Niche proprietary games and AJATT

What if a person's motivation for learning Japanese is only to play niche proprietary games/software that will never be localized into their native language. How could they follow the AJATT method?

If someone's only motivation is playing a specific set of games, that's a recipe for quitting once they've finished those games. Try to broaden your content choices so you always have something to do in Japanese. If you spend too long searching for content, your immersion is paused and you don't progress. To succeed with Japanese you need both active and passive immersion, and games alone won't cover everything.

This situation where you have only proprietary options and no free alternatives isn't unique to language learning. I think Richard Stallman would say that if there's no libre alternative, he'd still refuse to run the proprietary version. From a software-freedom perspective, not running proprietary software preserves your freedom just as much as running free software.

The GNU Project's philosophy says we should avoid proprietary software. That said, Richard Stallman also allowed an exception: using a proprietary program can be justified if it is crucial to developing a free replacement that will help others stop using the proprietary program. So if your goal is to help other AJATTers obtain free replacements for those Japanese games, you might choose to run them for the purpose of reverse-engineering or creating alternatives. Running proprietary software solely for immersion is a bad idea.

Tags: faq