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John117’s guide on learning Japanese for playing Eroge and Galge Version 1.40* *additional updates of Version 1.40 are typed in Pink 1.Introduction So I know there are a lot of eroge/galge fans who wants to play eroge but they don’t understand Japanese and they mostly rely on fan and commercial translation teams. So I have written this guide to share what I know to you for learning Japanese the way I do. You don’t have to follow my guide word by word because every person has methods that they are comfortable to. My method may be not the best for you but feel free to try it all or some parts of them. This guide will make you. . . Ø Read console galges with a fair understanding such as Infinite Stratos Ignition Hearts 2, Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Come wa Machigatteiru PSVITA, Date A Live: Rinne Utopia, and Final Approach 2 ~1st Priority~. Ø Play story driven eroges like Aiyoku no Eustia, AstralAir no Shiroki Towa and the Grisaia trilogy. Ø Play eroges with jrpg elements like Baldr Sky Dive 1 and 2 (understanding the items, weapons, plugins etc.) Ø Make you pass at least JLPT 3 Ø Have a solid pillar to start learning Japanese Ø Rely less on fan translators since sometimes translations are long or they are dropped Of course I don’t guarantee that all mention up would be accomplished in just a month but it would take years! If you are an enthusiastic eroge gamer and has finished every translated eroge out there you would be craving for more naturally. 99% of the good eroges are untranslated and let’s face this fact. So why not start now for you can experience some of the benefits little by little and as time passes by you’ll be already reading eroge with ease. I believe in learning Japanese needs persistence. So that means being exposed to Japanese media and some serious self-learning Japanese. I don’t recommend hiring Japanese tutors or learning in a class since it’s costly. Beginner classes are slow paced since you will have to go along with other classmates who may be not as serious as you in learning Japanese. Also in learning Japanese you will need to sacrifice some other time for other things. Like watching a Hollywood action movie, hanging out with your friends, studying for your school subjects and playing RPG games. You may say you don’t have any time to learn Japanese but just think and you may think of many occasions where could learn Japanese. Ø In bus, waiting for your stop Ø Waiting for the train Ø Too much social networking where instead you could learn some Japanese instead Ø Your teacher loading windows XP Ø Waiting on line for buying your groceries Ø Washing plates(you could listen to Japanese songs or audio japanese learning Pimsleur while at it) I’m sure you can think of a lot more time where you could make use. So enough of chit chat let’s get started to the next chapter! 2.Steps to partial mastery of the Japanese language Step 0 – Immersion In immersion you are going to do passive studying with Japanese native materials. I myself take more time in immersion than some serious studying since I learn Japanese for understanding fun Japanese stuff and not to get stressed from too much learning. EROGE Since your reading this guide you want to play untranslated eroge right? So get started NOW! Even if you did not yet even learning Japanese it’s okay well you have Machine translators out there right. This guide by Aerogamer(http://amaenboda.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/an-aero-gamers-guide-to-using-atlas/) will make your computer able to read eroges with Atlas machine translator just follow it so you can start reading untranslated eroge. So please read Aerogamer’s guide carefully then come back here. On picture on top is Magical Marriage Lunatics. It's one of the the most basic simple eroge the are very friendly with atlas, But after lots of playing "easy" eroges you'll want to read eroge with more unique story. Well I did try Muramasa by Nitroplus on my early stages of untranslated eroge playing. How much did I understand, you can say about 40%. Wow! thats such a very low percentage. Unfortunately that time I was not learning Japanese and not yet know how to separate normal with abnormal terms. I even pondered what was the particles. It was good though, with lots of mecha action and suspense. The eroge screenshot you are seeing on top is an eroge from favorite which is AstralAir no Shiroki Towa. So this eroge takes considerably intermediate Japanese skill be be able to appreciate this eroge. This eroge has so much japanese version Esper terms like psychokinesis(超能力/念動), telepathy(以心伝心), pyrokenesis(念発火能力)which will make Atlas translations really go bad. You know that Translator Aggregator's name list are for Japanese names right? But no they can be used with complicated jargon words. by replasing jargon words with equivalent English translation which you can cross check with JParser you can make better and more "sense" translation. Another good example of an eroge you must replace jargon terms is Baldr sky Dive 1. You get a whole jargon of