Read Chinese visual novels
Surrender to the Waifu Path and become literate in Mandarin already
Visual novels are games that tell a story through text while providing anime-style art and sound. Usually, there are no battles and no puzzles, just paragraph after paragraph of storytelling and the occasional choice between story routes.
In the last two years, I have read 10 Chinese visual novels1 spanning 400 hours2 and over 3 million characters3 worth of content. For comparison, The Three-Body Problem has just over 200k characters, so I read 15 times the equivalent of that novel, which improved my literacy quite a lot. Additionally, it was at least as fun as any reasonable option to build my skills up from an early intermediate level.
I’ll share a bit about the experience below, and give tips for those seeking to learn Mandarin using VNs.
Visual novels for language learning
The Heavenly Path does recommend some visual novels, including a few I haven’t played yet. However, I first got the idea of using them as a learning device from the Deep Weeb podcast, which targets Japanese learners. Visual novels as a genre were invented in Japan, and most titles are Japanese. Japanese learner “the Doth” achieved notoriety for the remarkable feat of passing the Japanese N1 exam with less than 15 months of study, and he did make extensive use of visual novels to practice reading. His and other similar stories covered by Deep Weeb made an impression on me.
As an aside, beyond just making me aware of visual novels, I’ve found guides for Japanese learners to be quite informative for other reasons. As awesome as the Heavenly Path is, I still got new ideas from TheMoeWay, and part of what I’m trying to do here is help bridge the gap.
The benefits of visual novels
There is a smooth progression of Chinese graded readers one can follow4, but the transition from those to books written for natives is harsh. There comes a point where even children’s books involve an inordinate amount of dictionary look-ups. Visual novels shine at precisely this level, helping us break the barrier from learners’ materials to native media. Several factors contribute to this.
For one, though the language used can be complicated for some titles, in my experience it is typically much easier than what one finds in books. That’s because the stories tend to be aimed at young audiences and are almost always dialogue-driven. Moreover, when playing a VN, instead of facing a huge scary wall of Chinese text as one would in a book, there is only one tiny paragraph to be read at any given point. You read it quickly, press space, read the next one, press space again, rinse and repeat. This whole cycle has a mild dopaminergic effect, gobbling sentences up then pressing space is kind of addictive.
The audiovisual elements also contribute a lot make a boring story palatable. The usual path towards literacy in a foreign language involves some amount of putting up with uninteresting stuff because it is more suitable to one’s level than other options. The stories in visual novels are not always the best, but the anime art, music and voice acting end up making the experience enjoyable. I remember Gaokao.Love.100Days came as a breath of fresh air. When I read it, I wasn’t ready to upgrade to actual novels, but at the same time couldn’t stomach reading more graded readers or children’s books. Just one minor caveat though: the audiovisuals are a two-edged sword, as some learners might be repealed by their silliness and inclusion of fan service5.
The dialogical nature of the stories plus the animations and sounds make reading visual novels for long stretches of time less fatiguing, so we end up reading more. Those games are usually very long as well, which means more opportunity for practice. It is not unusual for them to take dozens of hours to be finished by natives, with learners requiring several times as long. Reading the same title for a long time helps us get familiar with its style, build confidence and increase speed. The stories are commonly choose-your-own-adventure style, which adds some replayability as we get to explore different story routes. The fact that early intermediate learners struggle to find suitable reading materials further compounds the value of length within any given title6.
What the setup looks like
It’s hard to configure all the software most learners use to play VNs working. When the setup runs smoothly, the experience is surprisingly ergonomic, but it is an absolute kludge for sure. I’ll refer the reader to other guides with detailed instructions, and just explain the mechanics in simple terms here to clarify what is and isn’t possible at the time of writing.
We play the game on Windows desktop, with a text hooker7 attached to it. This text hooker is the key piece of software which makes easy dictionary look-ups possible. Essentially, what it does is to grab the game’s dialogue lines from memory and send them to the clipboard. Once the text is there, other software can be used to render it on a special webpage. Off-the-shelf browser extensions8 can then be used on that page to look the definition of a word up by just moving the mouse over it.
With a little more effort9, one can get to a point where creating multimedia Anki flashcards, complete with a screenshot and audio recording, takes 10-20 seconds.
What this all amounts to is making it possible to play desktop games with instantaneous dictionary look-ups and easy flashcard creation. Now, all the magic in the setup relies on the text hooker being able to do its job, which it can’t always do. Many games don’t play well with hookers, and even for those which do, some experimentation with settings may be needed. The games mentioned in this article can be configured to work unless otherwise specified.
The alternative to using text hookers is relying on OCR, which is what people generally do to read manhua. Early intermediate learners who care more about their input being comprehensible than about playing any one specific title would do well to prioritize games which work with the hooker. Free OCR software is not that reliable, and at the early intermediate stage look-ups are frequent. I am currently at a level where I do feel tempted to go back and try out some titles which I passed earlier due to lack of hooker support, like WILL: A Wonderful World (VNDB; Steam).
As one final tip before I move on to discussing a specific game, when searching for information on titles, the Visual Novel Database (VNDB) is invaluable. It includes user reviews, tags describing the game content, and many other filters, along with powerful search features. For example, this page lists the most recent releases whose primary language is “Chinese (simplified)”, tagged by users as having no sexual content and whose rating on the website is at least 4.
Gaokao.Love.100Days
I originally wanted to go over all the games I played and share some tips on how to select which game to play, but ultimately decided to leave that for another day and just discuss my experience playing Gaokao.Love.100Days here, which is as good of an option as any for someone new to learning Mandarin by reading VNs.
