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Ok, so for a bit of extra practice I started playing Dragon Quest (from the original nintendo), of course in all japanese, but while I was translating the menus I noticed something interesting. Each of the menu options in the game were all in Hiragana (which is nice since I can read it) but when I went to translate them, they came up as having kanji in them instead? Let me just give an example:
はなす was a menu option, but when I searched it on jisho.org it came up as 話す instead.
Here’s the link from Jisho http://jisho.org/words?jap=%E3%81%AF%E3%81%AA%E3%81%99&eng=&dict=edict.
I know the command in the game is used for speaking with people so I assume what I chose is right…but then I’m still baffled by why the game didn’t use the kanji instead?
Help?
Maybe it’s so younger japanese who don’t know kanji that well can read it. Or maybe it’s just for fun. There’s no law that you HAVE to use kanji. :)
=^..^=Hahaha,that sounds pretty good to me! I still have a lot to learn and I’m definitely seeing a lot of variation just playing through and translating what I can.
I agree with Zeldaskitten. The newer games in the Dragon Quest series are rated Everyone 10+, so it makes sense that many kanji would be left out. I’ve noticed in anime, if the viewing audience is generally younger, the lyrics to the theme song are on the screen, but with furigana on all the kanji. Since your game was on the original NES, they probably couldn’t script furigana into the text-blocks, or lacked the necessary space.
It’s good to practice things that are meant for children when you’re still learning; so, good for you. I’m looking for Japanese-language Disney movies, myself.
My guess is that the resolution the NES outputs isn’t big enough to display kanji – say you’ve only got 8×8 pixels for each character (no idea, that’s just an educated guess), how would you represent 話 clearly? It’s not like 話 is a complicated kanji: schoolchildren learn it in second grade or equivalent (according to Wikipedia).
Good point. So simple, it didn’t even occur to me.
Wow, thanks for all the responses! I’ve been wanting to start using my japanese with a game and figured I’d go as simple (and interesting to me) as I possibly could. And considering I’ve played Dragon Quest one in english already this seemed like a good match.
I spent some more time today working on the very first block of text that comes up once the game start (slow and steady to the extreme) and I found another interesting thing.
Understandably there are multiple Kanji with a similar meaning but I found the word 団交 but in the game (I have kanji sonomama ds rakubiki jiten thankfully) it was a different Kanji that I can’t seem to replicate here…. but it looks like a box with two vertical lines on the inside and a little stem coming off the top left of the symbol. …That may not be very helpful, but I was curious why this kanji could be broken down.
I suppose it makes sense that maybe the character is more common as 団交? I hope this makes sense, and thanks to everybody who takes the time to sort my mystery out!
^ Do you mean 白 or 自? Are you sure it’s the same word? Perhaps it’s the same character but in a different font. Do you have a screenshot maybe?
I would have thought Pong would be the simplest game to play in Japanese ;)
Hahaha, pong seems to be the safer option so far…http://twitrpix.com/eubs here’s a ghetto-esque screen capture.
Oh, I’m retarded – I thought you said “horizontal lines” :S But I see what one it is :) 血（ち） is the kanji for “blood”, though I’m not sure why 団交 is highlighted and it’s getting you to draw 血…. It looks like you’ve had to draw those four kanji in the middle line in order (though I may be mistaken), but you’ve left the dictionary page (or whatever it is) for 団 open. I don’t know, but they are two separate kanji with no related meaning.
Ohhh, I see what you mean, strange, I don’t know how I managed that one, thanks!
What MisterM said is indeed true. On older systems where the resolution wasn’t very high, they often used a lot more kana because it would very hard to read otherwise. Chrono Trigger and Zelda is the same.
^ they also have all kana in どうぶつの森 for the nintendo64 This is the game i’m playing now.. I don’t understand a thing but luckily i know the game.
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