Intergrated Army,Dive, Vertical Flyer, Log Out, Brain Dead and etc. Well names can also be a silent killer you see. Just imagine playing an eroge and just just realized by the end of the eroge a certain japanese word is supposed to be a name and it has been bothering with you giving crappy translations. In order solve this you just have to make sure you get all the names already typed down in your name.txt. So hop to www.animecharactersdatabase.com and search for the search for the eroge and type those names. You might be thinking that using Atlas machine translator is really bad translation but it’s the best thing you will get. Believe me, after playing 4 full chara-ge that has considerable time to complete you will get used to Altas’ crappy translation. If you’re your unable understand atlas translation, just rely on mecab or JParser for translation on each word. The first untranslated eroge I played was Natsuyume Nagisa and I understand fairly okay (always using mecab and taking 6 seconds to understand crappy translates lines). Well it’s hard at first but just keep on reading. Also make sure to read eroges with light themed ones like school based eroges like Daitoshokan no Hitsujikai and Kanojo to Ore to Koibito to. I also advise using walkthroughs for the eroges for it may be really frustrating in the early stages of playing eroge where you get them on http://seiya-saiga.com/game/kouryaku.html ANIME/JDRAMAS When I watch anime I train my listening skills. Also watching lots of anime before reading Natsuyume Nagisa really helped me understand whats going on. I did grabbed lots of vocab like onii-chan, imouto, gochisousama deshita, kimochi ii, pettanko, mahou shoujo and oppai. You can learn lots of vocab and Japanese culture from anime and it would be very useful to your eroge reading. The voices in the eroge would be very helpful if you don’t understand Atlas’ translation and you won’t have use to much JParser. You just have to listen carefully and read the English subs. You can also learn from the op and ed by singing along. Constant exposure of the same words will make you naturally remember the words. I know some people who learn Japanese by watching the anime with subtitles then re watch it without them and test if they understand. This may be beneficial but I don’t like re watching anime unless it’s very good but if it works for you that’s okay. There was I time when I did get bored of watching too much anime so I dived to Jdramas. Usually an episode lasts 40 minutes which is twice of an anime episode. Watching Jidaigeki drama leveled up my knowledge on Japanese history. Like on how the Japanese overthrown the samurais in the Meiji Restoration. Understanding some history may help if there would be referencing to the Japanese history in playing eroges. Some good dramas are Ø Yae no Sakura = Based on a true story of Niijima Yae, a woman who uses a matchlock gun to defend her own hometown Ainu and some history of the meiji restoration. Ø Jin = A doctor travels back before the meiji restoration era and changes medical history in japan Ø Densha Otoko = An anime otaku who meets a beautiful woman in a train and defended her from a drunken man and fell in love with her. He then tries to capture her heart with the help of the people on a message board. Ø Moteki = Story of a guy with lots of women around him MANGA Honestly, translated manga did not really helped since it’s just. . . .English. There is neither Japanese sound nor text on it. You can try reading the raw mangas but it will give you a headache if you don’t know much yet of Japanese. LIGHT NOVELS You can make use of the same method with eroge but instead you manually copy the text in the light novel. I advise getting the text version of the light novel and not the scan version since not many OCR scans out there are good enough to capture Japanese text. You can get text based Light novels legally from amazon.jp in ebook form. It will cost you cheaper and you won’t have to bother with excise duties and expensive shipping cost that even be more expensive than the book itself. And just make you read it on your laptop to make use of the same tools you use to play untranslated eroge. Step 1 – Learn the Japanese alphabets Well there are 3 types of Japanese alphabets which are Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Hiragana are simple and they are 48 each which is made based on the Kanji. Well but there is a lot of Kanjis and they basically are for them Chinese. Hiragana and Katakana Leaning the Kanas first is a very important step in leaning Japanese because using Romaji (the alphabet this guide is mostly composed of) when learning Japanese is a BIG NO in my opinion. Romaji cannot expresses the writing and sound as precisely as the Kana does. So it's better to master the Kanas before proceeding to learning other aspects of the written Japanese. Use mnemonics to learn Hiragana and Katakana. It will take you just about 4 days if you take it seriously. So use mnemonics to remember all of them. By using mnemonics you use picture and related them to the kana which is more fun and faster than brute