It’s been over a year since I wrote the original ‘Learn to Read Japanese With Final Fantasy VII‘ article so I thought I would do a follow-up with a few more resources I’ve come across. You can read the predecessor article but I’ll quickly recap. The purpose of using a game like Final Fantasy VII to accommodate your Japanese learning is not just to make it more fun but to keep alive the passion you have for learning Japanese in the first place. I see it as similar to learning music. Sure, you can spend a billion hours learning scales and chord progressions and time signatures, and you should if you want to ever become great. But to really feel the music, sometimes it’s better to just learn a song you like. That’s what it feels like when I’m practicing Japanese in FFVII, or any other Japanese game. It’s hard to keep up the interest when all you’re doing is Kanji memorisation and verb conjugation all the time, you need something to actually use it all on.
In the last article, I went over the Japanese alphabets. I named a bunch of resources for learning kanji and grammar. And I gave a detailed description of my method of learning Japanese with Final Fantasy VII. I do have a host of new stuff but most of those resources I still use, I just don’t use Google Translate as much.
Aerith is praying for you to learn Japanese with FFVII so get to it!
Pronunciation and Stroke Order … Or Lack Thereof
Like the first article, I won’t be going into pronunciations or stroke orders. I wanna know Japanese so I can better understand the media I love so much, not so I know which stroke goes first when drawing a little tree. For pronunciation, I think just watching anime will help but I’ve also found that a lot of shows on Netflix have the option to switch to Japanese. I’ve recently been watching House MD in Japanese and it’s awesome. The guy who voices House has such a blasé vibe, I love him. But because there are no voices in FFVII, it’s best used to hammer in the written side. You can grind out vocabulary, conjugation, sentence structure, all with it being delivered naturally by your favourite characters in your favourite video game instead of robotically by some app. The biggest benefit to learning Japanese with FFVII is that you get to be lazy and study at the same time. You were gonna play FFVII anyway, might as well get a few more vocab in you while you do it.
Goodbye Google Translate
Since the last article, I’ve come across game-changing new resources. Such that my entire play sessions look completely different. The biggest difference is that I’ve found something that has almost taken Google Translate completely out of the equation by offering far quicker and more accurate translations. Before, Google Translate was at the heart of it all. I would play through a dialogue section of the game, translating everything as I went. So much typing. And the kanji I would have to draw myself, which is cool at least that Google offers that feature but frustrating when Google isn’t interpreting your squiggles properly.
Now, I don’t have to do any of that. And the translations are far more accurate as well. Google isn’t bad, but it’s not good either. I even went through and made bookmarks of all the translations I typed out in Google of the entire Midgar section. Around thirty web pages cataloguing the colossal waste of time. With this new system, none of that is necessary, and I’m learning quicker than I ever have before. This new system is called Kamui.
My goal was to get to 1500 in under two years, heyll yeah.
Kamui
Kamui is an OCR – Optical Character Recognition – software. It takes a scan of an image and automatically translates any Japanese characters it recognizes within that scan. You might have seen apps of these marketed to you if you’ve ever been travelling to a country with a prominent language foreign to your own. And if you’ve ever tried one, you’ve noticed pretty quickly that they’re almost always as terrible as possible. I tried a few when I was in Japan and they were completely useless, I was better at translating than they were and I knew very little back then.
So I went into Kumai expecting trash. I almost didn’t even bother but I was curious. Curiosity was good for the cat in this case. This thing works so damn well. I haven’t come across a single bad translation since I started using it except for one specific kanji that it struggles with. The word for magic is 魔法 (mahou) and it only registers the 魔 kanji half the time. Can’t really blame it though, look at it 魔. For it to be perfect in every other case is so impressive considering how bad OCRs usually are.
Kamui grabs text from my blurry, off-centre webcam and translates it perfectly
How It Works
The way it works is you first tell it what window you want it to track. So if you’re playing a game on your PC that’s in Japanese, you choose the game window. Then you specify the region of the window you wish for it to scan. This is great for games with subtitles because the subtitles usually always come up in the same spot at the bottom of the screen. You can just have it scan the whole window, but it’ll sometimes pick up random stuff in the background and mistake it for text. So then whenever a piece of dialogue pops up in whatever game you’re playing, just click scan in Kamui and it’ll take a scan of the text and translate it for you. You can also set up hotkeys for scanning while in-game and even a gamepad hotkey.
