I recently starting learning Japanese as a hobby and I‘m looking for ways to expose myself to people speaking Japanese. I’ve already picked up watching some J-drama, which I do with English subtitles, but I also want to hear people speaking conversationally in a not-scripted way. Also, I don‘t really care that I won’t understand what‘s being said at this point. I’m sorta trying to emulate the effect of immersion as much as I can sitting alone in my house.
So yeah, anyone have anything good to check out? Doesn't have to be gaming-related necessarily, but I figured that be a good place for me to start.
Gamecenter CX! It's not a youtube channel, but it is game-related. It is a TV show about a quite charming, funny TV host who is challenged to beat retro games. A nice feature for Japanese learners is that, like many Japanese variety shows, a lot of the words that are spoken also show up as text on the screen, for dramatic effect.
I have had decent luck finding random episodes on weird sites like dailymotion. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5hmvat
Here's the ep about Tokimeki Memorial, which is a hot topic currently.
The obvious recommendation would probably be to pick a VTuber your like, especially as the conversational nature of that medium can be well-suited to learning how Japanese is actually spoken (most other media being scripted and rehearsed). Beyond that, I might also recommend these compilations of strange and obscure games released only in Japan.
Thanks to everyone for taking the time to make some suggestions. Additionally, I found this channel if there's anyone else looking for stuff to watch: https://www.youtube.com/c/ushizawa16.
@Syzygy#15920 It’s the norm among Japanese let’s players to not talk (or to use Vocaloids)
You mean [those text-to-speech videos where the speaker uses a chibi _Touhou_ avatar](https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm19955677) (which I couldn't find on YouTube, for some reason)?
@Video_Game_King#16339 Ah, those head-only Touhou avatars are called “yukkuri”. I hadn‘t looked before but it seems that ゆっくり実況 turns up a lot of hits on YouTube. The voice thing they use is called Voiceroid, which is by the Vocaloid company but for speech - there are some free ones that are popular. Besides long play type videos they’re also pretty popular for tabletop RPG videos.
I haven’t really explored the space because I know no names yet, but does anyone have suggestions for Japanese-language YouTube channels focused on digging around in interesting games? I watch things like thorhighheels, grimbeard, minimme, in case anyone has those as common references. Not just gameplay but some amount of review/analysis is what I’d love to check out.
I know it ain‘t personality-centric content but 4ST’s one of the more obvious picks—they're particularly focused on investigating secrets and rumours about old Famicom-era games, with one of their more recent videos being an investigation into the PC Engine port of Yokai Dochuuki and its password-locked assortment of hidden developer messages, which not only involved tracking down the original programmer and confirming several rumoured controversies around the port but also led to them crowdsourcing brute-force analysis of the password system and offering ransoms for specific unique, non-programmatic passwords that had been lost to time:
I am a bit struggling with that part because Japanese Youtube culture is pretty different from the North-American experience (and some of its habits are legacy from the Nico Nico subculture). There are a lot of cool retro gaming channels, but they are closer to what Vysethedetermined or maybe Jeremy Parish and GTV do: recording, aggregation, research, contextualization (←rarely) and culture conservation(?). There are also indie digging channels, but all the ones I know present themselves as helpful consumer guides rather than “reflective” pieces with an auteur / critical approach similar to the examples you gave.
(In fact, from the few languages I can access, I barely see this style of long form personal essays anywhere else. It almost feels like these are all hellspawns of Insert Credit New Games Journalism-era Tim Rogers and the rest of the world has either never caught on or quickly recovered.)
I am not too interested in his recent stuff but Okada Toshio is a prominent critic in the world of pop culture and he does try to share interesting insights and personal readings into movies and anime. However, he does not talk much about games. I prefer paying attention to what Yamada Reiji says, these days.
@chazumaru
Thanks for the input. I was thinking there would likely be less of a “I am a recurring character through these videos” element in this space. However derivative some of that stuff may be, the valuable element I find in this genre is some willingness to say “this thing really tried for x.” (Feel like I may sound defensive here - the term hellspawn made me feel a bit self-conscious)
If you have any suggested channels in that less-reflective/auteur space, I’d be glad to hear. I’ll also take a look at those more pop-culture focused ones.
(The original impetus for this was my girlfriend sending me this video by an indoor gardening youtuber trying to start a collaborative ‘everyone grows a potato plant with this kit starting March 1’, which made me want to see that enthusiasm in a game-digging/thinking direction)
@MDS-02 Sorry I was being facetious with the “hellspawn” bit, since Insert Credit is partly responsible for that approach to video games critique, and it had both good and bad influence on the discourse. I personally enjoy most of them. I just think it’s not easy to find this kind of video due to cultural differences (that you surely are aware of) on the merits of personal opinion and open critique in Japan, as well as how gaming discourse online was built in each region.
For instance, I don’t know of gaming analogues for that kind of gardening video but, on the other hand, it reminds me that cooking videos in Japan are much more in tune with what someone like Adam Ragusea or Kenji López-Alt are producing. Here is a guy I like.
I wouldn’t be surprised if fashion and cosmetics vloggers in Japan also share more of a common grammar with Western Youtube － essentially any video community that wasn’t so much influenced by a pre-existing Nico Nico discourse might apply.
