Phil's Japanese Journal Ep 1 Jan

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Philips Japanese Journal, to show about tracking my journey of a year

[00:00:20] of learning Japanese with video games.

[00:00:22] This is the first full month in review. as well. And my goal for playing video games was an hour and five minutes a day, and I did an hour and eight minutes average per day. So I managed to hit all my goals barely. Before we get into like the meat of this episode, I wanted to talk about something I skipped over my intro episode. I don't like I picked up the full metal out Alchemist Manka and I quickly put it right back down. I love the anime growing up and I thought it would be an easy or least fun read, but the dialogue's actually very difficult, especially the vocab, as they use like military ranks,

[00:03:03] chemical names, and some very long strings of kanji

[00:03:07] that I could not parse. when consuming any Japanese media is the question of, do I actually comprehend the language? Like, am I understanding this? Or am I just putting everything together from the context? Well, I don't know how much value there is even investigating this question because it's like, if you understand it, you understand it, even if it's mostly context and not the

[00:04:21] literal language that is being want to understand it. But I have noticed that if I'm not actively looking to think up in a dictionary, I will kind of catalog an unknown word in my mind, especially if it keeps coming back up. Like I watch for it and as the story continues, if it returns over and over again, it might actually be more important.

[00:05:42] And if I still can't understand it from the context, at that point,

[00:05:45] there's probably more and more context around it.

[00:06:46] You don't have to understand every minor detail and that does feel counterintuitive as the whole purpose is for me to

[00:06:51] Learn and not leave out these minor details that I really want to know

[00:06:55] But having come to terms with this learning process so far There are some things that I just let go by without fully understanding

[00:06:59] Now there are a lot of like kind of like sub rules listed that aren't too critical as these like big four ones

[00:08:03] I feel like when I was in school and I was actually like studying English language, it was always more of a focus on English grammar instead of really about enjoying reading.

[00:08:07] That's more of an American school system thing.

[00:08:11] Anyways, I used the Todoku method for reading, gaming, listening, watching.

[00:08:17] That's the too long to read.

[00:08:19] Anyways, let's get to the meat.

[00:08:22] Let's get started with a game and so gaming in Japanese.

[00:08:26] I surprisingly got quite a bit of feedback from my last episode. typing the kanji myself, which took a long time and took me away from the game. So not really worth it. Issue number two is the Google lens is tied to Google Translate, of course. And there may be other ways to do it, but that's how I was using it. And I don't really like like, I don't want to say that it's bad, but it needs help. Google Translate does not do very well with Japanese, especially when I only

[00:09:43] really need one word translated.

[00:09:45] And I'm hoping to get like multiple, you know, I wouldn't say that I'm well versed or like, you know, advanced, definitely not. But as a beginner, I'm able to progress. There are other methods that I've tried, but they are like overcomplicated and not worth it. One that I did try for a while was using a program called Game to Text.

[00:11:00] Game to Text runs on your PC and opens up a window.

[00:11:02] Let's use like OCR or things like opticalomi Chan, which is a add on for Chrome that lets you make on key flash cards. I feel like I'm going through a lot of terms. This is getting really overly complex, and I can make the flash card, and then I could test myself on it later. Well, I think this setup is incredible. I don't really use it anymore because it isn't really

[00:12:22] possible in my current life. This setup requires me I'm like oh man, I got work in the morning So I wish I could use game to text more I even have a capture card to get video from my Xbox or my switch to my PC But I'm gonna have to wait till my son is older. We have a different setup Now let's get into the actual games I played

[00:13:42] so I finished my

[00:15:03] My I think this is the second game. This is the first game. dialogue that they are yelling at you while you are dodging bullets from the helicopter, and I cannot comprehend what I was supposed to do. I was even more confused because I thought you could shoot the helicopter down because it has two phases, and it does take damage from your explosive weapons. The problem is I ran out of explosive weapons, and before we can be completely dead. And so I spent like, I don't know, half an story seems simple based on what I could understand. But it felt like I was watching like a Tomb Raider anime. But to get the next cutscene to play, I had to murder like 20 dudes and climb a mountain. And then just do that for eight hours on a loop. Next game I've been playing Resident Evil 2. I was excited when this game popped up on Game Pass.

