesting plot as an incentive to keep you going for a while... The dialogue, imo, is actually better than that of the majority of 8 or 16 bit rpg games that existed back in the day.

Dragg Member

From: Sacramento, California Registered: 2007-09-21 Posts: 369

Cracky, yes the Wesnoth game definitely looks to be better quality, but if you look at the credits page, it looks like about 100 people or so were involved in the production of that game!

amthomas Member

From: Japan Registered: 2006-06-22 Posts: 104

Jarvik7 wrote:
One of my friends made a build of Nethack ... I'll ask him about a url.

Okay, I realize that this is horribly impatient of me... but just in case you forgot, um, could you please please please send the link to his nethack kanji variant? I'm really interested in how it works, and I'm a fan of the many existing mods to the basic nethack game...

so... yeah... ... ... link?

wicked cool,

-ang

Yatsuzaki New member

From: Tokyo Japan Registered: 2007-05-03 Posts: 4

Old thread but here I am, the friend Jarvik7 mentioned.

I posted about the game in this thread:

http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=1031

And a direct link to it on my site:

http://dontcometojapan.com/NetHackRTK.html

Someone complained about not liking the tile set. You can shrink it to text-size by removing one line from a text file. There is ample documentation on this sort of thing on the official NetHack page.

Using textmode will not work as the dungeons will be switched to kana which makes it impossible to see what's what. HOWEVER, someone could make a gfx tileset that looks just like the text set if they wanted it to look like that.

playadom Member

Registered: 2007-06-29 Posts: 468

Yatsuzaki wrote:
Someone complained about not liking the tile set. You can shrink it to text-size by removing one line from a text file. There is ample documentation on this sort of thing on the official NetHack page.

Using textmode will not work as the dungeons will be switched to kana which makes it impossible to see what's what. HOWEVER, someone could make a gfx tileset that looks just like the text set if they wanted it to look like that.

Actually, I figured out how to use text mode. I use Microsoft's AppLocale application to run it as a Japanese application. Normally this would make the dungeons in kana, but by commenting out the line:

OPTIONS=IBMGraphics

in defaults.nh

I was able to have both the kanji display correctly, and the dungeon work in ASCII.

Too bad ADOM is closed source. I would pay big big money for a Japanese learning environment integrated into that.

Last edited by playadom (2008 June 18, 10:17 pm)

Yatsuzaki New member

From: Tokyo Japan Registered: 2007-05-03 Posts: 4

playadom, very nice.

I am also thinking about my next project, another study tool.

In the meanwhile, my friend and I have been building up a quizbot on IRC. We have each level of JLPT on it so far. The lighthearted competition makes it incredibly fun.

ivoSF Member

From: The Netherlands Registered: 2005-11-29 Posts: 144

i tried slimeforest but it is very oldskool, the problem is that the gap to normal games is rather large.
does anyone know of decent pc games with furigan over the kanji?
those "ecchi visual novels" like kanon, da capo, x-change and some games without the "H" like ever 17 that are very nice to play and have a lot of text, so if there a few titles out there that use furigana that would be a reason for me to buy it.

one of of the many reasons i want to learn japanese is to play such games, what beter way then to learn japanese by playing them?

the problem is everything i know of is translated or for the moment way over mine head, furigana would lower the gap considerable.

stshores24 Member

From: Atlanta Registered: 2008-01-22 Posts: 71 Website

I was going to pull out KiCL again when I read on their web site that a Heisig keyword file was available. Sadly, their definition of 'available' seems to be 'formerly available via a broken link on a much-neglected forum'. Does anyone have this Heisig keyword file, or know of a reliable place to get it (i.e. you just downloaded it yesterday, not two years ago, and you know it's there)? I don't see inputting 865 keywords and kanji myself, and I don't know how to make the spreadsheet I have into a text file readable by that program.

Last edited by stshores24 (2008 July 11, 5:40 pm)

furrykef Member

From: Oklahoma City Registered: 2008-06-24 Posts: 191

Tell us the format of the file and I (or someone else) can probably make one for you. Not just 865 but all 2042 if you wish.

Last edited by furrykef (2008 July 11, 5:43 pm)

stshores24 Member

From: Atlanta Registered: 2008-01-22 Posts: 71 Website

furrykef wrote:
Tell us the format of the file and I (or someone else) can probably make one for you. Not just 865 but all 2042 if you wish.

Thanks! I'm not quite sure of the format. I uploaded one of the files here: http://rapidshare.com/files/129001352/J … a.clv.html , but it looks like this:

Code:

JLPT4 Vocabulary (Roumaji)
聞く~kiku
Meaning
listen, ask
風~kaze
Meaning
wind
だれ~~dare
Meaning
who
...

The first line, of course, is the title of the list.

It's pretty simple, but I don't know how to turn my spreadsheet into this...I mean, I could export the two columns for keyword/kanji from my spreadsheet as a CSV file and replace the commas with line breaks, but I'm not sure how I would insert 2042 instances of the word 'Meaning'.

p.s. The file I would be exporting the two columns from is here: http://rapidshare.com/files/129002631/k … o.xls.html

Last edited by stshores24 (2008 July 11, 6:03 pm)

Silmara Member

From: Bremen, Germany Registered: 2008-07-09 Posts: 22

I know its not a RPG but I changed the language in the Sims2 to Japanese and its really fun. They use a lot of Kanji, but if you played it before and experiment its not that hard to understand. When you like that type of game you can learn all the basics needed in everyday life .
Although you probably cant install the language during installation process the language can still be changed in the registry easy and harmless.

Here is an instruction:

http://www.sims2wiki.info/wiki.php?titl … e_Language

However, the numbers indicated there didnt work with my version Japanese was "e" instead of 15, which I discovered after changing the numbers several times.

Make sure to change the language in the Expansion folders, too.

stshores24 Member

From: Atlanta Registered: 2008-01-22 Posts: 71 Website

Silmara wrote:
I know its not a RPG but I changed the language in the Sims2 to Japanese and its really fun.

Hmm, I wonder how easy it would be to do that to other games. There were some older Maxis games that were imported from Japan (A-Train and Sim Tower, I believe they were called). I suspect the original Japanese versions might be abandonware now, but I'm not sure what search terms I would use.

Index » Learning resources

Dragg wrote:

Jarvik7 wrote:

Yatsuzaki wrote:

furrykef wrote:

Code:

Silmara wrote: