6 Video Games That Help You Learn Japanese

Slime Forest Adventure

To get you started with the basics of Japanese, Slime Forest Adventure is a great beginner’s tool to acquaint you with basic hiragana and katakana, with the former being the basic building blocks of the Japanese language.

The free version of the adventure game will teach you the very basics, though you can pay for the upgraded versions to learn to read more kanji and complex sentences. However, the free version should suffice for casual learners looking to get into the katakana.

Slime Forest Adventure’s gameplay is fairly simple, requiring you to recognize the correct words or characters in order to defeat the enemies onscreen. It’s great for helping you memorize the easier characters as well.

My Japanese Coach

Released for the DS many years ago, My Japanese Coach adopts a much more straightforward style of classroom teaching for those wanting to pick up the Japanese language.

There are several lesson plans to go through, and the game is designed to teach you Japanese vocabulary, along with the proper writing strokes for each character. If you’ve still got your old DS or 3DS lying around, and you can find a used copy of this game on eBay or at your local game store, it might be worth a look.

Learn Japanese with Tako

Alternatively, if you want to try to learn the language on your phone, Learn Japanese with Tako is a fun little app to help get you started.

The best part about this app is that all of the kanji characters and grammar featured in it are part of the JLPT N5 level exam, which makes it a pretty great tool for new or casual learners looking to start with the very basics.

The app is full of fun mini-games designed to teach the language in a laidback manner, and the ability to hop in at any time for a quick learning session is a plus as well.

Learn Japanese to Survive! Katakana War

Released on Steam, Learn Japanese to Survive! Katakana War is a game designed to teach you all the katakana characters.

With each chapter, you’ll learn a few new characters, and you’ll have to defeat your onscreen enemies by correctly identifying their specified characters. It shouldn’t take you all that long to master the game since there aren’t that many katakana characters at all, but this is a fast way to get all those words under your belt if you’re preparing for a quick vacation to Japan.

Persona

While the Persona games don’t exactly teach you Japanese per se, they’re probably the most accessible modern video games when it comes to learning about Japanese culture.

Personas 3 to 5, in particular, are very palatable for a modern audience, especially with the split between dungeon-crawling and the daily life sim elements where you take control of a high school student. The characters and events are very much ingrained in Japanese culture, which might give you a better understanding of what daily life is like in the country.

Not to mention the fact that there are classes and school lessons that often test you on random Japanese trivia. If you’re looking for a recommendation, Persona 4 Golden is probably the best place to start.

Final Fantasy

Similar to Persona, the Final Fantasy series isn’t designed at all to teach you Japanese. However, assuming that you’ve already got your hiragana and katakana basics down, it might be time to try your hand at actually playing a game in Japanese. In which case, the older Final Fantasy games are a great place to start.

With text boxes that you can scroll through manually, you’ll always have time to read through the kanji slowly and look up any new words you might not know. In addition to that, quickly getting yourself acquainted with the battle menus and options will also put your katakana knowledge to the test, and it’s a quick way to teach you to recognize simple words.

Besides, with Kotaku’s Tim Rogers’ FFVII translation video series now complete on YouTube, we’re pretty much convinced that Final Fantasy VII might be the best game for Japanese learners looking to throw themselves straight into the deep end.