[Guide] Reading Visual Novels in Japanese
[Guide] Reading Visual Novels in Japanese
Anime has slowly grown into a global phenomenon, but visual novels are far more niche. Many visual novels remain untouched by localization companies, and sometimes the localizations we do get are…lackluster.
Often, the best way to experience a visual novel is in the original language—Japanese. Whether you’re already interested in learning Japanese, or want to learn Japanese purely to play visual novels in their original language, both motivations are perfectly valid. Visual novels are a great way to learn Japanese, because you get exposure to both the written and spoken language.
I've written a guide on how you can learn Japanese by playing visual novels with the help of a friend who made some suggestions to improve it, and it's available on our wiki, wiki.comfysnug.space. As with all pages on our wiki, it's licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0, meaning you're free to share and re-post the content.
If you're interested in learning Japanese or have already begun, I hope you find this guide useful. It isn't meant to be a dedicated guide on learning Japanese, but there are some tools you might not know about that will make your life easier.
If you have any additions or corrections to offer for this guide, or are interested in working on our other pages, you can sign up for the wiki here.
This and that other post that linked to a post from Snoosite makes me think that having a /r/LearnJapanese equivalent here would be cool. I would make it myself, but I already have my learning method pretty thoroughly figured out, so I wouldn't really have many ideas for posts to contribute.
/offtopic
Thanks for bringing this up! I re-posted this guide to [email protected]: https://lemmy.comfysnug.space/post/82565
That's about as close to a LearnJapanese community we have right now, with an exception:
The only subject that will be discouraged (though not downright banned) is discussion of study methods exclusively without also including discussion about the language itself. So threads in the style of “how I learned 1,000 Japanese sentences over a three-week period” and similar threads focusing more on the methods than the language will probably belong in more specific communities.
I don't really care for the study method posts either. Speaking as someone who has been around the Japanese learning community a while, I've pretty much seen it all. It also seems to attract a lot of really low-level, absolute beginner posts which are usually better answered in a guide like ours or learnjapanese.moe's. At the same time, it would be cool to know when new services like jpdb.io get released.
I think a lot of posts related to learning Japanese could fit into this community, e.g.:
- What are you reading in Japanese this month?
- I made an Anki deck with all the chuuni words these VNs used!
- Posts related to the language used in a particular VN
Maybe it's because I've been encouraging it, but I've noticed there are a number of users who read VNs in Japanese in this community, so I think they'd enjoy seeing that sort of stuff. The ratio of untranslated to translated VNs probably has an effect on that.
However, it would be nice to have a place to talk about engaging with anime, manga, light novels, and web novels in Japanese. This community only caters to VNs, obviously. Maybe a MediaInJapanese community, or something like it?
I don't know if I'd be up for moderating that, but it's an interesting idea, where the focus is more on the types of content you can experience in Japanese as a second language, where people are at different levels of proficiency, rather than explicit focus on studying the language. And members would be encouraged to share resources for better understanding that media, like Fuseji for uncensoring words.
Not sure. Those are just my random thoughts, haha.
If you do sign up you definitely need to hit me up, because I have no idea how to get email set up so I'll have to manually assign you a password.
Thanks for sharing this guide, great explanation and advice.
A few years ago I managed to learn a few kanji with anki but got overwhelmed and dropped. This will help me to start again from the beginning.