Japanese Thread, talk about your quest to learn a bizarre foreign

Sorry, OP, but this is a topic for >>>/jp/

>>2958767
I would normally agree, but their threads on the matter are abysmal. I've seen much better come out of /vr/ in the past.

Have you read Tae Kim?

>>2958915
not all of it, got tired of plugging through and switched to kanji.

guess I can switch back though, just go it like that

>>2958928
Go read Tae Kim
Anyone here played SMT If...?
It's the number one game I'm learning Japanese for.
How complicated is it to read?

The biggest hurdle isn't grammar or kanji, it's memorizing vocab.

Learning Japanese was the best decision I ever made. So many games I could have never played otherwise.

>>2958968
I've found the biggest hurdle to be having the attention span of a goldfish.

I've attempted Oxford's Take Off In Japanese, I've had on and off evening classes, was grinding out words on "iknow" (formerly some other name), and I spent 4 months in a remote area of Japan doing volunteer work after the 2011 tsunami, yet my proficiency level is more or less hiragana.

Feels bad.

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FC,JP、FF2 is hiragana and katakana indication.
It's impossible to remember a kanji.

>>2959093
lil shits:you're a dragon knight, old fuck?
richard: ya bitch. i'm your dad's buttbuddy. i'll rape the emperor for sure then be back for your asses. will you let me be your pimp daddy then?

never studied it, kanji admittedly isn't friendly though

Is there a better self teaching book than genki?

>>2959596
I can't think of much worse than Genki.

If you have previous experience with language learning, do Tae Kim. If you're an English native, do Japanese The Manga Way.

Then move up to the DOJG.

Grammar is not the kind of thing you should be spending hours reading textbooks for. You get through it once, then start reading, referring back to the material whenever you get confused. Reading textbooks containing the equivalent of "the cat sat on the mat" will barely help you with real text, which is what you actually want to read.

>>2958746
>>>/jp/

I wouldn't mind knowing Japanese, but I feel like the amount of work to learn such a difficult language just wouldn't be worth it.

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>>2958767
>>2959615
>going to /jp/ to learn moon runes.

Either way fuck off OP.

>>2959621
Can you spare half an hour a day? Congratulations, you can learn a second language.

I spend more time a day jerking off with my Japanese skill than I do learning Japanese.

>>2959119
I wish I could get that much, I can still only read and know the words. The meaning of the sentences is totally lost on me.

what do you do after you have read japanese the manga way?

what are some 'simple to read' sega/nin era games?

>>2959630
H-doujins and porn games can make for good reading practice.

I found emulating kana-only games with a dictionary and grammar book, marking any words I looked up for review, to be pretty enjoyable if slow going. Played a lot of Famicom classics that way. Tagainijisho is pretty good as a dictionary where you can flag words.

Emulation was important to be able to pause dialogue that moved on too fast.

My plan to take it to the next level was to use a stroke-order dictionary and work through a game with some kanji, but I stopped being unemployed. Maybe someday.

This approach is no good if you aspire to speak Japanese, but I'm no weeb so it suffices.

>>2959630
I know two languages... I've learned Spanish.

But I need it for my job. ICE Deportation Officer...

I dunno, maybe I can give it a shot.

/vr/ should have a general for learning japanese.

>>2960574
No, that is beyond stupid for multiple reasons.

>>2960574
>learning a dying nation's language
Lel. Go learn Russian, Spanish or Mandarin instead.

>>2960613
>Spanish

After the Trumpstapo cleans up America, it'll go back to being an irrelevant language.

>>2960572
Did vidya help?

>>2960613

Russian is not very widely distributed. What an odd suggestion. Mandarin Chinese won't help you with the multitude of mutually-exclusive Chinese dialects, so it's not as useful as one might think.

Spanish is probably right behind English as far as widest area of distribution is concerned. Being fluent in both English and Spanish will take you very far.

>>2960623
Please don't turn this into a political pissing contest. This isn't the board or thread for it, and not everyone is American

>>2960623
Trump loves Mexicunts though.

>>2960540
Kana only is awful. SFC games with light kana usage are easier to read and more helpful to building a vocabulary.
I recommend Kanjitomo as a tool. It can OCR text (including emulators) to recognize kanji, includes a dictionary and a feature to save words you didn't know.

>>2960626
>Being fluent in both English and Spanish will take you very far.

Not really, spanish it's just talked in 3rd world countries.

