cross-posted from: https://lemmy.comfysnug.space/post/79947
Anime has slowly grown into a global phenomenon, but visual novels are far more niche. Many visual novels remain untouched by localization companies, and sometimes the localizations we do get are…lackluster.
Often, the best way to experience a visual novel is in the original language—Japanese. Whether you’re already interested in learning Japanese, or want to learn Japanese purely to play visual novels in their original language, both motivations are perfectly valid. Visual novels are a great way to learn Japanese, because you get exposure to both the written and spoken language.
I’ve written a guide on how you can learn Japanese by playing visual novels with the help of a friend who made some suggestions to improve it, and it’s available on our wiki, wiki.comfysnug.space. As with all pages on our wiki, it’s licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0, meaning you’re free to share and re-post the content.
If you’re interested in learning Japanese or have already begun, I hope you find this guide useful. It isn’t meant to be a dedicated guide on learning Japanese, but there are some tools you might not know about that will make your life easier.
If you have any additions or corrections to offer for this guide, or are interested in working on our other pages, you can sign up for the wiki here.
I’ve heard of Manga OCR before, but I haven’t used it myself. From the README:
If you’re going to give it a try, let us know whether it works well with visual novels too! If it does, we can add it to the wiki page.
At the moment, we recommend Transformers OCR because that’s what I use and have had success with. I used Gazou OCR before that, and it works on both GNU/Linux and Windows, but Tranformers_OCR is simpler and supports both Xorg and Wayland fully.
Will do!
An update: I’ve realized that Transformers OCR actually uses Manga OCR behind the scenes, so I’d say it works fairly well, haha.
I need to play with it more! But glad it is working well.