Japanese Is The New Game In Town
I’m a former gamer. I played a lot of video games in my day. In the beginning era of MMORPGs I might of had a slight addiction. . . and by slight, I mean big. I was always trying to decrease my game time. But something strange happened. After I starting learn Japanese I eventually quit video games completely. Effortlessly and unconsciously.
This sounds contradictory. The top three reasons people learn Japanese these days is for anime, manga, and video games. After spending so much time pursuing your wildest video game dreams (playing video games in their original language and playing those that never make it over to the English world), you may start abandoning video games or at least lose some serious interest. Decreasing a video game addiction for a Japanese addiction is a good thing.
The outcome is also part of the reason why people who like video games are more likely to learn Japanese to fluency. Why? Because they turn their Japanese studies into a video game. It’s so easy to do. Your favorite video game and the study of Japanese have incredibly similar features. This is enough to call for a comparison chart.
Video Games + Japanese
– Thrust you into a new world that you haven’t experienced before.
– Start you off with nothing as you slowly build up items, abilities, skills, experience, levels, and powers.
– Boring grinding tasks are required to build up experience.
– A never ending supply of interesting quests with detailed back stories.
– Major bosses to be taken down.
– Leveling up gives you new access to new worlds and new abilities.
– Always ways to make your character stronger no matter how long you play.
Studying Japanese will become your new favorite video game of choice. And when you have a favorite video game, you usually drop other games and focus solely on that. You’ve just achieved the best possible game addiction you could ever hope for.
Founder of Jalup. iOS Software Engineer. Former attorney, translator, and interpreter. Still watching 月曜から夜ふかし weekly since 2013.
YES YES YES
I agree completely!
Your site is so good man, I told all my friends about it and theyre very impressed!
BRAVO!! You are SO right! I started learning Japanese to feed my JRPG addiction and have also noticed a decrease in interest towards video games in general… Mainly because Japanese is taking over! It felt very natural, too.
I just wanted to say that this site has helped me incredibly, especially during the always-tough “how should I start?” stage. I’m currently working through RTK (#1020 today!) and I have the Genki books just waiting to be sentenced-mined. So thanks again, Adshap! またね!
Yes you and I have the exact same experience of quitting games to pursue Japanese. However, I failed at not making Japanese my game :/ but thanks to this site, I am on level 15 “hurray”. I heard that Zelda in Japanese for the DS is a good starter game for playing a video game in Japanese.
I never really intended to learn Japanese, it just snuck up on me like a computer game that you just try out and then somehow find yourself devoting significant amounts of time to. First I got an iPhone app so I could learn a little about the grammar because I’d heard it was interesting. Then I decided to learn some vocabulary so I could understand the example sentences. Eventually I was trying to figure out how to do these things well and discovered that Japanese Level Up had answers to some important questions I had (like how to make sentence cards that aren’t translations when you’re not ready for monolingual) but talked about it in the same terms–that of a game–that I had been all along. And somehow I keep going even though I don’t have any external motivation that would come close to justifying the amount of time I spend on it.
The way I do each of these things, Japanese has the disadvantage of being more asocial than WoW. But I am enjoying my increasing ability to read Japanese which I will keep in a way that I can’t keep my WoW characters in the long run.
Wow I couldn’t disagree more actually, I find that knowing Japanese has made playing games a lot more fun, I almost always prefer to play modern console games in Japanese than wait for the long delay of localization – the voice actors are usually better and it’s a fun way to study and pick up new words, too!
Don’t get me wrong, making a game out of learning Japanese is fun too, but really, who wants to play the same game over and over again all the time, no matter how good it is? Maybe I don’t get it since I never got into WoW, haha.
I have once tried to see drawing as a video game, where I would level up different skills (line-art, colors and many other things) and things like that. However, that plan failed and I kept being addicted too much into video games.
However, since I’ve started studying seriously with Remembering The Kanji, I’ve noticed that I’ve been spending less and less time on video games. Or rather, I could more easily put down my video games and prioritize my Kanji practice. A few times, I was overloaded and kept the practice going for the whole day, finishing right before I had to go sleep. Wake up, go to school, come back from it, Kanji practice ’til night time. I was amazed by how I wasn’t even tempted to go back to video games.
Now, I stumbled upon this site. A website seemingly dedied to Japanese learning, in the shape of a video game with levels. This interests me a lot, I’d like to see further into what this site has to offer!
I started learning because of Naruto.
I *love* that now some years later, you have created a gamified SAAS :) Just awesome! Cheers
Thanks! We’ve come a long way here since this post :)