Recently, I mentioned using non-traditional study methods for my Japanese studies. While it may be a no-brainer to many people to do things in the foreign language they are studying or rather look to material, that native speakers of the foreign language use, for foreign language study material, it is still a fairly new concept for me. Lately, I have decided to use my love of video games as study material for Japanese, since I really like Japanese video games. In this post, I am going to discuss watching other people play video games and how you can learn from that.
What do you do if you do not have time to play video games or you enjoy watching others play games more than playing them yourself? There’s the internet. There are people playing Japanese video games online on websites such as YouTube and recording themselves doing it. Some of them talk while they play the games, so although the video games themselves may not have audio for their characters’ conversations, you can just listen to the person playing the video game talk about it or sometimes even read the text on the game aloud as they play. Another option is NicoNico, a video streaming website and app (available on Japanese Nintendo 3DS and PSVita) similar to YouTube which has plenty of videos of people playing video games, sometimes in groups, and you can get the bonus benefit of listening to speech from the video game and the person(s) playing the game.
Another way to watch people play video games is the video game streaming website and app, Twitch. Twitch is worldwide, so you can find channels from countries other than your own that play video games you are interested in watching and there is the added plus of the chat feature. You do not have to participate in the chat, although it would be good written practice, but you can look to it as a form of reading practice and the chats usually revolve around the video game being played, so you have some context to go off of no matter when you begin watching the channel. I actually have not used Twitch a lot in terms of Japanese practice, but I have watched games played in other languages. There are plenty of gamers on Twitch playing video games in Japanese. Many of them are using the Japanese versions for speed runs of the game, but it still is good reading/listening practice, even if the pace seems a bit fast, but even in speed runs, there are some portions of the game (i.e. movie scenes) that cannot be skipped through.
Can you think of any other websites where you can watch others play video games in Japanese?
Learning Japanese for Life 