memorization. Hiragana mnemonic = Katakana mnemonic = http://www.canyouchopstick.com/2011/01/katakana-mnemonic/ A good flashcard website to remember the Kanaà http://www.realkana.com/ You won’t need anki since you will learn the Kanas in just a short period of time. So just test yourself in the practice tab of the site and type the kana shown on the top. Kanji In order to conquer the joyo kanji(general use kanji) which is a whopping 2316 I use Remembering the Kanji by Dr Heisig. So the way of learning the kanji with RTK is making stories for each kanji. RTK does provide stories but it is not that interesting. Go to http://kanji.koohii.com/ and make an account to be able to get stories for many other users. For Example à日(sun)+目(eye)=冒(risk) Story = Don't look at the sun directly with your eyes, it's risky! So basically you need to make 2316 stories. I am no smart person and honestly am not good with memorizing like history studies stuff but I did it so I am sure anyone who puts effort and time will be able to do this. You may ask me why I started to learn kanji first then second the vocabulary. I know many other people who learn vocabulary first then on the way learn the kanji with it. But I think that learning all the kanji in 1 whole gulp is beneficial to remove that kanji psychological barrier. Learning with RTK 1 will just teach you how to write the kanji and just show you 1 keyword. It wont teach you any readings or give you any Japanese words using the kanji. But that makes things more simple. Since we can concentrate on the kanji first then after finishing RTK 1 we can learn vocabulary that will naturally make a learn the kanji readings. Also a kanji can have multiple readings so don't bother learning all of them individually. Of course we need to keep the kanji on our brain so that we forget then. We need to review the kanji where we test ourselves each kanji from time to time. To review the kanji studied use the Flash card system in http://kanji.koohii.com/ so that you won’t forget the kanjis you learnt and keep on learning new ones. You will need a square notebook and lots of pens to write those kanjis. It would be faster to just recognize the kanji but it would then be difficult for you later to distinguish very similar kanjis. So start writing lots of kanjis! It’s best to finish learning kanjis for 3 months by doing 25 every day. If you do it too fast you will get a burn out and if your too slow you will be wasting valuable time which instead can be used to learn vocabulary. I sometimes added 25 or 100 card on some days and sometimes none at all when I have not much time. But make sure you REVIEW the due cards every day. If you skip one day your due cards would pile up and massive hell of reviews will be waiting. So when you finished RTK1 continue reviewing for 2 more weeks in the kanjikohii site then make an anki deck from your stories in here (http://kanji.koohii.com/study/mystories) by clicking the Export to CSV on the my stories part on your kanjikohii account. You will be doing recognition cards so the front card would be the kanji and the back card would be the keyword. Stop writing on your square book also. Set your deck to be show at random order and continue reviewing the deck. I did 25-50 new cards a day and when I finished the deck my reviews were just 10-15 min so I was spending not much time now to retain those kanji on my brain. Just in case it’s your first time hearing anki I will give a brief explanation. So anki is a flash card program that used Spaced Repetition Spacing so the more you get correct on a cards anki will test you in a longer period. You can read more of anki from their site (http://ankisrs.net/) and more of Spaced Repetition Spacing on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition. Alternately you can also just review in the beginning using anki but I prefer using the Leitner flash card system from the kanjikohii site for flashcards for the production. Then I redo the whole thing in recognition. If you are interested in using anki at the very start here is a good deck àhttps://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2654705267 There is also Remembering the Kanji 2 which is to remember the on and kun readings of the kanjis learnt on RTK1 and also there is RTK3 which gives an additional 965 kanjis. I don’t use RTK1 and 2 because RTK2 kanji readings is more better to learn along with vocabulary and the Kanjis in RTK3 is not worth that much to learn. So when I encounter a new kanji I just get the story from kanjikohii then I make a card for it to go with my RTK anki deck. For motivation I printed 2 pages with all the kanji on it and I wrapped it with book plastic and highlighted the new kanjis I have learned for the day. You should try it to, seeing all those kanjis highlighted little by little motivated me to KO all those kanjis, Site where you can download them à http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=11585 Step 2 – Vocabulary We are going to use anki deck for vocab so please download the two deck below Core 2k/6k/10K Further Optimized PIC/SOUND/PITCH ACCENTà