Introducing the Higurashi Dialogue Extractor 🇯🇵

The Higurashi When They Cry (ひぐらしのなく頃に) games by 07th Expansion are quite popular visual novels. Given its iconic characters and own cult follwing, it’s definitely recommended you check them out if you haven’t done so 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 learning 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 an online tool that automates this process for you:

Introducing the Higurashi Japanese Text Extractor online tool!
This tool allows you to have all text and (optionally) audio from every Higurashi game be converted into a highly accessible HTML format. You can then view all content inside your web browser with selectable texts and re-playable 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.

Please note that audio-snippet support is only possible with when “uploading” your games files which have the 07th mod installed. The tool does allow you to extract Higurashi content without any upload, but this extraction will then be without any audio support.

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 using it only as a secondary learning resource and to find another audio-focused medium to immerse with, i.e. an anime or audiobook.