Learning Japanese with Higurashi 🇯🇵

The Higurashi When They Cry (ひぐらしのなく頃に) games by 07th Expansion are rightfully very popular visual novels. Given their lovable characters, the intriguing mystery and the highly captivating story, it is definitely recommended you check them out if you haven’t yet.

Like most Japanese media that is popular in the West, one common question is if and how Higurashi can be used for the purpose of studying Japanese. While you can go right ahead and change the language of the games to Japanese, studying this way will be rather difficult.
Unlike anime with selectable subtitles, the Higurashi games are their own standalone software, making it very hard to interact with its texts. Words cannot be copied or looked up, and audio files cannot be replayed.
Especially when utilizing the popular method of “AJATT” to learn Japanese, these circumstances make it nearly impossible to properly study Japanese with Higurashi.

Fortunately, the Higurashi game files allow for an easy extraction of both text and audio! All the game’s dialogue files are actually available as plain-text. In fact, the audio files are also available should you be using the highly recommended 07th-mod.
Better yet, you don’t even have to extract all the content yourself thanks to the help of a little tool that automates this process for you:

Introducing the free and open-source Higurashi - Japanese Text Extractor.
With this program you can have all text and (optionally) audio from every Higurashi game converted into a highly accessible HTML format. You can then view all content inside your web browser with selectable texts and replayable audio snippets!

Additionally, the HTML format inside your web browser also allows you to utilize third-party tools for studying Japanese! You can use Rikaitan to directly hover over any word and get its translations as well as audio reading. Furthermore, you can utilize it in conjunction with Anki to immediately make vocabulary cards based on the Higurashi games. If you are very ambitious, you can even download the in-game audio of your target sentence and attach it to your Anki cards.

Do note that any audio support for the Higurashi games is only possible with the 07th-mod. The tool does allow you to extract Higurashi content without the mod, but this extraction will then be without any audio support. If you use the 07th-mod, however, the tool will respect your set censorship level, if you specify it in the tool’s configuration file as well.

If you are curious to use the tool now, click here for a guide to install it.

Is Higurashi good for learning Japanese?

Apart from the technical details described above, you might wonder how effective it is to learn Japanese with Higurashi to begin with.

Thematically Higurashi is a great resource for studying Japanese because of its many real-world subjects and “slice of life” sections. Furthermore, as a visual novel you will find it to be very verbose with a diverse range of words, making it perfect for both beginners and advanced learners. Higurashi is also originally written in Japanese by a native speaker and has many lines of dialogues which will ensure you have plenty of material to immerse with.

A major downside, however, is that Higurashi remains for the most part a very silent experience. While using the 07th-mod adds a lot of spoken Japanese audio into the games, it will be comparatively little. This can be a huge issue for beginners since listening is the most vital thing you should be focusing on when learning a new language. While replayable audio with the extractor tool can help you, be aware that Higurashi is still a reading experience and reading is what you will primarily train with it.

Overall, Higurashi is definitely a great resource to learn Japanese with, no matter what level you are. However, if you are a beginner I personally recommend to use it only as a secondary learning resource and to find another audio-focused medium to immerse with, i.e. an anime or audiobook.

How to use the Higurashi Extractor Tool

1. Install Python on your computer if you have not installed it already.

2. Head over to the extractor tool’s repository and download the file extractor.py and put it somewhere where you can find it again (e.g. your desktop)

3. Locate the Higurashi data folder for your desired Higurashi chapter
   If you have installed it with Steam, it should be found under:
   ../steamapps/common/Higurashi When They Cry/HigurashiEp01_Data/

4. Open up a “terminal” in the same folder where you saved your extractor.py file to.

5. Type this command into your terminal:
   python3 extractor.py <path-to-your-higurashi-data-folder>

6. If everything was successful, the script should have produced a folder with multiple .html files.

7. Open the file main.html in your favorite web browser. Do so by dragging and dropping it from your file browser into your web browser.

8. The opened file should present you with a long list of links to every “section” in the Higurashi chapter.

9. Find your section and have fun studying!