https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/702754122 Core 2k/6k/10k Audio + Image Files 0k-10kà https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/959273281 Open the decks then delete the Core 2k/6k/10k Audio + Image Files 0k-10k since that is just a dummy so the images and audio file can be installed. Then suspend the production cards and just do the recognition cards. This Core 10k deck contains 9,886 of the commonly used words in Japanese newspapers and is a very good deck for vocabulary. In this Core 10k you get Ø lots of example sentences which are more than 8 usually Ø Tones Ø RTK keywords used in the vocabulary so you can cross check if you forgot what RTK kanji is used on the vocab. This can also be useful to detect is there is a kanji you have not learned outside RTK 1. main example sentence with native japanese audio Ø vocabulary with native Japanese audio Ø A picture for every card. Some of the pictures did not mach with the vocab so I like to add my own pictures instead as they help me in associating with the word. Adding anime and eroge pics really motivated me to complete the reviews every day. I advise doing 25 cards everyday but if it’s too easy for you don’t hesitate to do 100 a day for the 1st 2000 cards(which I did) but they were so many cards I took like 2 hours a day to finish reviewing and leaning new cards. But now I just spend about 50 minutes a day in anki with my kanji and Core 10K deck. Doing vocabulary is a very rewarding phase for me. When playing eroges I see a Japanese words I know and I understand it without the atlas translation I just feel happy. In this stage I also read Irotoridori no Sekai which I have gave up long before and I was amazed on how better I could understand it now. Step 3 – Grammar Most of my grammar is just from “getting used” to Japanese from playing eroge and galge. But of course a having a solid foundation is good and Tae Kim’s grammar guide is all I needed for my grammar needs. Here’s the linkà http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar If you are interested in SRSing what you learnt for the guide you can try this anki deck àhttps://ankiweb.net/shared/info/4249761762 Go to the read and read on for more details. I personally did not did SRSing for grammar but if you are a beginner and want to catch up faster on grammar, constant exposure to Japanese media would be too slow for you. So if that's your case you can start SRCing those grammar. 3.What to do after completing my guide Let’s sum up what you should have done in a check list ü Motivated to play eroge/galge ü Made your computer able to play eroge using the guide from aerogamer ü Played lots of eroge/galge ü Watch lots of anime or/and Jdrama ü Enjoyed other Japanese media ü Remember the hiragana and katakana and be able to read them with ease ü Completed RTK 1 and continue to review old kanji and new ones encountered ü Completed Core 10,000 Recognition in anki and keep on reviewing ü Read Tae Kim’s Grammar Guide and gained brief understanding on Japanese Grammar So if you had all checked you have enough Japanese language skills to read some story based eroges and school romance based console galges. Now you can choose to stop but still keep on reviewing or keep on gaining more Japanese knowledge. You might be lost on what to do after this but don’t worry I’ll stick with you guys after a while. I will give some pointers on what you can do. Start making your own anki vocab deck So any words you encounter from an eroge or light novel you make new anki cards. You should field should include the following Ø kanjified Japanese word or the katakana loan words Ø pronunciation or the word on hiragana(exception to katakana words) Ø multiple or a single english meanings for the word Ø sentence where you got the words Ø english translation of the sentence Doing this would be time talking but this is one of the good ways to get extra vocab knowledge. Mining for words from resources you read is very important since Core 10,000 unfortunately does not contain mahou(magic) and many other fantasy terms. Use another pre made anki vocab deck I myself don’t really recommend this since it’s much more better to actually get words for the Japanese native material you read. By using other anki premade anki decks you might learn less common Japanese which you might not even encounter that often. But it you can always try to venture a pre made vocab deck. Core 2k/6k/10k supplement(15k cards CorePlus + JLPT)V5 anki deck àhttps://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1132075078 This deck as the description said was made for a supplement to those who have finished Core 10,000. You can read on the site for more details on the deck. Start on more Kanji acquisition Well for any new vocabulary with a new kanji you get the story from kanjikohii and add it to your anki deck. You now may start RTK 3 if you are willing to conquer more kanjis but I think its unnecessary still since adding any new encountered kanji looks more efficient to me. Reading Eroge and Galge with less reliance to machine translators So basically you read an eroge but you your