The Sims in Japanese! (And other videogames and manga without furigana)

Want to play The Sims in Japanese but don’t know enough kanjito play it? I recently discovered a way to do it! And it probably works in lots of other videogamesANDmangathat do not have furigana!

It’s not perfect, I admit. But it really helps. And it’s free, by the way.

ThesoftwareI began using is called Capture2Text.

You can know more about it here: http://capture2text.sourceforge.net/

And you can downloadit here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/capture2text/

You just have to press two keys of your keyboard and then select what you want to translate.

And here is how I use it:

I don’t know if there’s a way for the software to separate the words and to give me their pronunciation. But that’s easy to solve. I basically just copy the word/text from the software and paste it into Jisho (https://jisho.org/).

I do not know much about its settings either, but here are the main ones that I somehow changed:

Why did I start using this?

Because I would need to know thousands of kanji to play it in Japanese, so I could easily look up the words in the dictionary using their pronunciation. But I just know 400 kanji right now. I could wait until I know most of them, but I’m into language immersion (seriously, guys. It works.) and I really love The Sims 2, 3 & 4. So why wait? I will keep learning kanji, of course (it’s more important than I ever imagined when I began learning this language, because I thought learning vocab would be enough). But through this method, I can even improve my kanji knowledge. Reading immersion can improve our vocabulary, grammar AND kanji.

So… if you’re like me, try it out!