Okay, so I decided to pickup Monster Hunter again after doing my Core2000 vocabulary studies for the last three weeks or so, and as predicted, I am able to do a little more. Monster Hunter is a realtime action RPG where you… hunt monsters (^_^). Apart from Street Fighter 4, this is the second game i’ve played entirely in Japanese. As my recognition of vocabulary gets better, I’m finding it easier to gain a the general meaning of an entire sentence versus just recognizing one word and being unable to really get what’s going on. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean I can comprehend everything. But I am sort of “wading” through the sea of Kanji a little better.
The shot below shows me getting some information on a tutorial on how to kill, monsters, collect icons and i’m guessing how to gain stats.
I cannot really understand everything that’s happening, but I am getting the basic idea of what is going on. Like most video games, you can sort of skip through these explanations, and focus on the end message, which is the purpose of the buttons.
So in this picture I see it says ” L button + O button is for “choose item” アイテム選択（aitemu sentaku) and the other says “L button and the Square button” is for “item use” or so i gather. I can also read some of the Kanji now, so even if I don’t know the exact meaning of the word, I can sometimes pronounce it and look it up. Having a dictionary is a MUST when doing this, because some words keep repeating over and over.
I’m also starting to get a sense of the game menus a little better, but it’s still not so easy, because Video games tend to have a lot of words that relate to chemicals and specific sorts of actions. On that menu you can see :
“Menu 1/2”, “Item”, “mixing?“, “Quest confirmation”, “Action”, “Advice”, “pause?”
I looked up 調合（ちょうごう）chougou – and saw that it says “mixing”
I looked up 一時停止（いちじていし） ichijiteishi and its two words which mean “moment”, and then “suspend”. I wasn’t sure if this meant “pause”, but at the bottom of the screen you can see “ゲームを一時停止します。” Which I could mean mean “The game is paused”, because in any video game when you access the menu, that message comes up.
So I wasn’t even close to being able to go this far three weeks ago, but after doing a lot more reading, starting a vocabulary study routine and so on, I could kind of get by, but its still hard to understand almost everything that is being said to me because I still don’t know enough vocabulary. At the the very least, I understood that I took a quest, and on the quest I was supposed to collect two “fresh meats” from the monster. I also understood that my instructor was telling me how to do it as well. I am not sure if I want to keep trying the game at present, because it is a bit difficult to enjoy a game when you don’t 100% know what you are doing… but like I said, I’m treating this like an experiment in gauging my reading and understanding comprehension.
Ciao
Jamaican Learning Japanese 