this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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I started Pokemon Weiße. It starts with...
https://www.pokewiki.de/Professor_Esche/Zitate
This is very above my level. But I can get through it by looking up every word I don't understand. It takes me a long time to make progress, but I'm actually 100% understanding the grammar. Its only the vocabulary that's tripping me up.
dict.cc is very useful at looking up set phrases that occur. Bianca (English) aka Belle (in German) exclaims "Hopfen und Malz verloren", which actually means "they're hopeless". It used to be hard to look up set phrases/idioms like this, but fortunately dict.cc just has a good database of these and found it instantly. Aside from the idioms... the most advanced grammar is the "subjunctiv". Which is a "hypothetical' case in German. (Ex: the German word for "can" can be turned into subjunctive form, which then means "could" in English). You are greeted in this game with a few words from Professor Esche in the subjunctiv.
Aside from that, its banging my head against all the (tons) of vocabulary I don't know yet. But with modern computerized dictionaries, it really isn't bad to look them up.
Now the words may be difficult, but the game makes it easy. With graphics, sound-effects, and music playing over the text, you can get a good "feeling" of what any phrases are. And because Pokemon's sound design / music design is so integral to the story and so iconic, you'll always have a "gist" of what's going on even if you cannot understand the words in front of you. So the only question is how hard do you want to work at understanding these words?
I haven't made the decision yet on how "hard" to work on understanding everything... But I do think playing this game in German will 100% help me learn the language.
Love the Pokemon games for language learning! Enjoy the playthrough!
Example:
Hmm, I struggled with this sentence. I thought I understood it. I click next and...
Ohhhhhh. He's reading (vorlesen) from the Expedition-Handbook. The next sentence makes everything so clear, even if the grammar of the first sentence was so difficult for an A2- like myself. (Its... an A2 level sentence. I "should" have been able to figure it out, but I'm not very well practiced with this yet).
In a lot of these cases, there's "play". I don't have to achieve full understanding from the first sentence, the 2nd or 3rd sentence helps explain the earlier sentences.
In Pokemon White / Black, it is the first time you depart as a group, a set of 3 where Bianca took the pokemon you were strong with, while Cheren is more of your traditional rival.
This is the first time I've had the opportunity of "someone" calling out to me with "ihr" (you-all in German). This is especially good practice because "ihr" also means "they" or even "hers", depending on context (yeah... German is weird). It actually took me a while to "understand" that ihr in this sentence was referring to me + Biana + Cheren all together.
It makes me appreciate the changes Pokemon did over the years. Earlier games was just "you" vs "rival" (You vs Gary, for example). Adding additional "friends" so that more group words, or other such "roleplay" situations really adds to the language-comprehension of this game.