I think playing just about any Japanese game without understanding the language would be more like watching recent action movies. I mean, you can care less about the plot since you don't really understand it anyway, but you're there for the action anyhow; or the action is all you can understand.
It doesn't help that I got the Japanese Rosetta Stone, and barely touched it; and I only know a few words by verbal memory (Maybe went through lessons 1-3 (of many in Level 1) before my brain burned out, and I got bored.). As for the phonetic characters, Kanji, Hirigana, and Katakana, I don't quite understand how to read/recognize them just yet; Romanji is the best I know, used more for speaking (and, according to what I came across online, asking someone that is Japanese to spell out the phonetic characters in Roman characters; or vice-versa if you know the word, but not how it looks in the proper characters.) however, than reading.
I wish there were easier ways to learn, but as far as I remember, this is the closest thing to how I learned Spanish, and learned it well. High School level 2 Spanish, however. My teacher in that class spoke 90% of the time in Spanish (it was her teaching method, and her primary language as well), and it was probably the quickest I ever learned that language. I mean, I can translate some words that pop up on the spot, and have a rough idea of what's being said. I guess if anyone were to be able to read my thoughts as text, it would look similar to the Al-Bhed translations as you play throughout Final Fantasy X (and X-2). In that format, I can at least gather the context of the situation, and figure out the rest of the conversation.
Not the best method of understanding things, but for the time being, it works. Too bad my mind is more Latin-tuned; it just makes learning/translating Japanese that much harder, since it's not a Latin-based language.
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Topic: [ Itnetlolor's Letters of Uncertainty ] -- New Steam Broadcast Edition (Read 18970 times)