Playing Tears of the Kingdom

August 6, 2023

One of my favorite things to do to get exposure to Japanese is play video games. Recently, I’ve been playing the new Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in Japanese, and it’s been such a blast.

The Japanese here:

お行いきなさい　この世界せかいに安寧あんていを・・・
Go, bring tranquility to this world…

I didn’t think there were many more games that could make me feel like a kid again, or, perhaps more importantly, let me relive the wonders of learning Japanese.

Thankfully, I haven’t struggled much with the Japanese used in Tears of the Kingdom, but it does have me thinking back to when the previous game, Breath of the Wild.

I remember looking up so many words in Breath of the Wild.

I would sit there for hours upon hours, learning new words and absorbing as much as possible (even if it wasn't very much at first 😅).

I loved it. There was so much cool ancient-sounding Japanese, and trying to piece together what happened in the game world was so fun.

Of course, my progress not only comes from looking all those words up, but also staying on top of my core studies as often as possible. There’s so much grammar I would’ve missed had I not done so.

By the way, did you study today? Consider this a reminder! → Study Now

Anyway, Breath of the Wild was 6 years ago now.

And while I was in a slight panic (time flies!!) after writing that sentence out, I remembered what I thought when I first started learning Japanese:

If I just start today, I’ll eventually be where I wanna be.

And now, here I am, 8 years later, having used NativShark and so many video games to help me reach my goals. Some I didn’t even realize I was aiming for until after I achieved them.

Here are a few of the goals that I’ve accomplished in no particular order:

Move to Japan
Pass JLPT N2
Pass JLPT N1
Make friends who only speak Japanese
Have them show me around and get experiences I would never have been able to as a tourist
Be part of an awesome Discord community full of learners like me
Enjoy games, media, and my other interests in Japanese without needing to look things up and struggle to understand
Learn how to speak a dialect in Japanese (博多弁はかたべん, Hakata dialect)
Play the sequel to Breath of the Wild and barely look up any words, even in the old-language-dense cutscenes

All from this one somewhat random decision I made 8 years ago when I was bored.

Funny how the seemingly small decisions can have such a huge impact on our lives, huh?

Really goes to show the power of showing up as often as possible, never giving up, being patient with yourself in your goals, and also being open to grabbing the opportunities as you see them.

Maybe you should give Tears of the Kingdom a shot in Japanese if you’re into it.

Maybe it’ll be tough and you’ll spend a lot of time looking up words and grammar, and it might feel hard to comprehend…

But then when the sequel comes out, it might be nice and easy for you. You might have even reached some of those goals you have for yourself as well ✨

If you’re feeling doubtful you can handle it, you should be able to dig in more comfortably once you’re around the end of Phase 2 of NativShark.

You’ll likely have to look up a lot of vocab (unless you’re used to playing these types of games), but grammar-wise, around the end of Phase 2 should have you covered enough to get a foothold. Just don’t stress about understanding every single sentence thrown at you because that comes with time.

Just gotta not give up and keep hitting that Study Now button.

Good luck out there, and happy studies ^^

NativShark goodie bag

New content

We just added 4 new Units to NativShark. They have lots of new vocab, dialogues, and the following lessons in them:

Unit 81

Saying "(ever) since" with Vたきり

Unit 82

Various kinds of 道 (dō)

Unit 83

Repeating two actions alternately with VてはV

Unit 84

Body part idioms

New Podcasts Episodes

Laid-back Japanese

Japanese barcode hair?? - YouTube, Spotify

Not-so Laid-back Japanese

こんな髪型もあったん？？ - YouTube, Spotify

The Konnichiwa Podcast

Foodie Talk - Spotify

A summer picture from our artist, Chie

Thanks for reading ^^
Ty