"Games and anime won't help you, real Japanese people don't speak like that."
"You need to write kanji hundreds of times in order to learn them."
"It's impossible to pass JLPT N1, you need to have 180 IQ and study for 20 years!"
Empty words coming from the mouths of those who don't know Japanese.
I learned Japanese almost exclusively from playing videogames, watching anime, and reading manga, and I'm here to tell you it's not only possible, but it's also the best way to learn Japanese.
I've met many Japanese learners across my journey, and the best all have one thing in common: they had fun while doing it, and they spent most of their "study" time (if you can call it that) consuming content in Japanese.
There is this excellent video by Game Gengo which goes into extensive detail on how to go about this, so I'll be fairly brief and focus on my personal journey rather than specific methods.
You can also read my other article, which focuses on specific methods and on lifestyle and mindset choices optimal for having a good time while learning Japanese.
Some 7 or 8 years ago, I had started realizing how bad a lot of game translations were, and how many issues were introduced in localizations, such as cut content and censorship. On top of that, I was finding out about all sorts of cool untranslated games, but I obviously had no way to play them properly without understanding the language. So fed up with this whole situation, I decided I better start learning Japanese.
After looking at some online guides on how to approach this venture, I went right into the action.
First, I memorized kana using a simple online tool that makes you type out their pronunciation. Grinding this for a few hours a day, for a couple days in a row is enough to get you started. Being able to read them fast requires lots and lots of reading, though, so don't get hung up studying kana just because you can't fluently read them. You'll get faster the more you read real text.
Then, I started reading Tae Kim's Guide so I could get a grasp of the basics of grammar. There is a lot of information in this guide, so you obviously won't be able to fit it all in your head at once, but it's not necessary. Skimming through the whole thing, while paying special attention to the earlier parts is enough to get you familiarized with the basic building blocks of Japanese, so you can get started consuming content as soon as possible. You will still not understand most grammar for a long time to come, but knowing about the existence of some of these things will allow you to more easily look up explanations when you come across them through reading.
It took me about 2 weeks of reading the guide for a couple hours every day to get through the whole thing. Even though I only knew kana, I learned some kanji along the way which show up in some of the explanations.
After all that, I was ready to actually start learning.
I began by reading Yotsubato, a manga commonly recommended to beginners (I recommend it, too!), and going through a pre-made Anki deck of Japanese vocabulary. The deck was called "Core 2k/6k", but there are likely some better ones nowadays. You can get some here.
I only read a few volumes of Yotsubato, but I soon started playing some games in Japanese. I was a fan of RPG Maker and Wolf RPG Editor games, since they were short, generally easy to understand due to their simple stories, and they were often compatible with texthooker software such as Textractor, which allow you to extract text from games live as you play it, making it very easy to look up words you don't know using a popup dictionary like 10ten Japanese Reader or Yomitan. Console games with furigana are also great, since they allow you to easily look up any kanji word even if you don't know the kanji. I spent many hours playing games on my 3DS in class due to this, but that's another story.
A few months after I began using Anki I had reached a sizeable amount of vocabulary from the pre-made deck I was doing, but it was getting pretty boring, so I decided to start doing what is referred to as "mining": building your own deck out of words you find in the content you consume, as if you were mining ore out of rocks.
This is where something like Yomitan, which I mentioned previously, becomes incredibly useful, as it allows you to add any word you look up with it to Anki with a single click. Putting many of these elements together, you can build yourself a nice workflow where you get text from games as you play them, add words you don't know to Anki with just a click, and do Anki every day reviewing the cards you yourself created from the games you were playing.
Here you can see a typical mining workflow. I'm using Yomitan with the Jitendex dictionary file, Textractor with the "Copy to Clipboard" extension enabled, and the Clipboard Inserter browser extension so copied text gets automatically pasted onto this site.
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Looks too complicated?
Kamui simplifies all of this so you don't have to mess around with multiple windows, popups and obscure programs. Just select your game from the Kamui window and start mining.
Check it out here.
I kept learning like this for several months, although I didn't have a structured routine outside of Anki so I was on shaky foundations. After a while, I lost my impulse, and I stopped doing anything other than Anki and watching anime (with English subs) for a long time. I wanted to play these crazy console JRPGs that were never going to see the light of day in the West, but looking up words from them was too difficult and tedious, and the complexity of the story and dialogue meant it was pretty much impossible to learn through them without an easy mining workflow.
