About

I began studying Japanese at the start of 2019 as something I have wanted to pursue for many years now. My primary reason for wanting to learn the language was definitely to gain a deeper understanding of Japanese videogames, particularly those found on Nintendo consoles.

Many of the Nintendo games make an effort to be as approachable by all age groups. One way they accomplish this is to ensure all games can be read by all age groups through use of Hiragana throughout. In the early days of videogames, Hiragana was used due to memory limitations - it's way smaller storing the text for just 46 Hiragana and 48 Katakana characters compared to the thousands of Kanji.

I have always loved playing Nintendo games and Pokemon was one of the first games I bought for my GameBoy back in the 1990's. What better way to investigate the interesting language than to compare the English and Japanese translations for all of the original 151 Generation One Pokemon.