Learning Japanese for the imports?
Hey i know alot of you here both collect and play imports from japan. So my question to you is how/where did you learn japanese, how difficult is it to learn. If any of you have good resources (ie books tapes classes) you could recommend it would be appreciated. Also i'm not too knowledgeable on the subject, is japanese broken down into several dialects, are there different character sets for different regions in japan, is each symbol representative of a letter or a word?
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The Japanese use katakana, hiragana, and kanji. Kanji characters originated from the Chinese, and they represent full words or concepts. They're a real pain to learn, as grade school kids in Japan alone need to know 2000 different symbols. Unless you're extremely serious about learning Japanese, I wouldn't bother to try becoming fluent in kanji just for video games, not unless you absolutely must know every bit of a game's story. Instead, you're better off learning the kanji common to video games. Most games that use kanji are text-heavy games like RPGs, in which case they tend to use the same stereotypical settings from game to game. If you learn the kanji for stuff like dungeon, mountain, ocean, forest, castle, king, princess, fire, water, wind, earth, lightning, north, south, east, west, etc., you're set.
As for katakana and hiragana, they're alphabets, but they don't represent single letters like in English except in the cases of vowels and "n". When romanized into English, they're usually pairs of letters - a consonant and a vowel. Examples would be: fu, ka, hi, ro, se, etc. The sets for katakana and hiragana are basically the same, but hiragana is used for native Japanese while katakana is usually used for representing foreign words, which are 9 times out of 10 English. If you Google "katakana chart" and "hiragana chart", you can find many useful charts that you can print out, and you can easily teach yourself the characters just by picking up a game and start romanizing. Katakana is the most useful thing you'll learn in terms of video games because you won't even have to learn the Japanese language itself. English words are extremely common in video games, and as long as you can decipher them from the katakana, you'll be able to play just about anything, even RPGs. You'll miss out on most of the story, but you'll get all the essential information like names of characters, items, moves, locations, etc.
Some people have the "dedication" to train themselves to traverse menus and pick out very basic, reoccuring words. You could probably accomplish this in a year. I'd pick up this, this series, and an electronic dictionary.
But realistically speaking...
Achieving basic proficiency through living in Japan w/ constant interaction in Japanese + classes: 2 years
Achieving basic proficiency through classes/self study in the US: 6~8 years
Achieving basic proficiency through books/self study in the US: 10+ years
In other words, unless you're willing to take the first option, you will lose interest in understanding some silly RPG's story long, long before it's possible.
Last edited by Nick Goracke; 06-18-2008 at 03:19 PM.
I import all the time, still havent learned much of Japanese. Sure, I'm missing out on the story but eh, the game still plays good enough.
**shimmying to Import-mania**
Because it makes no attempt to be great, it is therefore extremely great.
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I've never attempted to learn Japanese, but I do play Japanese games without any hesitation. I mostly stick to action type games where language isn't much of an issue, but I'll also pick up strategy and adventure games too.
I try NOT to get myself into situations where I'm forced to translate Japanese text in order to start or finish a game. But if the situation becomes unavoidable, I've found some useful tools to help me get by.
THE most useful tool for me is a good Japanese/English word processor. I use a freebie called JWPCE. It can be found here...
http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~grosenth/japanese.html
It's quite a versatile tool and has so many useful functions it's sort of like a Swiss Army knife Japanese word processor. It even contains it's own dictionary. But to make it really functional, you'll need to have more than the Japanese alphabet to work with, you'll need the kanji commonly used in Japan. I found kanjinetworks to be an easy to understand and well organized kanji resource and you can find that here...
http://www.kanjinetworks.com/
Another site I've gleaned a few things from is Jim Breen's Japanese Page. You can find that here...
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/japanese.html
You now have everything you need to copy Japanese from your TV screen or game manual into the word processor and from there you can you can paste the text into Bable Fish or Google language tools for a translation.
Is it easy to do? HELL NO! I only do it because I'm a stubborn son of a bitch who refuses to be stopped from playing a game by foreign gibberish. Is it hard to do? HELL NO! I'm also a dumb son of a bitch and if I can do it, so can you.
watching alot of anime in japanese but english subtitles can help u glean SOME level of understanding...however minute it may be =(
"ryo, bibbity kun" lol
At one time I had the whole Katatana alphabet memorized so that I could understand all main menus and save screens in my import games. Beyond that, I only know a few commonly used words in Japanese video games. However, out of my 200 plus import games, I haven't had hardly any problems playing them. You really don't need to learn Japanese to play import games, unless your main form of gaming is rpg's. And for that you can always get the US and Japanese version and use the US manual to help you thru. If it's a game that only came out in Japan, then learning Katakana and using gamefaqs.com can be a great resource for help.
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Originally Posted by THE 1 2 P
hmm.. it's like the others said, takes a lot of dedication. I've been studying about, maybe a year? I know around 200-250 kanji. although there were days where I'd slack off, I study about an hour a day average.
It's important that you learn to speak as you learn the kanji though, so you can learn proper sentence structure and pronunciation.
If you are going to be serious about it, you will need a kanji dictionary and a jap-to-english, english-to-jap dictionary (WITH furigana/rubi! This means subscript for every kanji so you can read it!) I suggest you pick up neither until you can read AND write both hiragana and katakana.
