Possibly amusing anecdote: when I was maybe ~6, my dad went on a business trip and very kindly brought home the new Pokémon Silver for me. Only complication was, his trip had been to Japan, and the game was in Japanese (it wasn’t yet released in the US market), and somehow he hadn’t realized this.
I managed to play it reasonably well for a while based on my knowledge of other Pokémon games. But eventually I ran into a person blocking a bridge, who (I presumed) was saying something about what I needed to do before I could advance. But, I didn’t understand what they were saying because it was in Japanese.
I had planned to seek out someone who spoke Japanese, and ask their help translating for me, but unfortunately there was almost nobody in my town who did. And so instead I resolved to learn Japanese—and that’s the story of what led to me becoming fluent at a young age.
(Just kidding—after flailing around a bit with possibly bypasses, I gave up on playing the game until I got the US version.)
Possibly amusing anecdote: when I was maybe ~6, my dad went on a business trip and very kindly brought home the new Pokémon Silver for me. Only complication was, his trip had been to Japan, and the game was in Japanese (it wasn’t yet released in the US market), and somehow he hadn’t realized this.
I managed to play it reasonably well for a while based on my knowledge of other Pokémon games. But eventually I ran into a person blocking a bridge, who (I presumed) was saying something about what I needed to do before I could advance. But, I didn’t understand what they were saying because it was in Japanese.
I had planned to seek out someone who spoke Japanese, and ask their help translating for me, but unfortunately there was almost nobody in my town who did. And so instead I resolved to learn Japanese—and that’s the story of what led to me becoming fluent at a young age.
(Just kidding—after flailing around a bit with possibly bypasses, I gave up on playing the game until I got the US version.)