New course: Beyond the Beyond Vocabulary!
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’.
Enjoy, and feel free to share any feedback! ^ _ ^
New course: Legend of Zelda Vocabulary!
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.)
Enjoy, and feel free to share any feedback! ^ _ ^
doesn’t look easy, but it gives a change to exercise kana
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.
As always, feedback is welcomed! ^ _ ^
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.
Thanks, @GabrieleCramer-Knebe! I hope you enjoy them. 
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. 
Maybe it is an app issue but the audio for おぎゃあ in level two of the Zelda course sounds strange.
Thanks for creating these courses. I’ll try the Zelda course once I’ve made more progress on the basic courses.
Thanks, @Marcus.W! I hope you enjoy the course.
I’ve put in a request on Forvo, and I’ll see what I can do about getting the audio replaced. I’ll update here 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! ^ _ ^
TinyCaterpillar, do you have a group link for your courses?
I just made one. Bear in mind that due to how the ‘groups’ system works, clicking this link will add you to every course that I’ve published, and unless you leave the group, any courses in the list that you quit will be added again whenever you go to the groups page.
Is there a recommended order to take these courses?
Not exactly, since all of the courses that I’ve made so far are simply vocabulary found within the respective manga/video game. The courses were built in a certain order though, and the later courses do not cover the vocabulary that’s already been covered in previous courses. Certain sources will have more difficult vocab, but I still feel that they’re all accessible if you’re interested in the source material.
If you were to want to follow the courses in the order that they were made (this is what I’ve been doing as I make them), here’s the current list, in order:
1: Yotsubato Vocabulary (Vol. 1-12)
2: Fairy Tail Vocabulary (Vol. 1)
5: Shining Force Vocabulary
6: Langrisser Vocabulary
7: Beyond the Beyond Vocabulary
10: Legend of Zelda Vocabulary (OoT Vol. 1-2)
11: Yotsubato Vocabulary (Vol. 13)
12: Fairy Tail Vocabulary (Vol. 2)
(The missing numbers are courses that I’m still working on, that I plan to publish later. I’ll be updating the list in my first post to reflect this order when they’re finished.)
I suppose this list would be the closest I have to a recommended order. I don’t think there’s any real harm in doing them in any other order though. If it were me, I would pick one where I’m interested in the source material, and go through the course as I read the books/play the game, so that I could learn the vocab with context. I don’t know what your current level is, but I personally think that Yotsubato is a great manga for early reading (it was the very first thing that I seriously read in Japanese), and the vocab is probably the most beginner-friendly in that list.
Thanks for that detailed answer. I’m still a beginner but learning kanji so I’ll follow your suggestion.
@TinyCaterpillar, do we get to have a sneak peek at what your next course is going to be? RPG or manga (or novel?!)?
I was looking at 惡の華 today. You might be interested in it – surprised how easy it was.
Sure! The course I’m working on now is for the PS1 game, Wild Arms. It’s going to be a huge course, estimated to have over 3,000 entries! :o It’s unsurprisingly taking quite a while to build, but I hope to have it finished by the end of next month at the latest.
It’ll be RPGs for the next while, actually. I plan to build public courses for the first two small games I played in Japanese: Monster World III (more of a platformer/RPG) and Sorcerer’s Kingdom after that, then I’ve got Suikoden, which should be about half the size of Wild Arms. I’m planning to build volumes 3-9 for Fairy Tail after that, then it’s back to RPGs, with the first two games in the Atelier series. (My first Japanese exclusive games! :D)
I’ll be getting back to making manga courses eventually (I’m eyeing Cardcaptor Sakura at the moment), but I’ve been shifting between the manga and games as I feel the need for a change of pace. I actually played and gathered the material for Wild Arms and Suikoden about a year ago, so I’m still in my ‘gaming mood’ right now. lol
And thanks for the recommendation! I hadn’t heard of that series before, so I’ll look into it. It seems to be available on CDJapan, so maybe I’ll throw the first volume into my next order. I’m always happy to be introduced to more reading material. I ended up buying the first book in the Magic Tree House series after seeing one of your posts a while back, though I haven’t gotten to it quite yet. (So hard to find time these days >_<) I haven’t tried reading any Japanese novels yet, so that should make for a nice first step into that territory.
