Weird request i know, but I’m learning Japanese and would like to practice my hiragana skills. Reading them in dialogue helps me a lot. And it’s a bit more fun playing a game at the same time.
Actually, that request isn’t too weird - there are just not really many games with that, that also could really appeal to you.
After all, games that are made using only hiragana should be for a target audience in grade-school - and I think I can safely assume that you are beyond that.
Actually, when I started learning japanese and had the same problems with kanji, I asked back then here for games giving me at least furigana besides the kanji. But even for that I got back then no real answer, only a remark setting me straight about “the games being made for a mature audience which can be assumed to know their kanjis by heart”.
But the funny thing here is: before I asked that question, I actually got myself a game that had furigana. However, it remained the only one that I encountered so far.
This one game was “Gakuen Oujousama Kitan” from C’s - and I think it could still be obtained from DLSite.
To be honest, if I got a game and found that it was entirely hiragana, I’d return it. That’s almost like reading a book in English with all capital letters with no spaces.
rofl…i forgot about this thread.
No i meant more mostly. Obviously all is probably far too much, but I don’t really want games where it’s mostly kanji. I know there are ones like that, that try to use as much kanji as possible.
Unicorn: Didn’t find it, but then i probably wasn’t trying that hard.
… and actually that’s a shame, because the artworks in “Gakuen Oujousama Kitan” were done by CARNELIAN!
I just hope that you don’t mind if a game is about 50% yuri. After all, the player’s character in this game is a tomboyish female…
I will try to provide a link to its entry at dlSite later today.
suddenly WANT.
CARNELIAN + yuri = :OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
EDIT: Ffffffff, it’s like they made this game deliberately hard to find. I couldn’t find the title on eng.dlsite with the romanisation of the title you provided, so I did what anyone else would do; got a listing of CARNELIAN’s titles on erogamescape, and scanned through them. Nothing. Finally, I just did a search for the title directly using erogamescape’s kana search for ???, and found it. CARNELIAN is not listed as the artist >:(. Is ??? an alias she uses?
Anyway, NSFW: http://pro2.dlsite.com/work/=/product_id/VJ001738.html
It doesn’t really look that Carnelian-ish to me, but this is from 2000 so I’ll definitely accept that it could be her work.
I think finding Hiragana only games is all but impossible. Hiragana only writing is juvenile, so considering the games I’m assuming you’re referring to are for adults, it would be odd to find an adult hiragana only game. Everytime I think of hiragana only, I think back to X-Change 2 when Maiko Nagata writes only in Hiragana in a letter to Takuya and Takuya comments something along the lines of she must not be very smart :lol:.
Just like you, I too had trouble finding Hiragana related reading resources. I didn’t feel like importing Hiragana only material either. After all, why waste money on children’s books? They aren’t video games, but try YouTube. Search for children’s programs, like ??? - the intro is subtitled and of course, since it’s a children’s program, it’s hiragana and katakana only. I think it’s the Japanese version of “Thomas the Tank Engine” here in America.?After that, click around in the “related videos” section for more children shows. They’ll make you puke watching them, but if you’ve got a better idea then I’m all ears 8).
I think you’ll have more luck finding eroge with kanji that have furigana on them. Although still very rare.
i think i saw at least one other game with furigana in it a while back…
Well if they have furigana in them that’s fine.
Not surprisingly, your best bet for games with minimal kanji would probably be lolicon games–especially ones where the main character himself seems to be a child. At the very least the dialogue should be mostly hiragana.
If you don’t know about it already, AGTH is a nice tool (not sure if I’m allowed to link to it, but it’s easy enough to find on the web). It’s a tool that hooks text from the message window. You can then auto-translate the hooked text with other tools, or paste it into something like JDIC to look up individual words. Very useful for kanji. If you’re willing to search around for game-specific codes, you can get just about any game to work with AGTH, and about half work natively with no extra fuss. With the auto-translation tools now available, you can get a decent translation that’s readable if not pretty. In addition, user knowledge of Japanese and machine translation complement well, because users are more likely to understand grammatically lax colloquial langauge (i.e., dialogue), while translating programs are best at handling grammatically precise, kanji-heavy dialogue that presents a challenge to those learning the language. Using a combination of these tools, I’m slowly building upon the base knowledge of Japanese I acquired from the 3 classes I was able to take during my undergraduate (which was notably lacking in reading and writing). My reading ability is still woefully inadequate alone, but together with the tools I can generally get the gist of each paragraph.