Learn Japanese from Final Fantasy VII examples!

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picklejar

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I've created an app that helps people learn Japanese in a fun way by using Final Fantasy VII as examples!

No need to download or install anything. It's a public web app.

Home Page: http://kujatas.com/learn-japanese-from-final-fantasy-7

Current Version: 1.1

Newest Features:

  • Added statistics around which kanji strings are the most common in Final Fantasy VII. New as of 1.1
  • Major UI improvements: Much better menu, much cleaner pages in general. (Using Twitter Bootstrap.) New as of 1.1
  • Users can now add comments at the bottom of each page. (Using Disqus.) New as of 1.0
  • On the search results page, you can click on a result to navigate to the corresponding page (dialogue or non-dialogue). New as of Beta 0.11
  • Finally added credits/thanks on the home page, to DLPB, Luksy, Herman1134, Qhimm community. New as of Beta 0.10
  • Search for any text you want in Final Fantasy VII, Japanese or English. New as of Beta 0.10

Other Features:

  • Explore the full Japanese Hiragana "alphabet" (syllabary). Click on a syllable to see examples where it's used in Final Fantasy VII.
  • Explore the full Japanese Katakana "alphabet" (syllabary). Click on a syllable to see examples where it's used in Final Fantasy VII.
  • Explore the full Japanese Kanji, grades 1-6 & S. Click on a character to see examples where it's used in Final Fantasy VII.
  • Explore the full list of Final Fantasy VII dialogue text.
  • Explore the full list of Final Fantasy VII non-dialogue text.
  • Explore statistics to see which hiragana, katakana and kanji strings appear the most often in Final Fantasy VII.
  • Shows side-by-side the Japanese text, English PSX text, English PC text, and Beacause retranslation text.
  • Shows examples from dialogue text and non-dialogue text. (Non-dialogue refers to names of characters, locations, monsters, abilities, items, menus, etc.
  • Shows screenshots of the Final Fantasy VII Character Naming Screen, which shows how the alphabets are displayed in the game. Look on the hiragana and katakana pages.
  • Shows furigana (pronunciations above each kanji character) on the kanji page.

Features that might be in a future version:

  • Make the UI more mobile-friendly. The new UI overhaul made a big improvement regarding the menu, but it made some things worse, and this needs to be fixed.
  • Show screenshots of other parts of the game, like character dialogue, menus showing Materia, battle scenes showing monster names, etc.
  • Provide actual lessons to help people learn things in the right order, instead of just exploring. Considering multiple goals, such as "learn a few things to allow me to get pretty far in the FF7 game", as well as, "learn a few things to allow me to actually understand Japanese in the real world as well."
  • Make learning even more fun, perhaps using mini-games or scenarios. Example: You're fighting Jenova Birth, what should you equip to defend against her water-based attacks? (Can you distinguish between the Japanese words for water and fire? Can you locate your Water Ring and/or your Elemental+Leviathan Materia?)
  • Incorporate audio to help with pronunciation and make it more fun and immersive.

Special thanks to:

  • Luksy and DLPB for the touphScript and Beacause projects and their feedback on this project
  • Herman1134 (Jason Maltz) for his spreadsheet that correlates the Japanese and English dialogue text together
  • The Qhimm community
  • Your name goes here if you provide valuable feedback

Hope you guys like it! Would love to hear your feedback and suggestions!
 
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This is really cool!  Do you by any chance have any plans to add the Beacause translation to it when I've finalized it?
 
Sure! It already shows Beacause for the non-dialogue text. When I get the Beacause translation for the dialogue, I'll try to incorporate it. I would need the Japanese and English text side by side, though, similar to the public non-dialogue spreadsheet that you published.
 
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Update: Beta 0.3: You can now browse the full FF7 dialogue text.

Coming Soon: Beta 0.4: You should also be able to browse the full FF7 non-dialogue text. Also, after clicking on a Japanese character in the hiragana, katakana, or kanji page, on the "search results" page, for each dialogue result I'll add a link back to the full dialogue script for that chapter, which should provide better context.

Also I've started playing FF7 International again and capturing screenshots, so I'll probably start adding interesting images to this app as well.
 
Thanks, DLPB! Added.

So, in general, there were a couple of updates today:
Beta 0.4:
- You can now browse the full FF7 non-dialogue text.
Beta 0.5:
- Now includes the latest Beacause non-dialogue text, as provided by DLPB above.
- Also added screenshots of the Character Naming screens to show how they display the hiragana and katakana alphabets.
 
