You can’t use the search function here, it doesn’t work. You have to use google and search the site instead.

I do remember reading where people did do that as well as other games, but realize that you can’t read most of Japanese until you learn most of the Jouyou Kanji. Otherwise you will constantly be looking up Kanji, let alone basic vocab.

Aikibujin wrote:

You can’t use the search function here, it doesn’t work. You have to use google and search the site instead.

I do remember reading where people did do that as well as other games, but realize that you can’t read most of Japanese until you learn most of the Jouyou Kanji. Otherwise you will constantly be looking up Kanji, let alone basic vocab.

Actually if you set the language to Japanese in the most recent Pokemon games, there’s an option in the settings that allows you to switch to kana instead of kanji, which isn’t perfect either, furigana would be better, but you could theoretically read Pokemon without knowing all the Jouyou kanji.

What’s better is that you can set the language to Japanese in all versions of the game, even if you buy it outside of Japan.

I have often wondered this actually. I am quite a gamer myself and have thought about switching to Japanese language (wherever possible) to help my comprehension. It’s a shame that it seems unfeasible until I’ve learned the Jouyou Kanji though :(

So how helpful would it be to switch the language to use Kana instead of Kanji? Is that really feasible for a devoted learner or would it maybe have more of a detrimental effect in the long run?

What I’m trying to figure out is that (obviously) immersion is a good way of experiencing the language firsthand, but at what point is it a good idea?

Although this is an old topic, I do play Pokemon Y in Japanese even though I’m half way through season 2. Although I find the dialogue between characters and remembering Pokemon names difficult, a lot of the other parts to the game I find easy because of the icons and symbols (ie. items and routes). I think with playing the games, you don’t necessarily have to know the kanji reading but so long as you understand it’s translation from English you are at least learning something.

I’m with Aikibujin on this one. It’s probably better to plow through textfugu and then go on to native material. Plow through/slowly go through/skim through/whatever you need to do so that you cover all the Seasons. Else you might be bogged down with all the technical stuff that was probably on textfugu. So the time spent trying to figure out stuff on your own if you were learning Japanese through games could have been spent studying Japanese on textfugu and reviewing the practice lessons. 8 seasons is pretty long and personally that’s around 6 months worth of studying for me anyway. So after you do all 8 seasons and you start practicing with gaming, you’ll at least know what you are weak on and can come back to textfugu and know where everything is and what to spend more time on. It’ll be back and forth with native material practice and using this site to fill in things you don’t understand but has already been previously covered.