I made a deck for learning Japanese while playing Pokémon FireRed, with cards in story order
I wanted to play Pokémon FireRed in Japanese as reading practice, with the vocabulary arriving in Anki in the same order as it arrives in the game, so I built a deck that does that. This includes not only the story/dialogue vocab, but also all menus, UIs, etc.
The deck
- 11,236 cards, added in the order you meet the text when you play: the opening, Pallet Town, Route 1, and on.
- One card per word *form*: つかまえた, つかまえて and つかまえられる are three cards, each on the sentence where the game first uses that form. I know some people are gonna be mad about it, but I'm a total beginner when it comes to Japanese and it helps me. Shouldn't be hard to modify the code to make a version where these are combined into a single card.
- A second, optional deck of 925 names (Pokémon, places, moves, items).
The card
Front, exactly as the game shows the line (the game is written almost entirely in kana), with one word highlighted:
グリーンは すでに ポケモンを つかまえて ずかんの ページを ふやしている そうじゃ！
Back:
- the sentence in romaji
- つかまえて → つかまえる 捕まえる (捕 つか), and the same in romaji
- what it means here ("catching, and"), the literal meaning, and the dictionary sense that applies
- how the form is built: つかまえ + て (te-form)
- the sentence in kanji and in English
- collapsed sections: two more sentences with the same form, the whole message, all dictionary senses
- location and message ID in small print
Anki design choices
- Notes are added in story order, so it only works with Insertion order set to Sequential. Non-dialogue text (menus, battle messages, item descriptions) is spread through the chapter where you first see it, so it never arrives as a block of 500 menu cards.
- Every card is tagged with its location (Pewter_City_Gym). Sound words are tagged onomatopoeia, stammers and broken speech fragment, and cards the analysis was unsure about low-confidence, so you can suspend a whole kind in the browser.
- HTML and CSS only, with <details> for the collapsed parts and styles for light and night mode.
- The stretch up to the first gym is the biggest, about 2,500 cards, because that is where the menus and most basic vocabulary first appear. I tried to weave the menu cards with dialogue cards throughout the road to the first gym.
Get it
source: https://github.com/mkusm/pokemon-firered-jp-anki
deck download: https://github.com/mkusm/pokemon-firered-jp-anki/releases/download/v1.1/firered_jp.apkg
It's free. If a card is wrong or the template breaks on your setup, let me know.