Postby Kazu1985 » November 26th, 2008 6:59 pm
Pokémon shouldn't be that difficult, as concerns actually reading out what's written on the screen, as you won't see any Kanji at all. Due to having only Kana on the screen, bunsetsu are devided by spacings (although those are made pretty randomly from time to time, not being in common with the definition of bunsetsu that I know)-- all in all that can be an advantage for people new to the language. But one shouldn't forget that the game is designed for Japanese kids, who start learning how to write their language and not for foreigners.
And at that point, there are the disadvantages that I see for the foreign learner:
As for me, Kanji are a huge help to find out, with what kind of words you are confronted and what is actually meant. With no Kanji at all, I would say that one should already have some good knowledge of the language and its vocabulary, to figure out what the meaning of the things written on the screen is, due to the fact that Japanese consists of a lot of homophones.
I don't want to discourage you at all (as I think that it is great to tackle Japanese with things one is interested in), but you should at least have some knowledge of the basic (especially verb) forms and particles, and you should know some colloquial speech, as the characters don't speak, as they do in exercise books -- that can make the identification of forms a bit difficult at times.
Basically:
Being able to read and being able to understand are two different topics....
As for a dictionary, I would recommend the Kenkyusha stuff, but I can't give you any more details (as I am not a native speaker of English) and started to use JPN-JPN stuff, a while ago.
