Want to take your study time in a new direction? How about to a new level? Want to learn strange kanji? Or how about just playing those old favorites again in their original language? I’m going to help you get set up for playing and translating classic video games, entirely for free! Well, almost free.

A lot of people might not know about emulation or translation, so I’m going to take a moment to describe what I’m using. If you know what’s going on, just jump to the next section.

Preparation

Here’s what you’re going to need:

A computer

To be entirely honest, a Mac will be the best because it can use JEDict.

An Emulator

An emulator is a program that emulates one of the old console game systems, like Super Nintendo or Genesis. Emulators are generally considered legal to own and are easy to find. For this entry, I’m using this version of SNES9X for Mac.

A ROM

A ROM is an “image” file of a video game. When you open this file with an emulator, you can play the video game as you normally would on a console. The legality of ROMs has always been a bit touchy, but in the opinion of most people, as long as you are playing games that have no chance of profit and are not reselling them, you should be safe. An excellent site for Japanese ROMs is this one, which does ask that you sign up. I’m using the Japanese edition of Final Fantasy 6 here.

JEDict and maybe an Electronic Dictionary

The reason why a Mac is so helpful here is that it has access to JEDict, which is a fantastic program for quickly looking up Japanese words. A great aspect about JEDict is that if you know one kanji in a compound, you can type in that kanji and search all of its common compounds. Unfortunately, if you have absolutely no idea about a kanji, JEDict isn’t all that helpful. That’s where having an electronic dictionary with an input is really handy. Because I’m cheap, I use the Nintendo DS Kanji Dictionary.

Anki

You want to remember the words, right? Seriously, if you’re studying any language and not using Anki, you’re cheating yourself. Go get it here.

A Word Processor

Because, you know, you’re translating. Again, because I’m a cheapskate, I use Open Office.

Time and Skill

You might want to look at this as Japanese study and not playing video games, because you might spend an hour in real time moving through 10 minutes of game time. It’s a bit sad, really, but just know that the more you do this, the quicker you’ll get. Your Japanese skill can be of any level, but it might benefit intermediate to advance students the most. I consider myself intermediate, if that helps.

Just Let Me Play Already

Holy crap I don’t understand anything!

Don’t worry! That’s the point of leveling up your Japanese with video games. Here’s why I had you go with SNES9X: the pause feature.

Click that button in the lower left, and the game will freeze while you begin your translating. This is why video game translation takes so long–constantly pausing and resuming and pausing again–it’s almost enough to drive you away at first. But after a while, you get familiar with the game’s lingo. You understand what’s going on with just a glance. The repeated words become familiar to your brain, and you really begin to play and understand the game.

My desktop sure looks cluttered…

It sure does! I don’t really mind desktop clutter, but if you do, you might want to find a way to clean up this mess.

Wait! What do I translate?

Because I like learning every kanji I run across, I translate absolutely everything I can. When I first started doing video game translations, I copied only the more modern kanji and didn’t bother memorizing the more difficult kanji and expressions. You might want to take this route as well–if it seems useful, copy it to Anki; if it seems obscure, let it go.

Video Games and Your Japanese Study

You should keep in mind that video game Japanese (or manga Japanese, or anime Japanese, etc.) is not really reflective of everyday usage. If you dedicate all of your hours to studying Japanese through Final Fantasy 6, you’d be perfectly competent having a conversation about Magitech Armor, but absolutely unable to describe the weather. You should do these translations as an entertaining alternative to your usual routine. That said, you can add quite a bit of vocabulary to your lexicon incredibly quickly by translating Japanese games.

How do I know if I’m accurate?

You can usually find the original English game scripts on www.gamefaqs.com. The original English translations might differ greatly from the original Japanese versions of the game because of a number of reasons, ranging from censorship to cultural differences. However, English scripts can be a good resource if you cannot read a kanji at all.