randomwisdom.com

I had been putting it off because I didn't want to have to slog through the new Zelda game in Japanese. Then I went to Kennard's place and played Wii Sports (you swing the controller like a tennis racket!) and then over to Tajiri Mike's apartment and played Twilight Princess. Normally, text-heavy games are impossible to play because searching for kanji (Chinese characters) in a list of over 2000 takes too damn long (or in the case of the more complicated characters, it's impossible to count how many strokes the character has because it's just a smudge). As it turns out, Zelda has furigana (a phonetic superscript). This lets me read words where I might know the pronunciation but not the kanji, or quickly look up words I don't know in my dictionary. On top of that, it's a good motivation for me to finally study again.

That's it, I thought to myself, I'm buying one. And the next day, I did.

Though it's taking longer than I expected, I've found that the only really difficult parts are those with lots of archaic speech. Annoyingly, most of the dictionaries only provide very basic words from Japanese to English, and I've found I often have to consult a Japanese-Japanese dictionary. Occasionally I'll encounter a word that isn't in my dictionaries; role-playing games in Japan tend to have those in spades, mostly for made-up or magical terms. But if you know the meaning of the two component characters you can usually get an idea for what the word means. And that said, I've stumbled my way through the game's first area without too many problems, and I think my reading speed is improving a bit, at least in the parts where I'm not frantically looking up every word.

Wii Sports is a pretty good game too. Although I haven't quite gotten used to the idea of swinging the controller itself around, it actually does work pretty well! The bowling game is fun, though I haven't quite gotten the hang of how to get the ball to go straight (not that I can figure that out in real bowling either). I'm looking forward to trying out the boxing game next. Hmm, looks like it's about time to leave work....