>>2960613
What's more fitting to play dead games? There's hardly Spanish original games and Russian seems pointless unless you want mods for some late 90s Windows games like JA2 or HoMM3.
Learning Chinese and learning Japanese are related due to the common script. Traditional Chinese might be more common in retro games but I never looked deeply into that.

>>2960673
>Learning Chinese and learning Japanese are related due to the common script.

Uh, they don't share a common script. If you're referring to kanji, it's only loosely based on Chinese readings or ideographic information. A Chinese character in Japanese will likely have a completely different meaning from the same character in whatever dialect of Chinese you're looking at. And of course that's to say nothing of the volume of differences between Chinese and Japanese grammar and syntax.

I would actually say Japanese more closely resembles Hawaiian than Chinese. The phonology is so similar that speaking one language will make the other seem that much more natural to pick up on.

>>2960673
You don't need to learn a language to play 95% of retro games. Most of them don't even have text.

>>2960712
B-BUT MUH VISUAL NOVEL EROGAYS AND SHITTY JARPIGS

>>2958946
I palyed through it a few times and I've got about grade school level proficiency.
If you're like me it'll be the random foreign loanwords in katakana and 90s slang that'll trip you up more than anything else

>>2960718
As if someone would learn the language for just those two things. There's a lot more you can do with it than just those.

>>2960729
Not if you're a shut-in who only plays videogames for a living.

>>2960624
Yeah, there's a lot of translation patches of stuff into Spanish, now. I'd play less text stuff I knew by memory and slowly moved on to harder stuff.

They give you free Rosetta Stone, but it's a piece of shit for learning.

>>2960735
Then that's a hell lotta work for very little pay off.

I've been interested in learning Spanish for a while, but there aren't any schools in my area that offer courses.

I've been trying the teach-yourself approach with books, but they have contradicting advice about pronunciation. Either [e] always sounds like the ay in day, or always sounds like the eh in leg. The same book might even bounce back and forth between opposing theories about pronunciation. Surely Spanish phonology isn't that complex or inconsistent.

the objectively best language is german

it makes you sound like an angry autist when you speak it

>>2960762
It's e as in leg. Pronunciation in Spanish is very easy and very consistent, only the English "W" sound in "güi/güe" is weird.

The hard part about Spanish are the verbs.

The best thing is that it's very likely you can encounter people who speak Spanish as native speakers... at least in the US.

>>2960574
I wouldn't mind
not retro though

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>>2960712
Maybe if you're counting card games and other share/freeware clones.
Question is more what you want to play.
I'm curious about Sword and Fairy, Xuan-Yuan Sword or other Chinese language games. Any tips on learning the language or is it all just blind rage?

>>2960729
It's as good a motivation as any. You can always use it for other stuff afterwards.

>>2960743
It's not that much work and the payoff is huge.
The hardest part is getting a proper start.

>>2960790
>It's e as in leg. Pronunciation in Spanish is very easy and very consistent

My sources are still unable to agree on this matter:

http://spanish.about.com/od/spanishpronunciation/a/e.htm
http://studyspanish.com/pronunciation/vowel_e.htm

>it's always a as in ace
>it's sometimes a as in ace, but becomes e as in leg when it's between consonants
>it just varies from word to word or accent to accent

>>2960741
Any games in Spanish? I learned some before I graduated and I want to keep it up

>>2960887
Concentrate on reading it first, it's pronounced exactly how it's read.

You can learn pronunciation down the line, by hearing it.

I recommend you watch veeery basic cartoons and children's shows in Spanish first. I watched a lot of Plaza Sésamo (Sesame Street).

People try to go too quickly and then don't remember shit. Go at a child's pace, concentrate on PERFECTING the very very basics and slowly go up in complexity like a native child would is the most natural way to do things.

I know people who did 3 years of Spanish, then stopped for awhile and didn't remember anything since they rushed things.

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How much anime do I have to watch to become Japanese?

>>2958746
It happened about 30 years ago and the toys were brand new or not even made at the time.
Japanese grammar is a cluster fuck but there's not so much to it that it's difficult. A few redundant words and desu goes at the end. That's about all you need to know to play a game. Best resource is a long hair dictionary.

>>2961371
You want to take 8 years to speak as well as an 8 year old?

>>2962013
Not quite that much, I'm going to hope you have higher mental accumen than a toddler.

But I learned Spanish very well (I believe) partially by starting to watch and read stuff for little little kids and work my way up... I feel like it's more natural than using Spanish as a second language books made for adults.

>>2962091
babies are knowledge sponges, dude. I WISH I had the mental acumen of a toddler.