For example, if I wanted to play a 3DS game that had no furigana, in order to look up kanji I had to use the drawing utility in Google Translate to manually draw every single kanji I couldn't read (or a radical picker utility like the one found on Jisho) then copypaste the result into a dictionary, and then add it to Anki. If I was doing this on my phone, adding a word to Anki was nowhere near as simple as doing it on PC, also.
And this is making the bold assumption I was able to draw the kanji or pick its components correctly in the first place. As a beginner you have no idea how these characters are composed, and you start out by memorizing the general shapes, so this makes it very hard to use a structured method to look them up. Even if you do have the necessary basic knowledge, sometimes the text on a game is tiny, blurred, pixelated, or all 3 at once, so it becomes impossible to make out the composition of the kanji unless you can already recognize it by shape and context alone.
Having lost my motivation, I almost completely stopped practicing reading in Japanese, even though I knew perfectly well that's all I had to do to get better. Nearly 2 years went by, and I decided I had to finish what I started.
Having a somewhat better level than what I had left off from, due to a lot of passive input, very occasional reading, and a year of Anki, I decided to start dedicating time to reading visual novels.
Visual novels are very popular for Japanese learning, since they mix together many elements that make them perfect for it:
Easily hookable: Most VNs from the 2000s onwards are compatible with texthookers, which makes it very easy to look up words from them compared to other game genres.
Lots of voices: Generally, the dialogue in VNs for all characters but the protagonist (and sometimes even the protagonist) is voiced, which is a luxury most videogames can't afford. This makes them like a mix of games, anime, and books, all in a single package, and it's very useful for practicing listening at the same time you practice reading.
High variety and difficulty range: In this genre you can find anything from the most casual slice of life to the most hardcore political drama science fiction, allowing you to gradually expose yourself to harder and harder material within the same medium. Additionally, visual novels tend to make heavy use of narration (as opposed to dialogue), something not often found in games, manga, or anime. This type of text tends to be more difficult than dialogue due to its more literary nature, and getting exposed to this sort of text earlier can massively increase your comprehension of easier texts. It's like reading a novel in terms of difficulty, but more fun and easier to figure out what's going on due to visuals and audio.
The downside is that they tend to take a very long time to finish (especially when your reading speed is not that great yet), and since they're more like books rather than videogames, they often have no gameplay, which might make them excruciatingly boring for someone who just wanted to play games. Regardless, since I decided this was the fastest way to learn Japanese, I pushed onwards.
After some months of having restarted my Japanese journey, and reading and mining from visual novels (and doing Anki) every single day without miss, I took and passed JLPT N1, the highest level of the most popular Japanese language exam.
This took around 3 years, but I know it could've been done faster if I had a good routine and knew how to keep my motivation up. Although I don't think it's a competition, and there is little point to comparing times or speeds, I know that in my case, a lot of this time was spent worrying, being frustrated, and stressing out over not doing what I had to do to learn. If I had spent all that time actually just reading Japanese stuff, regardless of the difficulty or medium, regardless of whether it was the "fastest" or "most optimal", not only would I have gotten there faster, but I would've had much more fun in the process.
I believe that the best way to learn anything is by having fun, and the more fun you have, the more you learn. After seeing a friend going through the same struggles I had while learning Japanese, especially having trouble mining from videogames (and he really doesn't want to play visual novels either), I started exploring solutions, until it ended up in a project I named Kamui.
Kamui is an all-in-one toolkit for mining from videogames. It removes the complexity of existing tools by putting everything in a single place with no previous setup required.
With Kamui I want to remove the technological barrier to learning Japanese from games. You shouldn't need to do research for hours or days on end and download a bunch of weird programs and scripts just so you can mine from a videogame.
I also want to make videogame mining more accessible to all learners. Many, like myself, end up frustrated by the difficulty of mining from games, and end up choosing mediums which are easier to mine from, like books or visual novels, but this isn't always the most fun for them, and can result in a complete loss of motivation.
But, things can be more fun.
If you want to know more, you can check out Kamui by clicking here.
I wish you the best of luck at learning Japanese!
