Nintendo 3DS discontinued after almost a decade

This is very late intermediate stage - to put yourself into having to read "Japanese."

I would only do it after knowing and writing/speaking Hiragana and Katakana outloud, several times, written it over and over and listening to songs (or any text, but songs have lyrics and it's easy) over and over and doing the lyrics over and over to kick in the muscle memory.

My secret, really, was learning the kana via Kyary Paymu Paymu songs. I enjoyed them, but, after doing that, over and over, the alure was lost and it took me about 3 years before I could listen to Pon Pon Pon again. But - the repetition in the song drilled down the kana for me.

If you already know Kana, then basic vocabulary/grammar. There's a great app on the Android App Store called "Kanji Study"

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mindtwiste...

It's been further tweaked and is more refined then what it used to be, but the memory games are super useful for both kana and N5/N4 Kanji - the basic of the basics.

As for playing with a game/any game, it all falls together after a while - you see the pattern, you "get" the idea, but I would use a dictionary such as Akebi on Android or Jisho.org (Jisho literally means dictionary.) or even translate.google.com and each word you don't know, add it to a unique list and study/drill those over and over.

Soon it will come together. It's very slow at first, and painful, even though I could read Kana and had N5, I suffered reading the "warning" screens on the 3ds even though they're for kids, some of the words did not make sense, but the context was implied.

That's it, as for the games:

Pokemon is great, Zelda is also great, but if you really want to excel -

Karaoke.

You can go to youtube, and find karaoke songs to listen too - the 3dS joysound app stopped/died, but it's still on the WiiU and on the Switch and it is excellent, it offers near 100% furigana (except for very very simple kanji) and being forced to sing along makes you vocal quick.

You can also youtube "karaoke battle" or general karaoke after songs.

"カラオケバテル”

”カラオケ”

I personally enjoy lots of J-pop (which made learning the language much more easily/motivated) so I used songs I knew such as Tatsuhiro Yamashita

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rzBvkcHUz4

山下達郎 RIDE ON TIME （カラオケ）

And then just drilled on that as if it was memory cards or study drilling.

Pokemon games are good, zelda is great. Mario isn't per se as there isn't much "text" The inkling for a bit of puzzle makes it more that you need to "understand" what the meaning is, as it's different in English.

Context is much more inferred then stated in Japanese.

Phoenix Wright Professor Layton Animal Crossing

Then you can go onto some normal plain jane ds games, final fantasy and Square Enix titles are great once you're nearing the end of intermediate understanding.

The richness of games available would not be possible if Nintendo was not in the picture as a hardware manufacturer and had to target all their games at MS/Sony hardware.

Sony & MS have almost never tried any novel hardware and been able to tie it to unique gameplay that was actually successful. They've only tried to copy Nintendo's ideas, mostly failed, and then cancelled the hardware. See Kinect, Playstation Move controllers for PS3, etc.. it was all just copying the Wii.

A lot of the games on DS and 3DS would never have seen the light of day with their unique gameplay elements without Nintendo doing the experimental hardware required.