main reading would not be from the Atlas translation but the Japanese sentence itself. If you did not comprehend properly the sentence you then you read the sentence with the the furigana for the Japanese readings and find out of the words you don’t know with JParser. By doing this you can increase your Japanese reading ability and start enjoying eroge how the Japanese do. You can also understand the eroge in a higher degree this way and have a much better immersion to the eroge. For the Console galges you can’t rely on Translator Aggregator or Atlas but only your own brain. Well you can use a dictionary but I find it annoying to always search in my Japanese dictionary since it takes too much time. Reading galges would have fewer benefits in learning Japanese with using eroge but you can truly measure your Japanese ability without all those translators. Also you can instead just listen to have better understanding on the galge. I know sometimes it’s annoying to not understand a galge. You can either stop playing on keep on playing without understanding. But when I don’t really understand a certain event I can just make assumptions on what happening. There are the facial expressions, background picture, voice tones and many other elements. You can try to modify a certain event in a galge just by making those assumptions. I know it’s not “understanding” but it keeps me motivated to continue playing the galge without stopping. Of course making assumptions should not be done too often since instead of understanding and reading you would be making your own story. I myself use assumption not often. If you still don't understand what are assumptions ill give you an example. Okay some in a particular event in a galge you dont understand anything at all. So you use your observational skils and retrieved the following information Ø The background CG is the protags room Ø The people in the event are the protaganist, the heroin, another "girl" freind Ø The end of the event the ends with the heroin shouting Ø The Sound effect on the end of the event is the door banging Ø BGM is a comedy type Okay now lets make the assumptions. . . This event tells me that I am doing some thing with another "girl" and I made the heroin jealous and angry. SInce the BGM is a comedy type until the end I assume that this event is not a very serios one and wont affect the storyline that much. That is unless you get a bad ending right after the event. See thats easy! This example is one of the simplest you can make. But when going to important events the explanation of military term, special terms or Japanese names I will share you a trick. What I do is to keep a note book where I write all the important stuff about the galge. Sometimes you can forget how to read heroin names or special term so this is when the notebook will be useful. OS you can jot down the names and special terms and even write down the story line summary. Taking up a Japanese major I myself am not considering going as far on doing this kind of feat since I just want Japanese so I can understand written and spoken Japanese. But taking up a major on Japanese will really increase your Japanese level higher. If you are considering to use Japanese language to earn a living as a translator or other job you will be able to use Japanese for fun and work. Also you may skip a year or two since you did have prior Japanese knowledge if you did well on the entrance exam. You can be more motivated now since there will be tests, projects, homework and thesis which will make force you to learn Japanese. I don’t really like them since I prefer to learn my Japanese in a steady pace but I know many people out there like working under pressure. 4.Conclusion Writing this guide has been truly a joy to me. Higher appreciation of eroge and galge has a wall which is your illiteracy to the Japanese language which is truly a tough barrier but with the right tool we can take it down. I hope this guide will help you to enjoy Japanese media and I thank you for reading this guide. I also apologize for any mistakes and error in my guide. I will close this guide with some serious motivation paragraph which a made . . . The mastery of the Japanese language takes lots of time and effort. But it is only achieved from giving some of our time every day for learning Japanese. Fortunately you and I here are most likely aiming just to have partial mastery on the language in order to enjoy Japanese anime culture but it does not change the fact it will still be a long road. But on the end of the road is bliss and enlightenment for you will be able to truly understand Japanese media with ease. Make sure you don’t lose sight on the reason why you are learning Japanese as learning Japanese is not a chore but is close as to a hobby. I wish you to have fun while learning Japanese and enjoying Japanese media. "This picture shows Tom Cruise slaying his obstacle to master samuraihood. . . . which is the inability to speak in japanese with his sensei" Discussions? Comments? Questions? Additional Ideas? Critiques? Better Ways? Improvements for the guide? Feel free to post below