Suggestion - the romaji / name of the japanese.  When I see Star, I should also see under it "hoshi" for example.
 
Great minds think alike, I just added this to the list of future features.

For kanji, I'm thinking about putting the hiragana pronunciation above it and the Romaji pronunciation below it.

And I'll probably give users options like "always show", "always hide", "show only on hover", etc.

Putting hiragana pronunciation above kanji is actually a pretty common practice, even in Japan. They do this in the Final Fantasy VII International instruction booklet that comes with the game. And another example is Japanese news sites, like: http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/
 
DLPB, I went ahead and added the pronunciations, but only on the Kanji page. If you search that page for "star" you'll confirm that "hoshi" is indeed one of the pronunciations.

Also, I realized that I already had the English translation written below the kanji, so I put the hiragana pronunciation above the word (which seems to be the custom in Japan), and I put the Romaji pronunciation above that. I think it works really well.

I guess I'll call this Beta 0.6 and update the first post.
 
Putting hiragana pronunciation above kanji is actually a pretty common practice, even in Japan.
Click to expand...
There are 2000 kanji that is considered "basic literacy" (I think that's up to seventh grade literacy). Those do not have the kana printed above them unless they are intended to be read by children. So menues, warning signs, kid-friendly advertisements, etc will have all the kanji "furigana"ed (that's what you call those characters unless they're part of a name, which makes them nanori). News papers aren't required to do this to these 2000 kanji, but for kanji outside of this basic set it's required.
 
This is pretty neat for Japanese learning FF7 fans! One thing your "app" is good for is word examples, if you've learnt a new word, why not check to see how it's used in the FF7 dialogue. :D

Though I think for some the style of learning is not very practical, using my field expanded disk I've been able to add a lot of English text into the JP game itself to give on the fly "immersive" translations. Though I didn't finish the whole game as I find the Vita + JP PSN store much better for Japanese learning than FF7, simply due to variety + audio. But this is really great for FF7 fans anyways.
 
Wow, this is a really incredible project. I'm at a slightly intermediate level, still using furigana for kanji when possible. This will be cool to check out.
 
Update: Now at version Beta 0.7. The katakana page now includes a table of digraphs, such as chi+yo=cho (as in Chocobo) and te+i=ti and fu+a=fa (as in Tifa).

NFITC1: Thanks for the clarification around furigana! I'm planning to make it optional to hide the furigana. I've never lived in Japan, so your feedback is incredibly useful.

Roden: That's a cool idea of injecting English translations in the Japanese FF7 game itself! And I agree that FF7 is probably not the best way to learn Japanese, but then it again it might be effective if it makes the learning process fun enough. Obviously there are major limitations, like no audio, and limited genre/text to work with.

cmh175: Glad to see your interest as well. I remember your other thread discussing inserting Japanese in the English game. If you can solve the technical problems around that, FF7 could be translated into a lot more languages.
 
Update: Beta 0.8: Added a new Stats page!

You can now explore statistics to see which katakana strings, katakana syllables, and hiragana strings appear the most often in Final Fantasy VII.
In the future version, you can also see which hiragana syllables and kanji appear the most often in Final Fantasy VII.

Some people might want this information to help them decide which Japanese characters to focus on in their studies.
 
Update: Beta 0.9: Finally got around to adding the hiragana digraphs (like ji+ya=ja).

This happens to be a big milestone. Now, finally:

  • Every single Japanese syllable is now available in the tool.
  • The statistics page shows which syllables and strings are the most common. Some people might find this info helpful for prioritizing which characters to learn first.
 
Update: Beta 0.10: Finally added a generic Search Page. You can now search for any custom Japanese or English text in Final Fantasy VII.
 
Update: Version 1.1 is released! And actually, there were a couple of other releases before this (1.0 and "Beta 0.11"), but I never updated this thread.

So, there have been lots of changes recently since my last update here. The biggest recent changes are:

  • Added statistics around which kanji strings are the most common in Final Fantasy VII. New as of 1.1
  • Major UI improvements: Much better menu, much cleaner pages in general. (Using Twitter Bootstrap.) New as of 1.1
  • Users can now add comments at the bottom of each page. (Using Disqus.) New as of 1.0

Anyway, see the first post for more info. Or just go see it yourself and play with it: http://kujatas-picklejar.rhcloud.com/
 
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