RE: Gaming Posts of the Week | Alpha | Link Start!
Playing games, watching videos, reading articles, etc. can indeed help you, but you need to keep learning, and you need some base knowledge to build learning on.
When learning a new language you start with learning vocabulary and simple grammar. Learning Japanese/English/… by switching the language of your media to Japanese/English/… without any other aids will make you learn very slowly, consuming media in another language to primarily learn vocabulary/sayings/…, basing it on your pre-existing knowledge can be very helpful though.
My English and Japanese are prime examples for this, actually.
In Germany pupils start learning English somewhere around age 8 to 10 in school (meaning: 2 or 3 times a week: 45 to 90 minutes of learning plus homework).
Starting at age 15 I actively started watching English let's play videos, putting what I've learned to the test. IMHO I think it helped me learning English a lot, so 8 years later I feel very certain, speaking English.
Also at age 15 I started watching anime in Japanese, with subtitles, without any base-knowledge to build on. 3 years later I could say simple sentences like "I am …", and I wasn't even certain about that.
2 years ago I took a Japanese course in University though, teaching me a lot in one year, thus now I can read and understand Japanese media, learning, while looking up stuff. The year of Japanese in Uni is a base of knowledge for helping me to learn when consuming Japanese media.
Gist of me rambling:
You need special media to consume, to also learn from, without having a "base of knowledge" to work on. Which the mentioned games seem to be thumbs up.
Yes, language switching feature like that would be so much help. When I was in middle school I started watching movies (in English) with English subtitles, then without subtitles.
Didn't work out well, I couldn't understand like, half the movies I've watched lol. So did with games. But it was a great practice. And now I can understand... pretty much everything without subtitles. Now my English is still not perfect, but definitely better than I used to (Imagine how atrocious I was).
I wish I could watch anime without subtitles. I think I've learnt some simple Japanese sentences like you said, something like "I am... .", which is something that the 15 y.o. you understand and I recently learnt years later. This is some very good tips from an experienced person, so thank you!