[lazyasciiart]

I love this story. I remember seeing two pre-literate kindergarten kids playing on a gameboy or similar handheld, one of them teaching the other strings of button presses for things like “save game” - just navigating through all the menus by memory.

[gambiting]

I played through the entire Pokemon Yellow without understanding a lick of english. You just remembered what the commands did, and you learnt by experimenting.

[AyyEye]

Thanks for this comment -- it dredged up a memory I had almost forgotten.

I did this but inverted. When only pokemon red/blue were out in the US I downloaded a rom for pokemon yellow (discovered on whatever p2p I was using at the time) when searching for pokemon to play in an emulator. I didn't know it existed at the time and it was in Japanese. When I told my friends "pikachu follows you around!" None of them believed me.

[gambiting]

Haha, that's incredibly cool too! I actually played through a rom of Pokemon Green for the exact same reason - it was cool, no one at school believed me Pokemon Green was a real thing.

[bcjdjsndon]

Even as an English speaker the Pokémon all sounded gibberish to me so it wouldn't have been much help