Gaokao was the first visual novels I ever read, and its premise immediately hooked me. We will sit the life-defining gaokao in 100 days, having just started a relationship with the cute classmate we had a crush on. Because teachers and parents frown upon relationships, we have to keep it a secret. During the next few months, we need to juggle parental pressure, working hard to increase our score, and dating, which both ourselves and the girl, Muxin, are clueless about.
Since this title was my introduction to the genre, I picked up many tropes and conventions from it. To start with, notice how I described the story in first-person. Visual novels usually are presented from the perspective of the protagonist, who is never shown on screen. The most important characters have both voice acting and sprites, secondary characters can have sprites but no voice acting, and minor ones sometimes don’t even get a name. I’m speaking in generalizations, of course, there are exceptions for everything and different subgenres may go with different conventions.
In Gaokao, there are several lengthy dialogues between, e.g., the protagonist and his parents, all of whom have no sprites or voice acting. I found scenes like those, with only text and no audiovisual components, to be boring in almost all of the visual novels I played. Mostly that is because those missing elements help keep my attention when they are present, but another likely reason is that the scenes including them received more care overall. The creators thought it was worth spending their limited resources to add some eye (and ear) candy, which implies they were better to begin with.
Another issue is that Gaokao has dozens of different endings. The way this works is that as the game progresses, you make choices. Sometimes in the middle of a dialogue you have to choose between 2 or 3 options for how to respond to a situation. But more frequently, at the end of each of the 100 days of the game, you get faced with the screen below, in which you choose which subject to study, or whether to rest, talk to the girlfriend, etc.
Anyway, depending on the choices you make, you unlock different story routes. These routes will focus more on different characters, and each of them will include a few possible endings. Any given route can contain a good, a neutral and a bad ending. You can always save just before making a choice, proceed to see how the story ends, then load back, make a different choice, and see the next ending. Doing this, you could attempt to collect all endings, which is one of the game’s achievements. To make this less repetitive, there is a skip function, which will quickly skip over previously seen lines, stopping only upon reaching a new scene.
Originally, I had received the advice to always have a guide open and to try to get to a good ending, because it would be more fun. For some games, this matters less, but in the case of Gaokao, the choices I made led me to the “no route” story route, so the latter half of my first playthrough was super boring. It consisted of me going through the motions, clicking to study Math or Chinese, with little actual story to keep my interest. I advise the reader to not be afraid of spoilers, and to do the right thing and follow a guide. In this particular game, a good story route is way more fun than a bad one.
In the end, even with the skip function, after a few playthroughs the novelty wore off and I was bored of this game, so I didn’t get even close to seeing all endings. I think I went through 3-5 of the major story routes though, and one thing I liked about doing that is how they complemented each other. A character does something in one branch, but their motivation for that is explained in the other. There is some lore build-up as well, different routes fill in on the characters’ backgrounds and the school’s history, and there are also some wacky easter eggs to be found.
My Steam account has ~70 hours of play time recorded for Gaokao.Love.100Days. All in all, I consider it a great title and would strongly recommend it for any learner who feels some amount of curiosity and who is willing to put up with the pain of setting up the text hooker and everything else. This game most definitely wouldn’t appeal to me if it wasn’t for the added benefit of language learning, but that is irrelevant. I would only rarely read any long story at all if I wasn’t gaining anything besides pure enjoyment, and I see the possibility of being exposed to new types of media, which can embed cultural differences, as one of the benefits of learning a foreign language as a hobby.
Well, I’m technically still reading my tenth VN since I found out that, contrary to my memory, one of the games I used to include in my count is neither listed in the Visual Novel Database or tagged as a visual novel on Steam. It was a short and unremarkable puzzle-based RPG. Regardless, I’ll finish the current game soon enough.
Summing up the number of hours I played each game according to the tracker on Steam, I’m at almost 500 hours, but this counts the entire time the games were open. There were periods when I combatted procrastination by alternating 5 minutes of gameplay with 5 minutes of some chore, so that number is necessarily inflated. However, more often than not I’m careful to only have the game open when I’m actually playing. That, paired with back-of-the-envelope calculations about how much I ought to have played given how long I’ve been playing for and how much I typically play each day, leads me to estimate roughly 400 hours of gameplay.
If we assume I averaged 8000 characters per hour during those 400 hours, which seems reasonable, I’ve read 3.2 million characters worth of content. Roughly 1/3 of my time logged playing visual novels was for Tricolour Lovestory, whose script exceeds 1 million characters according to its Steam blurb, further corroborating that estimate.
Mandarin Companion starts really elementary, then Imagin8 Press has slightly more challenging titles which can last for a while. I read graded readers from those two companies before jumping into children’s books and visual novels.
Or outright hentai. One has to be on the lookout for that, since so many titles include it.
I have not personally read manhua, partially because it usually requires OCR to do dictionary look-ups, which instantly makes them less appealing than visual novels to me. I guess that they tend to use even simpler language, which might be helpful for beginners, but ultimately would limit their usefulness if viewed purely as a learning device.
I use Textractor, which is good enough for me. There is a newer LunaTranslator that claims to be an improvement, but Windows Defender flags it as a virus.
Many browser pop-up dictionaries allow for easy Anki exports, which creates plain-text cards fast. ShareX then can be used to record the character’s line and grab a screenshot from the game. This guide offers what seems like a good setup. Here’s an archived version of the stegatxins0 instructions it recommends.