Play Final Fantasy IV to learn Japanese

If this your first time browsing this guide, I suggest you get started with the first lessons available here.

The Japanese version of Final Fantasy IV can be purchased online here.

In order to make some more progress in our learning, you will need to skip the introduction dialogue in Final Fantasy IV as Cecil is returning to Baron castle to return the Water crystal to the king. This is because at this point in time trying to understand so much dialogue would be a hurdle and would discourage just about anyone from learning the language.

Instead, we’ll slowly integrate easily digestible bits and pieces about the language until we’ve made enough progress to read and understand key elements in dialogues. This will allow us to understand the general idea of what is said without having to understand every single word which is written.

If this is your first time playing the game, suffice to say that Cecil feels remorse about taking a magical crystal from the village of Mysidia. After confronting his king about it, he is sent to deliver a package to a nearby village with his friend, Kain.

After a short discussion with the key, you will be able to control Cecil (セシル). Before you start exploring however, open up the character menu as this is what we’ll study in this lesson.

In the menu, much like in the English version, you will see 9 different options displayed on the left.

In the previous lessons, I mentioned that Katakana (the angular script) was used for words of foreign origins… Let us now see how this works.

Starting from the top, look at the first, fourth, fifth, seventh and ninth options. You’ll notice that they’re all written in Katakana.

Let’s focus on those words right now as they’re much easier to learn for English speakers than the words written in Hiragana (the other options in the menu).

Let’s look at the words we’ve selected from the menu:

アイテム

アビリティ

ステータス

コンフィグ

セーブ

Now compare each one of the katakana with the following chart:

Let’s do the first one together: アイテム.

Read each katakana loudly and repeat the process a few times. This word sounds very, very similar to its English equivalent. Can you guess what it is?

…

The answer is: item (translated as ''inventory'' in the English version).

The good thing with words written in Katakana is that simply by reading them out loud you can often guess the actual meaning in English.

Match each one of the words written in Katakana with their English equivalent. In order to do so, simply read each word in Katakana and compare the sounds with the English words.

Note: Some words in Katakana will not match the English in form but in meaning. For example, the word item is the equivalent of inventory.