Group for my courses (CAUTION: Clicking this link will automatically add you to all listed courses.)
CDJapan (A great site for ordering Japanese books.)
If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions concerning the courses, please leave a post here, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
Because this topic covers multiple courses, please be sure to specify which course (and if possible, which level) is concerned when reporting any issues.
New course! Shining Force Vocabulary: Learn vocabulary and expressions from the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive strategy RPG game!
This was one of my favorites on the console growing up, and I found myself enjoying it all over again while playing through it in Japanese. I was amazed at just how much was lost in the translation!
This will be my first course based on a video game, and it is estimated to include a total of 943 words/expressions by the time it’s finished. The course will be split between eight ‘chapters’, reflecting the game’s own chapters, with the first two compiled now and the rest to come soon.
Wanted to thank you for your courses! I’ll be starting the Yotsubato one next week, and once that’s finished, I plan to move to the Fairy Tail one. Can’t believe the first volume is 79-levels long… going to be quite the adventure.
Fairy Tail’s volume 1 did end up being quite the monster, didn’t it? xD I hope you enjoy the courses though, and please feel free to let me know if there’s anything I can do to help!
I can slightly hear the "に ", but I do agree that that one could have clearer audio. I put in a request on Forvo, and I’ll see if I can get a better one added. I’ll update here a bit later.
Edit: The audio’s now been replaced with a new clip. Please feel free to let me know if you notice any other issues!
Going by the title “Warsong” for its western release, Langrisser is another strategy RPG on the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, and is also the first game of the genre that I remember really getting into.
Barring any future tweaks, this course is being released as ‘finished’. Since it’s not as dialogue-heavy as Shining Force, this game’s course will be significantly smaller as well, currently totaling 239 words/expressions.
Random question: so you joined Memrise in 2014 - I assume that’s when you started Japanese, yeah? What level would you say you’re at now? The vocab for Langrisser, the 239 words/expressions, is that all you didn’t know playing the game?
That’s right. I had made a few brief attempts at learning Japanese previously, but it was when I joined Memrise that I was able to get really serious about it.
I’ve honestly found it difficult to judge my ‘level’, since I haven’t attempted anything like the JLPT tests yet. I’d say that I’m somewhere in the early to mid-intermediate range, with still a lot of basic stuff like various grammar concepts that need ironing out in my learning. I’m definitely beginning to feel more comfortable with the language, but I feel that I still have a long way to go before attaining anything near fluency.
My reading skills have improved through the games that I’ve been playing, but there are still many times where I lose the thread of the conversation, and find myself doing a lot of head scratching. Because of this, I try to take screenshots of everything, and refer to those when I’m actually creating my vocabulary lists. I can do much better at deciphering the meaning behind most sentences when I have access to a dictionary.
And yes, all of my courses are intended to contain words and expressions that I had not previously learned through something else. So “Langrisser Vocabulary” wouldn’t (barring any oversights) include anything that was covered in any of my previous courses.
I do however often decide to make additional entries for words that have been covered already, with different English prompts, if I feel that there’s a noteworthy difference in the way that it’s used between the different cases.
Sounds like you’re downplaying your skills. I bet you’d test into N2, at least. I’ve met a handful of people who can’t actually speak that well or write (though, we all know about the “vanishing” kanji skills of Japanese youth) but who’ve passed N1 because of their listening and reading comprehension (latter being the most important).
Your Youtsubato has been wonderful, but I asked because I’m at a juncture between slacking off/abandoning Japanese or continuing. I’m juggling five languages right now, and I can sort of do Dutch, so I kind of want to make that six… but Japanese is such a behemoth; and it’s pivotal one devote x++++ hours to it, whereas I can spread that same time more evenly with the others and still reap benefits. hm, hm, hm, decisions.
Anyhow, thank you for the response because if I do continue, I know that there are no repeats. Sucks that memrise got rid of that function: delete words you already know.
Haha, you might be right. I was thinking of taking the N3 test last December, but the nearest testing location is about a seven hour drive away, and I wasn’t feeling confident enough to commit to that. Reading comprehension has certainly been where the majority of my focus has gone so far, so it’s reassuring to know that that’s the most important part for the test.
I’m glad to hear that the Yotsubato course has been helpful! Japanese has been the only secondary language that I’ve seriously studied so far, so I can only imagine how much work five languages at once would be! Japanese is certainly a monster of an undertaking, but I wish you luck in whichever path you decide to take!
