Ye I just had 3 Japanese exams, they covered different areas.
So now I want to talk about how I felt, learning Japanese was much easier then what people have told me. And how the Japanese pop culture affect games, mainly games from Japan.
Ok first of all lets go into the ridiculous inconsistency of the Japanese writing language. form a design perspective it is horrendous
I know a lot of people that have studied Japanese on university level, which is an point I will come back to later as well. And they have basically all told me that, “oo its so hard you have to learn all this sign and the words are hard” etc. I want to state, they are so fucking wrong.
First Japanese Writing has 3 different signs, Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Kanji are the hard ones, as they are one Kanji for everything. Exemple there is a Kanji for Ochinchin = Penis, but you can also write all the signs for ochinchin おちんちん and btw おちち ochichi means father in Japanese.
The real issue with Hiragana and Katakana which are both sound signs, is the amazing incostenstince. It exist 46 signs, and then some alteration of them in Hiragana. Then it exist new signs but for the same sounds in Katakana, which are used for foreign words for example jeans is not written with Hiragana but with Katakana ジーンズ. Anyway the shitty problem with learning this is that many of them look really similar, and that it is 2 versions of each sound, and by adding small lines or a circle( to h sounds) the sign is changed,. は= ha, ば = ba, ぱ = pa.
OK but those small changes that some signs have is easy compered to learning the difference of ッ シ ノ ソ ン, = tsu, shi, no, so, n.
This make me truly feel wtf? Especially for me who have had to endure lecture's about user friendliness for years. Why did they make the signs look so similar. But clearly the worst part is that couldn't they at least be of the either the same vocal or consonant.
If this was a game or any other modern product people would hate it. It would be so much smother if for example all シ was different H sounds, ha,he,hi,hu,ho. Instead of having them at completely different sounds. Furthermore some of the Katakana looks like the Hiragana, for example も モ Mo. So the user would think, o great at least I know that one but of course. for example ko in hiragana is こ and ni in katakana is 二. So its extremely unintuitive to learn Japanese. its a lot of this and then it are some strange rules for example a small tsu (っ) means double consonant e.g ちょっと now っ this sign don't mean tsu it means the consonant afterwards will be doubled, here it says chi + the sign for yo in small becomes cho and then small tsu + to becomes tto = chotto( a little)
Ok so while all this probaly sound really, really compicliatred and its more rules to....I mean this is just the signs then this grammar etc. But just learning this is surprisingly easy. I don't just say this because I am awesome, but really I learned each hiragana in 1 day! And then each Katakana in 2 Days, the main problem was to do all signs at one in the end and don't confuse them.
I made a game out of it. I had an exam on hiragana on Monday the second week of the course, as its a double course it means the student should have spend 40 hours preparing for this exam. By turning the study into a gameification season I learned Hiragana in 2-3 hours top, I got a A+ on the exam. I used this site realkana.
I told my self, get 100 in a right. Before you move on. So I Started with the signs for the single vocals and K. And don't get me wrong I did not, study hard for 3 hours in a row. I did this, it toke like 5 mins then I played a starcraft 2 game. After that game I did S and T and so forth, after each letter I added in more at the same time, until I had all signs then I aimed for 200+ in a row and kept doing it until I had succeed. Very simple, Gamification to learn.
I know a lot of people who are wannabe otakus like(ye I went there-_-). And they like me understand oral Japanese at a decent level but believe it takes year to be able to read. It don't, I can read a standard manga now.
The thing is that the last kanji which are a lot of, actually are much more “user friendly” most of them instead look like the object they are supposed to be, and how kanji combination works is pretty simple.
Summary: IF u are a wannabe otaku ( we both now u are). Dont be afraid to just spend something like 10 hours to learn to read basic Japanese, then you actually learn the Kanji to from reading as the sentence is understandable, one can assume what the kanji means,
Next part will be about Japanese pop culter and how it affects gaming.
