Tag: video games

Japanese puts me to sleep

I mentioned the other day about having difficulty finding interesting articles to read in Japanese. It gets worse than that: just an hour ago around 2:00pm, I was listening to Web JOQR Internet Radio (WMP9 can get it for you) and there was this Katou Emiri girl hosting a show… aaah, she’s trying so hard but it was so dull, dull, dull! I’ve never really liked radio that much and she wasn’t really talking about anything relevant to my interests. Within a few minutes my head dropped off to the side and zzzzzzzzzz…. until 3:39pm. AT WORK! My image is ruined~!… is what I want to say but nobody really cares. Except me. I gotta find more interesting things to listen to, and soon.

Same with articles, I’ve gotten really tired of Mainichi Daily. They never have any delicious news running or anything, it’s always the same old, same old. I’m used to my news being “juicier” and full of casual gossip and opinions. The boring, professional (yeah, I admit it’s professional) A did this and B did this and C went there is just not working for me. Even their game reviews and stuff are almost overwhelmingly positive, no matter how good or bad the game is. Yomiuri Daily is even worse. For today I’m trying Yahoo Japan and Famitsu‘s website. YJ is a bit of a failure. But Famitsu has some potential, at least for a day or two, until I find a more opinionated site. There’s a new game coming out for the DS, Steel Princess. I’ll keep an eye out for it.

That’s all for today.

Still learning Japanese, yay.

I love it when I learn something worthwhile. Like I learned 喜怒哀楽(きどあいらく）not too long ago and now it’s showing up in just about every article I read. Like this one, about 6 lines down. When you first learn something sometimes it seems so rare and exotic, like “When am I ever going to see this word again?” so it’s always fun to realize it’s actually a common phrase, yay.

As for the rest of my Japanese studies, it’s going…well, I guess? I’m almost done with that interfering little Fire Emblem and this time I promise my next game will be in Japanese (sorry Grandia Extreme!). What I’m suffering from right now is a lack of things to read. I’ve grown tired of many of the things I used to like about Japanese culture like anime and manga so all I have left to read are videogame and music articles, and the occasional news item. I need to diversify, but nothing else interests me about Japan or the Japanese. Well, videogames and music will keep me occupied for the time being and then we’ll see where to go from there.

Video games

If you have to cheat, at least make it enjoyable cheating, right? I’d play Fire Emblem: Goddess of Dawn in Japanese if I could, but since all I have is the English version and an English Wii, no way am I going to deny myself my right to delicious rock-paper-scissors disguised as a strategy game. Part 1 is the most annoying part of any FE I’ve ever played to date but thankfully I’m almost done with. So long as I get to kill that stupid cheating Black Knight again in the end, I’m cool.

Still this doesn’t change the fact that I’m devoting a considerable amount of time to a game that is not furthering my studies of Japanese in any way, shape or form. So to counterbalance that, I’m also playing Rune Factory 2 on my DS. Actually I’ve been playing it fitfully for a while, but the restrictive nature of the Kyle parts has got me rather down. The second generation is better in terms of things to do, but the main character just isn’t a patch on cute little Kyle so it’s a bit of a dilemma. Why they couldn’t just skip the whole second generation thing and keep Kyle throughout I will never figure out.

So I’m enjoying the game, but am I learning anything? Quite a lot, actually. In the beginning I thought I’d take my DS over to the computer and enter sentences into the SRS as I played, but it’s a very tedious and slow process, not recommended in the least. So now I just play the game like I would any other. Occasionally a rather tricky kanji comes up and I note it down for future checking, but other than that I’m breezing through. It’s important to me to get my Japanese to the point where it feels just like English to me, and playing through games without constantly running to the dictionary is part of that for me. What I am thinking of doing, though, is seeing if I can find a script of the game, or at least a comprehensive FAQ in Japanese, and then ripping the sentences from there. I’ll get round to that…some day. And that’s all for today.

Minor setback

Computer troubles got worse and worse until the machine eventually wouldn’t start up at all. It had to be taken away completely and fixed and I only just got it back. I have a computer and the internet at home, but I spend most of my time at work so not being able to use the machine kinda hurt.

I didn’t let it affect me TOO much though. I finally got Mana Khemia out of the way (oh crap, I wanna play it again!) and can spend some time playing a Japanese game next. I have the Lucky Star and Suzumiya Haruhi games for PS2 but truth to tell, I don’t really like anime games. Also the glamour of those two anime have long since faded for me so I don’t particularly care to play with them. I might play an Atelier game, maybe, since I’m such a Gust fan.

I spend the downtime reading a lot of Japanese manga, working my way through my collection of manga that I bought long ago and never bothered to read. I read more Dragonball and also volume 1 and 2 of Azumanga Daioh. I notice my speed still isn’t too high when reading, even though I’ve been doing my reps and sentences. I get through the pages alright and I understand everything, it just takes a while to get through. I could finish one English volume in 15 minutes but it would take me about 2 or 3 hours to get through the same volume in Japanese. I should time myself one day.

All in all even with the delays I’m not doing too badly for myself. The search for proper spoken media still continues but I’m doing great when it comes to reading material and reading practice. And that’s all for today.

Long weekend!

Yah, so Monday was a holiday in addition to the delicious weekend break. I usually take a little break from Japanese on weekends, but this time I took a BIG break.

I still managed to watched a few episodes of “Erin ga Chousen” (I’d link to it but I can’t be bothered, check the usual websites for buying stuff) and I entered several sentences from Naoko Chino’s All about Particles book, but that was all on Friday. After that, banzaiiii!!

All English games! Almost done with Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King, and getting somewhere good with Fire Emblem: Goddess of Dawn. I told myself once I was done with those two games I would only play Japanese games, only go to right ahead and start Mana Khemia. What can I say, I’m a sucker for Gust games.

Also cheated anime-wise. Even though I have a lot of Chi’s Sweet Home and Amatsuki raws, I decided to watch Gundam Seed…even though I’ve already seen it once before. It sucks even more than I remember, why do I do this to myself?

So to cut a long story short, I have a lot of catching up to do this week. 50 sentences a day and only 1 Dear Abby column per 10 sentences. That’ll teach you to be naughty. Today’s websites:

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%95%E3%83%AB%E3%82%AD%E3%83%A3%E3%82%B9%E3%83%88 「フルキャスト」
http://mainichi.jp/enta/music/news/m20080527spn00m200014000c.html　「安室奈美恵：さらに進化！40万人ツアー」
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/gourmet/food/shinagaki/20080526gr09.htm　「アニメと同じ　陰の努力」

Yomiuri is really, really, really boring but very good for learning new vocabulary. And that’s all for today.