How I Learned English with JRPGs and a Paper Dictionary

In the late 1990s, I often played Japanese role-playing games with a paper dictionary beside me. A line of dialogue stayed on the screen until I pressed a key, so there was no reason to hurry. I could read it again, think about the scene, and look up one word if I still needed help.

It was slow at first. It was also one of the best ways I ever found to learn a language. But games were not my first experience of thinking in another language. French was.

Before English, there was French

English was my second foreign language at school. I had started with French, and by then I was already doing very well in that class.

Reading made the difference. I read a lot in French, and after enough time I noticed that I was no longer moving every sentence through my own language. I could follow the thought in French itself.

I did not have a name for this process. I only knew how it felt: reading became faster, the language felt less foreign, and I could stay inside it for longer. That experience mattered when I began learning English.

The translations existed. I often chose English anyway.

Most games I played had a version in my own language. The problem was not that translations were missing. The problem was that I often could not trust them.

Some were so unclear that I could not understand what a character meant. Some changed the meaning of a scene. Even when the words were good, redesigned fonts or newly recorded voices could make the translated version feel worse than the game I wanted to play.

So I often chose English instead.

My favorite genre was the JRPG. The English scripts were translations too, but in the games I played they were usually solid. More importantly, their dialogue was almost perfect for a learner. Many conversations had no voice acting, so I could focus on each written line.

I could read a sentence twice. I could look at the rest of the scene and think about what the character wanted. If one word still blocked the meaning, I could open the paper dictionary.

The dictionary became less important

At the beginning, a short conversation could take a long time. I had to look up many words, and sometimes I understood each word but still missed the meaning of the sentence.

Then familiar things began to return. The same words appeared again. Grammar patterns stopped looking new. The story gave me clues, and I could often work out an unknown word from the sentence or the situation.

Little by little, I used the dictionary less.

The important part was not the number of words I checked. It was the time I spent reading and thinking in English because I wanted to know what would happen next.

Within a few months, I became one of the best students in my English class. After that, it was difficult for my classmates to catch up. Most of them stopped using English when the lesson ended, while I kept using it every day. French had already shown me how it felt to follow a thought in another language. Games gave me a reason to repeat that process in my free time.

A spelling habit that helped me

I also had another habit. The written form was the main way I remembered each word.

When I met a new word, I first fixed its exact spelling in my mind. Then I connected the letters and familiar letter groups to the word's meaning and to the way those patterns sounded in English. That made the word easier to remember when I saw it or heard it. It also helped me avoid storing only a rough copy made from the nearest sounds in my own language.

Once I knew the usual links between spelling and sound, I could usually work out how a word should sound from its written form. I learned the pronunciation as a separate fact only when a word did not follow those patterns.

What felt useful to me also has some support from research. A review of 23 studies found strong evidence that seeing a new word's spelling helps people remember both its written and spoken forms. One explanation is that spelling, sound, and meaning become linked in memory.

This does not mean spelling should come first for everyone. There is a real risk in the other direction. Researchers call it orthographic interference: lean too hard on the written form and you start pronouncing words the way they look instead of the way they sound. English, with its irregular spelling, is the worst offender for this.

Today, when audio is available, I connect all three parts: the spelling, the meaning, and the real spoken form. The spelling holds the word in my memory, while the audio tells me whether the sound in my mind is right.

From a paper dictionary to Termy

Many years later, I tried a few new games on a PC and remembered my old learning process. And as a software developer, I had an idea of what it could look like today, so I started building it.

I wanted the help to arrive faster, but not to replace the useful part of the process. You should still read the original line, use the scene, and think before you ask.

So Termy is built to stay out of the way. It explains the word or phrase that blocks you and keeps the help brief, so you fill the gap and keep playing without breaking the flow of the scene.

It also keeps each word with its original sentence and screenshot. When you review it later, you see it where you first met it and hear how it sounds, so the spelling, the meaning, and the sound come together, tied to the scene you found it in.

For a practical version of the same habit, read how to actually learn English while playing games.