>>2961421
Keep watching until you start to feel the urge to molest children, if you don't feel like a pedophille you haven't watched enough.

>>2962091
What's difficult for native children and what's difficult for adult learners often aren't the same thing. They tend to use simple concepts because they're easier for children to understand, as an adult more difficult concepts aren't a problem because you've already encountered them in your native language. Your target language's word for 'dog' is no less problematic than 'simulation'.

>>2961371
>it's pronounced exactly how it's read
Sure it desu

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How the fuck..? There isn't a single person overlap here from /int/ or /a/? Amazing. If you want to learn nip, there is a general on /a/ with everything you need to learn, and on /int/ there's Japanese posters in the Japan generals. /jp/ prolly sucks

Here's /a/'s pastebin: http://bitlasers.com/djt

でも、日本語でしゃべるのがゲイ

>>2960574
for learning LANGUAGES period. There are plenty of retro ways to do this (even language learning games on retro era consoles). I started a few language learning threads with vidya on/v/ before back befor eit was b2. Anyway SNES FINAL FANTASY IS HOW EVERY IMMIGRANT LEARNS ENGLISH there should be a thread, if not here, on /vg/

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Emit is a language learning game by Koei released for all sorts of CD based systems as well as the SFC with an extra tool to use a CD player for audio.
You can easily switch between Japanese and English for audio and subtitles and jump back and forth between sentences.
At the end of a chapter you can test your comprehension.

>>2962318
>There isn't a single person overlap here from /int/ or /a/?
I'm from /a/
Just didn't mention it.
What this anon said though. Go read the djt on /a/

>>2962197
True to some extent but I've always found childrens learning material to be the easiest way to learn a new language. Maybe that's just cuz I'm a kid at heart and enjoy playing kids toys like everyone else here.

>>2962449
Is this for japanese to learn english or for english to learn japanese?

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>>2958767
Fuck you

OP go to /int/ and read the sticky. Maybe find a torrent for the Genki textbooks.

>>2963272
They released it for Japanese to learn English but it also works the other way around.

>>2962318
Fuck off weeb, I don't want to learn your dead gookrunes language.

>>2960762
I|f you're struggling with books, try Duolingo. It's a website that uses the Thomas Michel method: you learn a few words, make a couple of rudimentary sentences and learn the grammar rules as you go, always building on the knowledge rather than reviewing tables.

Learning a sentence in the first day makes it much more fun, which is important if you want to stick at it, it needs to feel immediately worthwhile as well as a smart future decision.

>>2963664
Forgot to say, Duolingo is free and teaches a shit load of languages. They have Japanese to English, but the other way around isn;t finished yet.

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>>2958746
Tried to play this in japanese without speaking a lick of nip and god damnit does it make me want to learn, especially since the translation is at never ever status

>>2958746
>bizarre foreign language
=english

>>2963959
a lick of what you redneck?

>>2963982
I'm not a southerner.

>>2962318
your post demonstrates very well why the /djt/ is a terrible jap learning group. The manga and LN downloads are the only good to come from it.

Not /vr/, though.

Madou Monogatari for the SNES is pretty simple if you know your jouyou kanji.

>>2966273
Aren't most SFC games like that? Early/small games don't have Kanji at all but I can't think of an extremely complex written game.

For a very easy-to-read title that's still text heavy, there's Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom (サラダの国のトマト姫) -- mostly kana, but a few kanji here and there (国、王、森、湖、etc) that should be easy enough for a beginner to memorize and recall quickly. The text is gigantic, and the font is very clear.

I seem to recall Star Ocean (SFC) using several hundred joyo kanji. It was more complicated than Tales of Phantasia or Madou Monogatari at least. Trouble is that the font is not quite as well-designed, and if you see a kanji you don't know, it might be hard to figure out what it is, or the radicals it uses, or the stroke order.

>>2966273
What's so bad about the /djt/ guide?

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>>2968417
Am I doing something wrong here? The game doesn't even have Hiragana.

>>2968682
That's katakana.

>>2968501
there's only one acceptable way to learn and it's doing core2k
reality is that it's gonna take years no matter which method you take

>>2968759
How on Earth do you take years for Core2000?

>>2968776
I mean getting to a point where you can fluently read anything should take years. There's no "best method" or magical shortcuts.

>>2968812
Does it matter? You don't have to wait years to start reading stuff. You're not going to get used to reading without reading experience.
At first you may have to look up every fourth words, then every fifth, every sixth and so on.

>>2960572
Arizona?

