The Japanese language uses three writing systems: kanji, hiragana, and katakana.
Kanji are logograms – each character has a specific meaning. It is used to write “content” words such as nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives.
Hiragana and katakana are syllabaries – each character represents a single syllable sound rather than a meaning. Hiragana is used for showing verb inflections, for prepositions, and other “function” words. Katakana is used for imported words of non-Japanese origin.
My work above contains 5 kanji characters:
春 (spring)
日 (sun)
鳥 (bird)
還 (return)
飛 (fly).
My name is not Japanese, so it is written in katakana : ビクトリア.
To learn more about the way Japanese writing systems are used, take a look at this article by StoryLearning:
The Sims in Japanese! (And other videogames and manga without furigana)
Want to play The Sims in Japanese but don’t know enough kanjito play it? I recently discovered a way to do it! And it probably works in lots of other videogamesANDmangathat do not have furigana!
It’s not perfect, I admit. But it really helps. And it’s free, by the way.
You just have to press two keys of your keyboard and then select what you want to translate.
And here is how I use it:
I don’t know if there’s a way for the software to separate the words and to give me their pronunciation. But that’s easy to solve. I basically just copy the word/text from the software and paste it into Jisho (https://jisho.org/).
I do not know much about its settings either, but here are the main ones that I somehow changed:
Why did I start using this?
Because I would need to know thousands of kanji to play it in Japanese, so I could easily look up the words in the dictionary using their pronunciation. But I just know 400 kanji right now. I could wait until I know most of them, but I’m into language immersion (seriously, guys. It works.) and I really love The Sims 2, 3 & 4. So why wait? I will keep learning kanji, of course (it’s more important than I ever imagined when I began learning this language, because I thought learning vocab would be enough). But through this method, I can even improve my kanji knowledge. Reading immersion can improve our vocabulary, grammar AND kanji.
It’s easy to get the meaning of the individual words through an addon like Rikaichamp(https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/rikaichamp/) and, if you still don’t understand the meaning of the sentence, just click “language switcher“ and it will give you the translation. I don’t recommend it though. As Matt from MIApproachsays, «Growing your capacity to tolerate ambiguity is essential to making rapid progress. Unfortunately, tolerating ambiguity often doesn’t come naturally. Most of us have grown up in a culture that places a lot of value on “understanding things.” Because of this, for most people, being able to tolerate ambiguity is a skill that must be actively cultivated over time.»