Oh, wow, great to see all of the things you have planned, haha! Always curious about your courses since you have great layouts and good taste for vocabulary to facilitate hopping into native material. I look forward to more.
Aku no Hana is… strange in the beginning. I’ve read the whole thing in French, and it captures the closed-off feeling of a small Japanese mountain village with lots of teenage angst. It’s worth a read, just don’t let the initial premise (highly deviant as mimesis to Baudelaire’s work) put you off.
I still need to read my Magic Tree House stuff~ I took a break from my Japanese, like I said before, to hone in on my other skills; now I gotta focus 
. I was looking at amazon, and there’s a very famous German author whose books I’ve read. Many have been translated into Japanese, and I think you’d be surprised how well you can read them (this is my pushing you to read more novels because I’m betting you can do so easily after all the courses you’ve made).
Check the first pages for this one:
There’s also 吉本ばなな’s キッチン, which is always recommended as a first novel. There is a course on it, too. https://www.memrise.com/course/634891/-10712/
Thanks! I’m glad to hear that!
Both of those were unfamiliar to me too, so I’ll add them to my list. I was able to read all of the preview pages without too much trouble, though I still have to go very slowly and consult my dictionary regularly. (It amazes me how often I still run into new words after all this time! lol)
I should probably start finding some time every day to do some casual Japanese reading. I tend to feel pressured to mine everything I read for vocabulary as much as I can, then try to make a course with it, but that of course takes much longer than simply reading the book. It’s probably time for me to start trying to learn some things passively, as I did with English.
Thanks again for the recommendations! I’ve got them all bookmarked now, and I’ll try to get my hands on some copies.
Haha, the thing with running into new words is… it never stops. Professors who translate (or just translators in general) sit down with their dictionaries. So, no hope there. What I’ve done in other languages is read extensively (like how you would in whatever tongues you’re comfortable) and just jot down any words I don’t know onto a notepad. Then whenever I get around to it, I’ll add them to my memrise courses. That way, the reading flow isn’t interrupted, but at the same time, I’m not losing those words. Of course, if I psych myself out and can’t be bothered to pick up a pen, then I’m happy to read novels completely uninterrupted!
Once last recommendation I forgot, which you might like. There’s a terrific website on Soseki.
Many of his novels there with full audio, translations if you want them, and vocabulary lists. Really excellent. Hats off to whomever made it.
Haha, that’s true. I’ve made peace with the fact that it won’t stop. Though it would be nice for them to start to become less frequent eventually. lol I’ve been keeping records lately of the average rate that I add new vocab to my lists for the screenshots from my games. Atelier Marie, the game I just finished, had a rate of about one new entry per three screenshots on average, and felt pretty manageable and enjoyable. Anything more frequent than that and I start to feel stressed out. lol Wild Arms came to about one for every two screenshots, and was an enormous project. (Though it was also a much larger game) I’d be happy to someday get to something closer to one for every five.
I was taking a similar approach with writing down the vocab when I first started reading the manga, but I eventually fell out of the habit when I began to restrict my reading to when I was actually ready to make the courses. I think I’ll give that another try, as I was getting through books pretty quickly when I was taking that approach. I just need to remind myself not to stress out about the ‘backlog’ on building the courses.
Wow, that really is an amazing resource! Thanks for sharing it! I really like the mouse-over translation feature. I’ve seen a handful of sites with similar features, but they were all done automatically, and were unfortunately very often incorrect. This one was clearly done by hand, which was undoubtedly a lot of work.
All the effort you put into your courses is going to be repaid, no worries. You’ll be much better off for the time you spent, and your future self will be thanking you.
Mhm, clearly a labor of love at the Soseki sight. I need to read those novels and again and again until I can do them easily. Oh, the joys of learning Japanese. If you want to make a course based on the website, I will be the first to line up 
Actually, the backlog thing is interesting. I’m at the point in most of my languages where I can read without much problems, but I still feel tied down to memrise. To the degree that it’s affecting some travel related stuff because I’m worried about not having internet and coming back a month later and it being hell to review all the items. I need to wean myself off instead of adding new courses, ugh.