>>2968759
...but the /djt/ guide DOES recommend core2k for kanji. Again, what's wrong with it? I don't care much for the actual thread, but the resources compiled in the OP have been quite helpful so far.

>>2962560
What does that material happen to be? Right now I'm struggling to even play Pokemon crystal which can is kana only, I can read and sound out kana but don't know any vocab

>>2958746
is there any practical reason their roofs are like that?

>>2968912

Doesn't really matter, all methods are the same.

>>2968759
>there's only one acceptable way to learn and it's doing core2k
core2k gives you edict definitions which can get nuances very wrong sometimes
Plus nothing's stopping you from creating your own vocabulary deck with sentences from the material you're consuming so you have actual context from when certain words are used, which is what I did (until I got tired of it and just started to read/watch/play japanese stuff and expose myself enough times to certain words until I memorized them).
Truth is, there's no acceptable way to learn. There are only "unacceptable" ways, like going with your Japanese class' rhythm, which will make you take forever. I've had a friend whose yearly test was literally only hiragana and katakana - and she failed.

>>2968836
With japanese you need to look up every single word. Not much fun 2bh.

>>2968945
how's your progress right now?

This has really nothing to do with videogames. Personally I think learning any foreign language is a stupid waste of time.

>>2968951
I can pretty much read and listen to whatever I want, aside of classical literature or certain dialects I'm not familiar with. I can communicate by writing fine although with weird phrasing because I usually don't talk with people in Japanese, and my listening is mediocre, although all I need to do is spend a few weeks or months watching Japanese media and talking to some Japanese friends and it should be fine.

>>2968967
*read whatever I want

>>2968945
And once you finish 2k you realize you don't care about VNs or animey and reading even the simplest jrpg is gonna take years anyway.
Don't even start, it's a waste of time. Either way Japan is a dying country.

>>2968958
>Personally I think learning any foreign language is a stupid waste of time.
>this is what amerifats unironically believe

>>2968994
>dying language
Fixed for you

A true retro way is the Let's Learn Japanese series from the 80s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let's_Learn_Japanese
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hZ_jn9j0y8&list=PLD4C5B65A10143C15

>>2969003
Well, fair enough. But then, vidya is also a waste of time, so it doesn't make much of a difference whether you spend your free time playing vidya or learning a dead language.

>>2969009
clumsiest motherfucker ever born

>>2969013
there's the difference that one thing is fun and the other is boring

>>2968682
Oh, apologies. Didn't know it was something other than a FC/NES game. Try the FC/NES version.

>>2960658

>Confirmed for not living in California

Seriously.

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I've just started and learned only Hiragana and some very basic grammar. I wonder how long will it take for me to understand Mizzurna Falls?

>dying language
You will be dead before that, the Japanese language is fucking interesting from a linguistic point of view, all the more if you take video games and literature into account. Learning any language is worth in itself, anyone who says the opposite is ignorant or a monolingual person who doesn't understand the benefits. It's a lot of effort, though but fucking rewarding.

>>2968958
>>2969003
>>2969082
Do you actually think Japanese has no applications other than playing VNs and reading doujins? Do you realize that Japan is one of the world's biggest economies? It's not like your brain has a limited amount of storage, so learning Japanese or any other language is infinitely more useful than playing video games and shitposting on 4chan.

>>2960626
>>2960613
And Russian is useless for retro games. Maybe to download roms from russian sites or playing some obscure russian games for DOS and ZX Spectrum only.

>>2969759
>Do you actually think Japanese has no applications other than playing VNs and reading doujins?
Yes, you're never traveling there and marrying a schoolgirl, get over it.

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>>2968958
Videogames are a stupid waste of time too, but you don't have anything better to do with your life anyway.

>>2969775
Japanese is also spoken in other places. For instance Palau.

>>2969704
Start it up regularly to see how much you understand.

>>2968759

>>2966273 here.

I agree that it's stupid that they insist that core 2k can be relied upon. It does nothing to explain the differences between ruigo, and somewhere in the 6k deck it says パンツ means pants. That's "we taught him wrong as a joke" level misleading. That said, I still use it along with my mined decks and look up suspicious words on goojisho and weblio. It helps me learn newspaper and business nouns I wouldn't come across otherwise.

But, my bigger problem with /djt/ is that the majority of posters don't know what they are talking about at all, so 90% of the answers they give are misparsings of machine translations. Or, at least that was how it was when I gave up trying to help them.

>>2969819
That right there is the name of an important relevant country if I ever see one.