And one more thing on duplicates: I’m currently planning on doing some more work on my manga courses (at least adding a volume to Yotsubato and Fairy Tail) after finishing with my current game, and I was considering including some select vocabulary in those that had already been covered in the games’ courses, since the manga courses have been more popular so far. I may still decide against it (need to get into it first and see how it would look), but if I do, I think I’ll keep a list somewhere, detailing which words overlap with which courses, so that users could easily ignore those as they go. I would want such a list for myself anyway, since like you, I’ve been annoyed by the lack of the auto-ignore feature.
@TinyCaterpillar [quote=“TinyCaterpillar, post:12, topic:1753”]
I was considering including some select vocabulary in those that had already been covered in the games’ courses, since the manga courses have been more popular so far. I may still decide against it
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It’s up to you of course, but I think you should do it. I’m sure there’ll be a few people who’ll go through your whole manga courses first or not even touch the video game ones, which’ll mean they’ll miss out on those words. I personally have been putting words I don’t know into a translator, then later adding to an anki deck. But it’s preferable to learn those words on memrise though.
Thanks for the feedback, @jecht. I’ll take that into consideration.
A big part of what will determine my decision will be how much extra work I think it will take to create and maintain the courses if I include the duplicates. When making a duplicate entry, I can simply copy the original entry for the spreadsheet, and cut out the time it takes to compile the definitions and alts. When adding it to the database though, uploading the text, audio, part of speech, etc, will all have to be done from scratch again. Any tweaks to one instance of the word would have to be reflected in the duplicate(s) as well, which could get to be a lot of work.
When I was first starting the Fairy Tail course (my second course), I was wondering along the same lines, whether I should include some vocab that was already covered in Yotsubato. I was very tempted to include vital words like 魔法, for example. I ultimately decided against it that time though, as I came to worry that I’d be spending more time repeating myself than not. Looking at my spreadsheets, I currently have a growing total of around seven thousand entries from the games alone (I have a few large, unfinished courses still in the pipeline), so I think it would be impractical to put every one of those back into the pool of ‘uncovered’ vocab for the manga courses. I could however limit it to words that I view as vital to understanding the story, and leave out some of the more arguably superfluous entries, like many loan words and conjunctive verbs.
In any case, my current plan after finishing the current game’s vocab list is to wrap up a two volume manga series that I have partially finished, then go through Yotsubato’s volume 13. I think I’ll largely give myself free rein on that one, since it was my very first course, and I only stopped working on it when I did because the thirteenth volume hadn’t been released yet. By the time I’ve finished with that, I hope to have a better idea of what sort of standards I should be aiming for with Fairy Tail.
This was a little-known RPG released fairly early in the original Playstation’s era. It was developed by Camelot, which would later go on to make the much more popular Golden Sun series.
Like Langrisser, this course is being released as ‘finished’, barring any future tweaks. This is another fairly hefty course, currently totaling 929 words/expressions, split between two ‘acts’.
I’m sure the Legend of Zelda series itself needs no introduction, although it was only recently that I learned about the manga. I rather liked the way that it put its own spin on the story with some creative liberties here and there. (I know I’ll never look at Volvagia the same way again. )
This course currently covers the two volumes for the Ocarina of Time series, with more planned to be added later as I read them. (Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess would likely be the ones I’m most interested in tackling next.)
Course update: Yotsubato Vocabulary and Fairy Tail Vocabulary have had new levels added for volumes 13 and 2 respectively.
This brings 131 new entries for Yotsubato Vocabulary, and 272 for Fairy Tail Vocabulary.
I plan to add volumes 3-9 for Fairy Tail soon as well, and most of the content is already collected and ready to be added to the course. I will be waiting a little while to add them though, since I want to divert my attention to breaking ground on my next new course for the time being.
Nice job @TinyCaterpillar. I was just thinking getting myself a Japanese Nintendo and start playing some of the games. I will definitely start with the games you have courses for. I have a heck of a time keeping the Kanjis in my head. I have big hopes that the game playing will help me.
Playing through the games has definitely helped me a lot in my reading, though the kanji words often won’t mean anything to me until I’ve drilled them into my head a bit with Memrise. I’ve been doing most of my reading through games in the past year though, and when I go back to the first few that I played, and think about how much trouble I had the first time through, it’s a world of difference.
If you’re just getting into playing games in Japanese, I wrote another post on the subject a while back here, that might be worth a read.
In any case, good luck with your learning! And feel free to let me know if there’s anything I can help with.
Updated!
Reading comprehension has certainly been where the majority of my focus has gone so far, so it’s reassuring to know that that’s the most important part for the test.
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