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Comment by FullMtlAlcoholc | Hacker News Reader

Translating a video game was also one of the primary ways that I learned Japanese. Playing through Chrono Cross while grokking the written form was tremendously rewarding.

To this day, I still choose Japanese audio for games if available.

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I find mind boggling the amount of games that have been released only in Japan.

Even series popular in the West like Final Fantasy, Shin Megami Tensei, Ace Attorney, Fire Emblem have had Japan-only releases, I cannot even imagine how many lesser known titles are lost to western audiences.

Probably Japan is kind of an outlier, but I guess other countries with a large enough market to support games developed for local (not global) audiences would have a similar phenomenon, I wonder if there is some hidden gem developed in China, Korea, India, Brasil that we will never be able to play...

It's way worse if you were European. Did you know that the first OFFICIAL release of Chrono Trigger in Europe was the 2009 DS remake?

Same in Australia, I think. I owned a ridiculous setup with a NTSC->PAL cart converter and an old CRT just to play Chrono Trigger, at one point.

Pokémon on 3DS is wonderful for learning Japanese. It's a game for kids so it's made up of a lot of kana with some low level kanji.

Unfortunately, even Japanese children are native speakers. I wouldn't recommend going into native material unless one has grammar points and some vocab nailed down, even if the kanji is easy or rare.

...um even if you are entirely swamped and way confused by the dialog it's still pokemon.

You'll be fine.

My niece set her language to German when she played (and beat) Pokemon X. She was probably 6 or 7 at the time, and didn't know a lick of German.

Most text in Pokemon is either completely formulaic ("A wild <Pokemon> appeared!" "Charmander used Ember" "It's not very effective") or a one-off pre-combat joke from a trainer ("I like shorts!"). It's pretty easygoing stuff.

Your advice is common amongst educators these days, but the general consensus in language acquisition research is completely the opposite. If you can understand something, with enough repetition, you will acquire it. Free reading of native material is hands down the most effective way to acquire a second language that we know about.

There are quite a lot of scholarly works accessible from the internet on the topic, so if you are interested I recommend taking a look. I was going to link some examples, but it's probably better for you to find your own way without my biases.

I've read and heard enough Japanese to be able to pick out the differences in VA direction between English and Japanese audio tracks. 90% of the time, I end up preferring the Japanese tracks.

Native audio with English subs for me. It feels rare to find an English dub that's good.

I thought maybe it was just a Japanese thing, but then I watched the (excellent) series Wakfu. The French audio was much bett

I learned Japanese by osmosis-watching lots of JAV in my younger days forced me to learn in order to identify what was being said to maximize utility.

Our drivers were different but you actually produced a patch enjoyed by a lot of j-RPG fans that came

Japanese Adult Video?

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