>>2970939
I've been using /djt/ but I have only learned kana so far. What would you recommend?

Naive. The only way to become fluent in a language like Japanese is to spend years of study and also live amongst people who natively speak it. It's not something you can do quickly or casually as a hobby. And even if you DID want to go through all that, you still wouldn't be able to fully understand all the minute culturalisms, dialect traits, and subtleties only natives would pick up on.

>>2969009
Yan needs a fucking haircut

>>2970987
Are you saying I don't understand English?

>>2971000
Not sure how you figured I was saying that.

>>2970987
Or you can spend a fuckload of time on Japanese sites and consume lots of Japanese media, which is basically the same thing, apart from the conversational practice and nuances you'll be missing out on. I've never taken English classes or traveled outside Brazil in my entire life, yet I was able to score an A on the Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English exam effortlessly, so I don't really think your claims hold water.

>>2971014
I've only spend two weeks of my live in a English speaking countries and rarely if ever deal with native speakers. Most of my exposure has been via hobbies.

>>2971014
Sounds like he's about to point out that he didn't do any of what you said and still can speak/read/write English despite it not being his native language.

>>2971031
>>2971035
You fucking monkeys are comparing an easy as fuck anglo language like English with the unreasonably convoluted gook shit Japanese.

btw /djt/ has existed for over 5 years and I still have to see a single success story from that place

>>2971062
That's because once you make it you stop going there.

>>2971062
Browsing /djt/, it seems like lots of people made it though.
They're reading the VNs and doujinshi they wanted to read.

>>2971073
>VNs
I can "read" with text hookers too.

>>2971060
But I was alphabetized in Russian. I had to learn Portuguese and English from zero, which is essentially the same as what these people are trying to do with Japanese.

>>2971080
Then why are you asking?

>>2958746
Hakone!

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>>2970871

>>2970871
>>2972734
SFC = Normies
MD = Dudebros
PCE = Weebs

Seems about right.

>>2960623
You realize there are a billion speakers of Spanish and that most of them don't live in Murrika, right?

>>2973261
ah, but are there any high-quality spanish language games without english translations?

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>>2973683

>>2973683
Why only without English translations? Even if they exist you're often better off playing the game in its original form.

>>2973749
Indeed, whether the localization is or is not good, it can be enlightening to see what the original was. Or in the case of things like WD games, you can see what was changed for the western release.

At first I was "I don't want to learn another language just to play games/watch anime". But then I realized that by thinking like this I'm just trying to justify my laziness.
So, I started learning Japanese one and half years ago and having a blast with it. Not only because I like learning foreign languages in general, but also because Japanese is totally different than anything I've encountered previously. Passed JLPT N4 last December, planning to pass N3 this year.
Seriously, if you like games and have hesitations about learning Japanese, then do it. Totally worth time and money spent on it.

>>2975050
This. Learning something new can never do you harm. And learning languages is fun to begin with, Japanese just has the added value of you being able to play video games and read novels or something.

I don't give a shit about JApanese, but I am learning german and I do use video games as a pretty big aide. so slightly relevant It's easy as fuck to find german/Pal/European versions of most classic games that I played in my youth/teens. i dont feel like two much of a fag because every game I play, I actually did buy at some point just not in that language so fuck it.

Pokemon(all of them) and Animal Crossing are the games I've spent the most time on. It's not hard to imagine what games are good. Lots of dialogue, stuf like the Sims is probably really fucking good. I've been meaning to start Knights of the old republic as well. Any game where you can make choices in the dialogue would be top fucking notch. Skyrim would probably be another one, but I admit I kind of stopped playing single player games after the PS2/GCN era so I havn't played a lot of the new shit. "learning a language" gives me a nice fucking excuse to make up for lost time and enjoy all the fucking games that are new as fuck to me.

Simply make a course on memrise(a flash card system) and whenever you find words/sentences you dont know add them to your personal deck.

before you dive in head first though, you should at least get the basics down with some kind of cookie cutter course. I know Assimil is good for german, but not sure for japanese. Otherwise you'll get frustrated as fuck and find yourself skipping dialogue which again defeats the purpose.

>>2975064
Don't play German translations of foreign language games. Play games that are originally in German.

>>2962376

please share your wisdom with us plebs.

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>>2972790
PCE is the master race after all

>>2961421
i find that the closer you are to the monitor, the faster you begin to instinctively squint

Studied Japanese since 2010, now I'm on a one-year study exchange in Japan.

Pretty good overall.