My Japanese Coach

10 Comments

1. Cal in Japan — June 24, 2010 #

   Rating

   Wow, what a great game/learning tool for learning Japanese. It takes the knowledge you already know and puts you in the correct lesson (Mine was chapter 8). My niece in Jr. High has also been using it and loving it. Sure beats blowing up and shooting up things/people. Also love the dictionary and writing lessons for Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Thanks for finally making it.

2. naware — June 25, 2010 #

   Rating

   This is a long review so here is a one paragraph summary: I bought this game in October of ‘09. I am nearly one-third of the way through the 1000 lessons and my Japanese vocabulary is getting huge thanks to My Japanese Coach. For me, MJC has been very effective for learning hiragana and katakana and Japanese vocabulary. It is mostly ineffective for learning kanji although I am learning some kanji, too. Just like anything else, it does take discipline to make yourself continue to do the work. Somedays I just really don’t want to turn on the game and learn each new vocabulary word. But I make myself do it because I really, really want to get to lesson 1000. And it is paying off. When I watch Japanese movies or use Japanese language learning materials, I recognize a lot of the words because I have learned them in MJC. After six months of using MJC, I found myself at a point of having a large vocabulary but needing to work on my grammar rules so I have started buying grammar books but I am still using MJC to learn vocabulary. Sorry, but what follows is a long review. Somewhere below, I have explained the system that worked for me for learning vocabulary using MJC.

   November ‘09: I lived in Japan for one year about twenty years ago. Without any exposure to Japanese since then, I had forgotten most of my Japanese. My Japanese Coach arrived in my mailbox one week ago and since then I have played it obsessively. I am now at lesson 106. I feel like I have recovered about 70 percent of my Japanese. It really refreshed my vocabulary and grammar. This is a great game for people who need a review of basic Japanese kana, vocab and grammar. I think beginners would get something out of it, also, because it provides a native speaker who says words. I think that will be helpful to beginners. I also think being able to record your voice and hear it played back with a comparison to a native speaker will be helpful for beginners.

   There has been a lot of talk about the stroke order errors in the game but I think I found a major grammatical error that no one has ever mentioned. Lesson 49 is about how to say you need something. It presents the two main ways to say something is needed or necessary as ‘hitsuyou’ and ‘iru’ . It gives two example sentences using ‘hitsuyou’. This is then followed by two example sentences using the construction ‘…nai to ikemasen.’ No examples are ever given using ‘iru’ in a sentence. I can only assume that whoever created this lesson believes that ‘iru’ has some relationship to ‘…nai to ikemasen’. Certainly, any beginner and many intermediates will leave this lesson believing that the verb ‘iru’ (to need) somehow is related to the word ‘ikemasen’ or to the construction ‘…nai to ikemasen’. That is a terrible error. ‘…nai to ikemasen’ actually is derived from the verb ‘iku’ (to go) and has the meaning of ‘not doing (fill in the blank) is a no go’. So for example, if you wanted to say, “You should wear your seatbelt,” you would say in Japanese (but I’ll word it in English), “Not wearing your seatbelt is a no go.” In other words, “Not wearing your seatbelt will not work” or “Not wearing your seatbelt is so not cool.” But the verb used is the verb for ‘to go’. You can see it has nothing whatsoever to do with the verb ‘iru’ that means ‘to need’. If you were trying to learn Japanese and didn’t know enough to figure this out, it could leave you really confused.

   I think this points out a huge error that was made in the creation of this product. I suspect that not enough emphasis was placed on consulting with native speakers of Japanese during the creation process of this game. I think a team of Brits or Americans basically created this game and that a few of them thought they knew Japanese really well and they did not keep a native Japanese speaker nearby to correct their errors. I have seen this frequently in English materials in Japan. You will see just basic mistakes in English in Japanese products that any 8 year old native English speaker could have corrected but nobody bothers to hire anyone to ‘proofread’.

