Complexity of Policenaut's Japanese?

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Marlboro
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Complexity of Policenaut's Japanese?

Post by Marlboro »

Afternoon, all!

I'm considering the purchase of Policenauts for either Playstation or Sega Saturn and I was wondering about the complexity of the Japanese used in the game. For example; lots of kanji? Mainly hiragana? Use of furigana? Sentence complexity: slang words not listed in usual dictionaries; et cetera. I just want to know to ascertain a purchase, that's all..

Thank you!
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Post by Artemio »

Lost of Kanji, even medical and spcae terms, around 3000 Kanji at least, If I recall correctly around 4000. The language when not using specialized terminology is very understandable. Osiris will be able to provide you a better opinion though.
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Marc
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Post by Marc »

From what you said, I take it you know some level of Japanese, right? The game has quite a bit of kanji (if you know all the joyo kanji + those certain other necessary characters then you won't have any problems -- i.e. there's nothing ridiculously rare) as well as specialized terminology dealing with areas like space and medicine. The grammar of the language isn't that hard. I find Kojima's writing to be easily understandable. He doesn't use a lot of slang constructions like in Dragon Ball, for instance. He uses kanji in place of hiragana wherever appropriate, which you'll know is actually preferable to hiragana. There is no furigana for the kanji, but there is ruby above certain technical words. For example, there will be コールド・スリープ above 仮死状態 -- it's usually just the English equivalents of the Japanese terms. And you won't find any words in it you can't find in online dictionaries. Hope this helps!
Last edited by Marc on Sun May 27, 2007 1:31 am, edited 4 times in total.
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Post by 8bitsonic »

Just curious, what are the "joyo' kanji?
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Post by Marc »

They're the 1,945 kanji the Japanese government has designated as "daily use"; that means Japanese are supposed to know their readings without furigana assistance (having them written out in kana). It doesn't include all the characters you'll see when you read a layman's printed work, however. There are others not on the list that crop up frequently and should also be learned.
Marlboro
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Post by Marlboro »

Thank you for the information! Although my rather bad knowledge of kanji wouldn't extend to medicine nor space, I've got a very large Kondansha Kanji dictionary if I need assistance! Curious how they put katakana variants above certain kanji... I assumed Policenauts was targeted at an older audience..
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Post by Marc »

Marlboro wrote:Curious how they put katakana variants above certain kanji... I assumed Policenauts was targeted at an older audience..
It was targeted at an older audience; the katakana variants were to show Japanese what certain terms are in English. Kojima is interested in that sort of thing.
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