Is it difficult to read in-game dialogue?

Anyone who has ever played a video game has noticed that one almost never, even in children's games, finds only basic "subject - verb - object" sentences. The same is true of Japanese video games. If you were hoping that a game for children would be easy to read, you'd be wrong. Sure, it's easy for a Japanese child. Every day we become dumber while they grow stronger. After all, they are smarter than us. Or are they?

Let's consider the fact that they grew up speaking the language. It's no surprise then that they would understand more difficult sentences than most foreign adults with diplomas who have only been studying the language for a few months. For them N64 games are easy to read. However, there is one area they still struggle with.

That area is kanji. Like us, children in Japan also don't know most of the twelve hundred letters taught in primary and secondary schools. If you've been following my Learning Japanese with Zelda videos, you noticed that most kanji more difficult than a second or third grade reading level have been replaced with hiragana. This decision by developers has two effects:

1. On the one hand it is beneficial for Japanese children considering they probably don't know most kanji taught in higher grades. So long as they know their hiragana they can read it anyway. In fact, with over two thousand kanji, it's probable that they would remember the pronunciation of a given kanji than they are to know the kanji for that same term.
2. On the other hand it only helps us if we have learned our vocab independent of kanji. In my case I made the mistake of learning way more kanji than actual vocabulary. I don't remember which one, but let's say I learned the word miru meaning "to see", spelled 見る. When I came across the hiragana みる I could not recognize it at first glance, because I came to associate the word with the kanji and not the other way around.

This is not to say I haven't bothered learning spoken Japanese, but that I focused on learning kanji at the expense of actually speaking the language. Learning the sound of your vocab will help you identify unfamiliar written language more so than simply repeating the word over and over again on paper.

Something that's helping me is writing my sentences with kanji like normal and then spelling the same lines in hiragana alone.

I'm not sure if this is a common problem or if it's just me falling behind since I've begun second and third grade kanji. If you are having this problem, or any problem learning, then let me know in a comment below.

If you'd like something to practice reading, here's a short clip from Fire Emblem 4: Seisen no Keifu to help.