   Anyway, as to the stroke order mistakes…who really cares. I think that stroke order is very important. However, I think that if My Japanese Coach is as far as you are ever going to take your Japanese learning, then it doesn’t matter what stroke order you use because you will never be more than a low beginner. If you are serious about your Japanese, then you will also buy other ds products that will teach you correct stroke order and more perfect writing. For example, you can buy a ds program on jlist or on Amazon.jp or play asia or yes asia or other sites to teach you calligraphy. It will make your stroke order and your character form nearly perfect. You can also buy kakitorikun or kanji dictionaries for ds and many other ds programs that will teach you many kanji along with perfect stroke order. So this is really a minor problem.

   People have complained about some of the games but I notice that everyone complains about different games. A lot of complaints are about my favorite games. I think that it is good that many different games were included because people have different tastes in what they enjoy or what they learn from. Somebody said they found the memory game annoying. That is my favorite and the one I play the most. I think people who find the memory game annoying probably have poor working memories and are the type of people who can’t remember a 10 digit phone number if someone tells it to them. I am not trying to make a value judgment about that. I am just saying that people have different needs. I find the flash cards and multiple choice games annoying because they are too easy. I have to agree that the spelltastic and other games that require the use of romaji are worthless. But who knows they might really help someone else.

   After lesson 100, there are no more lessons. Instead you are given either vocabulary or kanji to memorize. Lesson 101 gave you 10 vocabulary words. You play the games until you prove you know the words then you can move to the next lesson. Lessons 102-104 also presented you with 10 vocabulary words each. Lesson 105 gives you 10 kanji to memorize. Lesson 106 gives you 10 vocabulary again. I am guessing that every fifth lesson is kanji and the rest are always vocabulary. After lesson 100, MJC makes no attempt to organize the vocabulary by any logical means whatsoever. It does not select them by frequency of occurrence in speech or in the newspaper. It does not organize them by subject matter. So basically, you could just as well be memorizing words out of the dictionary. Here is an example. These are the vocabulary in English (and I will provide the romaji although the lesson gives it in hiragana) from lesson 106: a little (chotto), prominent (juujouna), brainy (soumeina), magnet (jijuku), provision (kyoukyuu), stiff (katai), brandy (burandei), delirious (uwagoto wo iu), disparity (soui), dehydrate (dassuishoujuu wo okosu). When I first started using the game, I thought it was annoying that the words were randomly selected in lessons 101 to 1000. But now I see some advantages to that. It is a little fun to be surprised because you never know what word you will be presented with next. It mimics real life. And it prevents your mind from being confused by learning similar terms at the same time. There is some linguistic term for this that I don’t remember. Sometimes it is better to memorize things that are very different from each other because then your mind is not as likely to cross its wires and confuse the items with each other.

   The kanji in MJC is the 1945 joyou kanji. Keep in mind, however, that in 2010, the Japanese government is planning on adding a couple of hundred or so kanji to the official list and removing 5 others. The kanji for chestnut is on the chopping block to be removed from the list of official kanji, which makes me sad because I absolutely love chestnuts. Apparently, they are going to replace the kanji for ‘chestnut’ with the kanji for ‘kit kat’. Ok, that last part was a joke. Sort of. If you know about Japan’s national obsession with the kit kat bar and if you are as sad as I am about the replacement of traditional Japanese culture by westernization, then you will get my little joke.

   In short, I would recommend this game for beginners to become acquainted with Japanese or for low intermediates to refresh their Japanese. You should not skip ahead in the lessons because the game does not very accurately judge what lesson you already know or don’t already know so you might miss something important. It will only allow you to skip 11 or so anyway so just do them. If you are so good you can skip 20 lessons (there is a cheat code that will allow you to skip ahead), then you are way too advanced to use My Japanese Coach anyway and should instead buy a more advanced product such as a parallel text book with cd or kanji training ds program, etcetera. If you need the ego rush from proving to yourself how great you are by skipping lessons in a course that is too easy for you, then save the $30 on the game and go people watching at Walmart instead. By the way, the labeling of the levels in this game is stupid. When the ‘high school’ level in this game is reached, a learner still knows less Japanese than the average real first grader in Japan. So I don’t get what the classification scheme is for except maybe to motivate the player and make them feel good that they are advancing? I guess it feels better to hear that you are now a 4th grader than, “Congratulations, you know as many words as the average 2 year and one month old in Japan and after the next lesson, you will have the vocabulary of a 2 year and 3 month old toddler. Keep working, you will be potty trained soon.”