If you have a DS, get this! No regions, so it will play
My Kanji Dictionary
My Dictionary
GREAT practice site. Teaches hiragana and katakana as well I believe. You must have a dictionary still, as you will NEED to know stroke order
That should help get you started...I'm sure there are plenty of people who are fluent/vastly more experienced than me, but I'll help you out whenever you need it if you PM me!
There's also a Myspace type site called "The Japanese Page"
www.thejapanesepage.com
And a Japanese word processor just like Notepad called JWPce
http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~grosent....html#DOWNLOAD
In most cases, though I'm learning hiragana, katakana and common sense are getting me through.
Sometimes the best way to pick up some words is to just do a cannonball in ice cold water and play a RPG straight up.
Though I didn't finish Fu'un Kabuki Den for the PC Engine due to accidently erasing my save data, I made alot of play videos of it on YouTube, with the aid of JWPCE.
I was amazed how many words I picked up along the way.
In the PC Engine Tengai Makyo/Far East of Eden games, when you equip or buy weapons and items, it may mainly have a kanji equivalent which may look scary at first, but the description of the item is a kana/gana equivalent of it.
Despite that, there are some RPG's that are way too involved and are just drenched in kanji and to appreciate the game has to be on an advanced native level. That's why I hardly touched Romancing SaGa 3 (though I'm still keeping it) because you frequently have to make choices that change the course of the game and affect the ending.
Last edited by Lord Contaminous; 06-21-2008 at 11:50 AM.
......and to save you some time, do not use Rosetta Stone!!...their learning structure is terrible for learning Japanese
Nick, I think you're way overstating how long it takes to achieve basic proficiency. I assume you mean being able to hold a conversation and read and write a bit -- that would be far less than a year living in Japan, and definitely less than two years with classes not in Japan.
It's actually much easier of a language than people give it credit for; the intimidating part is the sheer number of kanji, but if you want to get to, say, a 5th grader's level then that's only a few hundred.
But I agree that you don't REALLY need much in the way of Japanese skills to play most imports. I think memorizing the hiragana and katakana (only a bit over 100 symbols, not so difficult, and can be done in less than a week) is very helpful, but beyond that, not so necessary.
unfortunately almost all of the japanese games that make me want to learn japanese are infact rpgs. Take the story out of a JRPG and you have one hell of a boring grindfest on your hands. It stinks because they have SO many more rpgs than we do. these days rpgs are a pretty popular genre in the states, but we missed out on alot of early greats because they figured american gamers wouldnt go for them.
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It depends on the RPG. Most of the imports I play are RPGs, and I enjoy them just fine even without understanding most of the script. You'd be surprised how much of the story you can understand just from the visuals alone. I can imagine something very traditional getting boring without a story backing it up, but I mostly play RPGs with interesting gameplay, like strategy RPGs and ones with real-time battles. In those cases, even if I was playing them in English I'd still be playing them more for gameplay than anything else.
Like I said above, just learn the Katakana alphabet to help you thru the menu screens and then use gamefaqs.com for walk-thurs in case you get stuck. Althought knowing Japanese will help when playing import rpg's, it isn't completely required considering all the other helpful options you have.
ALL HAIL THE 1 2 P
I am entering into my 4th year of studying Japanese at my high school, and I still have difficulty with Kanji. My spoken Japanese and reading skills are good enough to survive in Japan, but reading newspapers and videogames without hurigana is a challenge. To be able to play text-intensive RPGs, you are looking at a lot of effort, even if you can use a Kanji dictionary well. Super Mario RPG is an example of an RPG with furigana, but it is not Japan-exclusive. Japanese isn't as hard as a lot of people think, but learning it on your own can be a challenge.
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I would be fluent in Japanese if I could get all of those extra characters memorized.
Speaking it would be no problem for me, as I have all of the rules down.
Learning how it works and how to pronounce everything is not hard, but the character part is hard, namely kanji.
Funny thing is, I wasn't even trying to teach myself anything: I picked it all up by translating katakana and hiragana with my mini japanese dictionary, and watching Anime in Japanese.
Basically, learning katakana and all of that was a mere accident for me.
I was looking at it and hearing it so much that it all sunk in!
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You need surprisingly little Japanese to understand most JRPGs. There are some obscure words (mostly stuff related to political heirarchy, weapons, etc) but that aside nearly all the kanji is from early elementary school. If you stick to mainstream JRPGs a beginner in Japanese who knows how to use a Kanji dictionary will have no problem.
That said, some games are tough. I'm struggling my way through Nobunaga's Ambition for the DS now and it uses a lot of obsolete words and kanji that make it difficult for some Japanese people. Anything targetted to an older audience is probably going to be challenging.
I've bluffed my way through several RPGs in Japanese, a language I do not understand at all. It's not that hard. I wouldn't be surprised if the language used in most of them is grade school level, either, since that seems to be the level of language in RPGs that we get in North America. But even tho I don't understand the plot, a lot of these games are not "boring grind fests" at all. I just make up a storyline for them as I go along. I've even worked my way through a couple that don't have walkthrus online.
Having said that, I did pick up a copy of My Japanese Coach for the DS to try to learn Japanese. My advice tho, is DON'T. This could be a semi-useful tool to augment Japanese learning, but as a primary teaching method, it sucks. I just really don't like how things are laid out, for one. I think learning all the hiragana first is what's most important, but they break it up w/ tons of lessons on other stuff. I've kinda given up on it and need to find a good course or maybe something online to use.
I'd recommend taking a course in person - half the fun of language-learning is getting out and talking to new people, all of whom are way out of their comfort zones.
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