How is the language code in Fez intended to be solved?

A lot of text in Fez is encoded, including text from a number of NPCs. I'd assumed that you have to do something in-game to unlock the translation, but I haven't come across anything of the sort yet. Is there a Rosetta Stone-style resource in the game, or is the player actually intended to use cryptographic methods to solve the substitution?

Note that I'm not asking for a translation resource. I want to solve this puzzle myself, but I'd like to know if I actually should have been copying the tiny text from all those NPCs I encountered.

Solution 1:

There is one room in particular that provides what you're looking for. You don't need to copy NPC dialog, though part of the fun is copying the other wall-writings for later consideration. So there is no single intended method (I imagine most people will look online)—your method could work, though it sounds frustrating.

Want a hint for that room's location?

It's off of the waterfall room.

Want an even bigger hint?

A pillar in the room links the code to an English pangram (sentence containing every letter of the alphabet).

And to give it away:

In the tree room above the waterfall, a fox jumps over a dog next to this pillar, which reads all the way around: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." (image)

Solution 2:

Eventually you get access to large amounts of text in the language code, which allowed me to work out the code using the normal approach you'd use for a substitution cipher -- spot frequently used symbols and repeated patterns, guess at the vowels and common words,build from there.

Later, I found a "rosetta stone" in the form of a pangram written alongside the thing it described.