[00:16:20] I've been wanting to play for a very long time. About two years ago, I played through Resident

[00:16:24] Evil 3 remake and loved it. Everyone talked about one in particular that I felt really smart in the beginning. Like there's a memo for new employees. And I couldn't understand much of the memo, but the game highlights the critical info in this case, I guess, meant like first initial of name was highlighted. Then I had to read all the desk name plates

[00:17:40] to get a lock combination.

[00:17:43] So I was worried due to some of the obtuse-ness

[00:17:46] of resinable puzzles that I would struggle, I picked up this game because I really enjoyed Dragon Quest XI and I thought this little spin-off might be pretty good. This game plays like a monster tamer game where you travel around collecting monsters to fight for you. You collect a monster and then you have to give them certain resources or food to join you. Once you get the monster gang together, you travel around treasure islands looking for seven dragonstones as you travel through different dragon train stations.

[00:19:03] The story is simple enough. The visuals are super cute. You build up your one treasure hunter Finally, I came and just like checked the walkthrough. What you're supposed to do is you're going to need to recruit run, make sure it's not out on a mission. By the way, you send your extra critters out on missions like the old Assassin's Creed games and there's like a chance of them to succeed and bring back more treasure. Anyways, you bring the pig to the slime and give it to her to butcher and eat. Then she joins you.

[00:20:20] I guess.

[00:21:42] These are not impossible to read,

[00:21:44] but as a beginner, I think I'm struggling too much

[00:21:46] to recognize words that I know This is easy to do on PC, but just unaccessible on Xbox. I've already done this on my Switch though. Like I use my Switch and I switched it all to Japanese. And almost every game is now Japanese when I started up. There are a couple exceptions which is really strange. Like my Dragon Quest Builder games, one and two, both of them do not seem to have Japanese as a language option,

[00:23:04] which I find incredibly annoying.

[00:23:06] I also have Fatal Frame. ones, the Japanese database, JPDB. This last month, I put another large chunk of time on JPDB, focusing on the vocab deck for a priestess. No, the bear does it a separate world purification journey with a cute and fluffy bear. Last month, I ended up covering about 77% or I'm seeing that 77% coverage. And now I'm all the way up to 80%. This is kind of interesting. Since I finish reading the web novel and then I'll switch to whatever I'm working on next. Next up is Rinchu. Rinchu has been another major study you think that has returned from last month. I'm grinding as much as I can on it. I've already finished the N5 vocab deck and I'm currently working on the N4 and N3 at the same time. I wouldn't recommend splitting decks a lot, but I'm going to try and get it. I think it should be doable. So as for reading, priestess, no, the bear does it, a separate world purification journey with a cute and fluffy bear. I'm continuing reading it. I really wanted to return this episode and claim that I finished the whole novel or something like that. But it turns out finding time to read this is also difficult. So I'm going to keep on that.

[00:27:02] I don't even know if I'm going to finish it kanji, but it messes me up quite a bit because I spent a lot of time studying the kanji and for me to not being able to use kanji as a crutch to read a children's manga is kind of tough. Next up, yatsu-bato ex-mesh point.

[00:28:23] So yatsu-ba is a big recommendation from me now.

[00:29:41] And I guess the Japanese learning subreddit.

[00:29:43] So my goal for reading this month this has become my main show. The only thing I struggle with is like

[00:31:00] when they talk about magic spells

[00:31:01] and the details surrounding them.

[00:31:04] Sometimes I'll get kind of lost when they're trying

[00:31:05] to explain to the main character, Oco, day and I hit like 35 minutes a day and almost 20 hours total in the last month. And I think that much like watching Japanese that doing it more might not actually give me that much benefit with my current skill level. This month I don't think I was really pushing myself to achieve that 35 minutes a day.

[00:32:20] So I'm going to try to push myself a little bit with the next one.

[00:32:23] My new goal will be 40 average minutes a day.