If anyone has any experience in the matter (of learning a language to play a game, sounds trivial but i am dedicated to playing it!) and can give advice, it would be delightful.
Hi Rabb1t, I am in the process of learning Japanese and am using games to help the learning process, so I thought I’d share that learning process.
First of all, I would only recommend learning Japanese if you are seriously interested in the language, as it is a long and difficult journey. There are ways to play Japanese games without knowing the language that require much less effort, such as simply stumbling through the game without reading anything, or using the Google Translate app (it has a camera feature where you can point your phone at the Japanese text and it will translate it for you. The “instant” translation is not great, but if you take pictures and use the “scan” feature, this can do a decent translation job.) Of course, knowing the language will give you the full experience, but will require a lot of stumbling and patience.
For actually learning the language, there is an awesome method produced by Tae Kim on his site called “guide to Japanese”. You can Google that phrase to find the site. He has a “complete” guide, and a “grammar” guide. I would suggest going through the “grammar” guide, as this will teach you all of the basic grammar of the language and get you ready for reading actual Japanese text as quickly as possible.
Once you have completed the grammar guide, you can start (trying) to read the Japanese text from the game of your choice. I say “trying” because Tae Kim’s method doesn’t teach a lot of vocabulary, and the large number of grammar points will be hard to understand at first. Luckily, you can refer back to Tae Kim’s grammar guide at any time, and I have some strategies for looking up vocabulary.
Vocab lookup method 1: Jisho is an awesome online Japanese to English dictionary that you can use to look up vocab. This gets very difficult with Kanji, but Jisho has a “radical lookup” system that works really well once you get a hang of it, but still, using this method for looking up every new kanji you come across will be very time consuming.
Vocab lookup method 2: Google Translate. Remember that nifty Camera function I mentioned on the Google Translate app? Using that to take a picture of Japanese text, you can then scan the picture to look up a specific Kanji. This method is faster than using Jisho and you can translate whole sentences if you’re struggling with the translation or need more context for the translation.
This is a very quick version of the method I’m using to learn Japanese, so if you have questions feel free to ask and I’ll hopefully be able to answer.
This will take a lot of effort and patience, but is very rewarding if you stick with it. Don’t get discouraged. If you put the work in, you will get results.