If you read the first article, you’ll know I play on my old-school CRT monitor. So how do I translate from my CRT if I specify a PC window? How else? Webcam, yo. I point my webcam at the screen, open up OBS and blam, there’s my window. There are probably better webcam programs out there to use but I already have OBS pinned to my taskbar so … yeah. Also, OBS gives me just enough settings to make the image clear enough to use. And my webcam is a piece of crap, so I’m surprised it works at all. Of course, if you have a game capture device like an Elgato, that would work best but I can’t be bothered looking for mine and this works just fine.
You can select the boundary of the window you want scanned
Ease That Pleases
Kamui is so quick and easy that I shudder when I think of the hours I spent typing into Google Translate. Not only does it give you better translations than Google, but it also breaks the sentences up into constituent parts and lets you see their individual translations within context. Gone are the days of painstakingly trying to draw out complex kanji with my mouse then hoping that Google will recognise what the hell I’m trying to do. Now, I just have to click the kanji and it’s right there. Any particles you’ve forgotten, or pieces of vocab, are only a click away. And the way it breaks everything up makes it easier to see what’s what within the sentence.
As I said in the first article, Japanese has no spaces in their sentences. Instead, they break everything up by particles. But sometimes it can be hard to tell whether a character is a particle or part of a word. In Kamui, that struggle is gone so it better conditions you to recognise when something is a particle and when it is not. It also lets you sync with Anki so you can make flashcards of anything you want.
The face Cloud makes when he hears you’ve been neglecting to learn Japanese with FFVII
Other Resources
This article so far has pretty much just been an advertisement for Kamui so I should probably stop fawning for a bit. But of all the resources I use, Kamui has been by far the biggest upgrade to my Japanese learning so I don’t mind gushing over it. They’ve paid me nothing for this so I should probably hit them up. Anyway, here are a few other tools for the belt.
Anki
Anki is an app you use to make your own flashcards. I was never a big fan of flashcards because it doesn’t take too long for them to pile up and become annoying. With Anki, though, you can set how many flashcards it gives you per day. I keep mine at around 20 a day and treat it pretty casually. The default is set to 200 a day, what nutcases have enough time to do 200 flashcards a day?! I only started using Anki because I saw that you can sync your Kamui account to your Anki account. So now the method is to add any vocab I come across in Kamui that I don’t know, or ones that I do know but keep forgetting, to my Kamui flashcard deck. It’s great for ironing out the little inconsistencies.
Anki even retains the scan Kamui took within the flashcard so you can create better associations with the vocab
The way Anki works is that it’ll give you a flashcard and then you have a four-scale selection of how difficult you found it. Easy, Good, Hard, and Again. All the different options do is change how long it will be until that flashcard is shown to you again. I’ve already collected over two hundred cards and I’ve only been using it for a couple of weeks. The way I use it is I tend to only use the Easy or Again options. If I don’t know it, I choose Again and it gets sent to the back of the current list. Once I get it, I choose Easy and it comes back in a few days or a month.
Rikaikun
Rikaikun is a browser extension that gives you Japanese translations by hovering your mouse over any piece of Japanese text. It’s great for quickly reminding you of any kanji and their pronunciations. It’s also great for breaking down vocab that uses more than one kanji so you can see what the individual kanji mean. This is more of a convenience thing than anything else but I find it surprising how often I use it. If I’m in a Tae Kim lesson or any site that has Japanese text, it’s so easy to just activate the extension and move your mouse over anything that isn’t instantly recognizable.
Conjugation Practice
After reading a good chunk of Japanese, you’ll learn pretty quickly that half of it is conjugation. As an example, たべる means ‘to eat’ whereas たべたくありませんでした means haven’t eaten. You can see how conjugation can really fill out a Japanese sentence. There are a few sites that offer basic conjugation practice and they tend to differ with how much they offer. Sometimes they only let you practice positive/negative, polite/plain, and past tense conjugations. Some better sites will offer more stuff like causative, potential, and presumptive conjugations. After searching around, I found what I think is the best and offers the most while still being pretty accessible. It’s free to use as well. I just pick a conjugation at random every day and spend around ten minutes practising it. It doesn’t take too long for each type of conjugation to become second nature.
Learn to Read Japanese with FFVII – Dimden’s Conjugation Practice
New Level System
So now that I’ve revamped my Japanese learning, what does the level system I set up in the first article look like now? Well, before where I had five levels of learning intensity, now, I only have two. Learning and gaming. If I’m trying to speedrun, I just skip all the text but when I’m looking to learn, I slap on Kamui and go to town. Kamui has made it so easy that I don’t have to break up my effort into stages of intensity anymore. It’s all just casual and I’m learning faster than I ever have before. I feel I’m gonna have this language down in no time. If I make a third article, it’ll be when I’m fluent.
Even Sephiroth wants you to learn Japanese with FFVII
