In an effort to continue my knowledge in Japanese, I’ve picked up some of my favorite Nintendo and Super Nintendo games in Japanese.

My favorite in Japanese is the old Nintendo games. Since the resolution on those games were so low, they couldn’t use kanji, so everything was in hiragana and katakana.

[hard, using kanji] 私の名前

vs

[easy, using hiragana] わたしのなまえ

One thing I found out is that the Japanese have mistakenly assumed sometimes that katakana is easier to read than hiragana for americans. This is incorrect. Most people learning the Japanese written language have a harder time with katakana.

[”My name is Doug”, written in hiragana] わたしのなまえはＤｏｕｇです

[”My name is Doug”, written in katakana] ワタシノナマエワＤｏｕｇデス

Although katakana is, for a lack of better words, their ‘basic’ character set, there are too many characters that are similar looking. ウクケスタヌフ, シツンソノメナ are good examples of this.

Hiragana has the same problem with: わねれ, きさち, るろ, のめぬ, こにた. For whatever reason, we’re able to learn the hiragana much quicker, and recognize them much easier. I can tell that those above are “wa ne re”, “ki sa chi”, “ru ro”, “no me nu” and “ko ni ta”… I’d have to look at my kana list to remember what I wrote above for the katakana.

This holds true for many people… or so claims the owner of yesjapan.com. After having learned the kana, I can claim that in my experience this is true.

Today I learned how to give commands. This is something you wouldn’t say to people you don’t know, or have no right to ‘push’ around. I change the final kana to the い row and add なさい (nasai)

Using the verb “go” (iku/行く)

Go! : 行きなさい (iki nasai)

So now I can use verbs in four ways.

Japanese	English
(verb)います	To do something
(verb)いたいです	The desire to do something
(verb)いましょう	Let us/me do something
(verb)いなさい	Command

Some words from Japanese:

• Cat: neko (猫)
• Dog: inu (犬)
• I, me: watashi (私)
• You: anata (あなた)
• He: kare (彼)