   I did get a lot out of the game though. I feel competent at hiragana and katakana again. I am learning more kanji. I will probably keep playing with this game until I get around to ordering better kanji learning software. My plan is to buy either kakitorikun or nazotte oboeru kanji practice training or a calligraphy program for ds. But I am very glad that I started out with My Japanese Coach as my reintroduction to Japanese. It really does a good job of acquainting you or reacquainting you with the basics in a easy to use way. You will feel pretty solid about being able to approach a more difficult study course after using it. I don’t think there is anything better out there right now for beginners or people who are really rusty other than living in Japan or taking a class. And I still think that My Japanese Coach would be useful to a novice to supplement their class or travel experience. Just remember it has a few mistakes in it so you will have to be open to learning things more perfectly from other sources as you advance in your Japanese.

   December ‘09: I want to add to my review. I am now on lesson 152. I have found a way to make memorizing the vocabulary in the lessons more fun. I have started googling all of the japanese vocabulary words in romaji. I find out amusing and educational things out about Japan with every single word. For example, I googled ‘koritsu’ which means ‘isolation’ and found the word ‘koritsu shugi’ which means isolationism. Remember when America was isolationalist? Anyway, I remembered the word ‘minshushugi’ or ‘democracy’ that was in a previous lesson and wondered if it was the same ’shugi’ being used in both. So upon further googling I found out that ’shugi’ is an ending that sort of means what ‘ism’ means in English and that all sorts of political words like communism and socialism and capitalism all end in shugi. And now the words koritsu, koritsushugi, and minshushugi as well as shugi are forever stuck in my head.

   In today’s lesson, so far I have looked up outlet (hakeguchi) and precedent (senrei). While looking up ‘hakeguchi’ I found out that it both applies to a place where a river runs into an ocean as well as anything that vents like a teapot’s steam hole. Also, it applies to anything that provides a person or a culture a way to release their emotions. So you could say that painting is your hakeguchi for when you feel sad. I found an interesting article about the current trend in Japan for some quasi intellectuals and professors to deny any war crimes like the rape of Nanking. Here is a quote from the article that uses the word hakeguchi: “the illusion-school faction is a hakeguchi — an outlet for frustrations in Japan after years of what are seen as inflated claims about Japanese war crimes.” Here is a larger quote from the article:

   “Harsher critics of the illusion school say its members do not belong in any serious scholarly discussion. “These academics are not interested in a debate,” says Mr. Nakano, of Sophia University. “What they do is to smear and undermine existing research. They cast doubt rather than illuminate.”
   
   Mr. Nakano says that while the revisionists have helped popularize a once-taboo discussion, their pulp publications, with huge readerships, are “pushing the trained historians out of the public debate about war crimes.” Unlike Germany, which criminalized the denial of gross crimes of genocide, in Japan, denials of well-documented atrocities have repeatedly come from leading politicians. Mr. Abe, the prime minister, recently sparked outrage in Asia and the United States when he said there was no evidence that Japan’s wartime government or military had enslaved thousands of comfort women, despite overwhelming documentation and a 1993 admission by Tokyo that it had. Few universities have taken action against revisionist academics. Once tenured, professors are difficult to remove from Japanese faculties, which in any case are seldom openly confrontational.”

   Well, that is pretty interesting stuff isn’t it. How could you forget the word hakeguchi after reading all that? By the way, it helps a lot when trying to memorize all of the vocabulary to make connections between words. For example, ‘guchi’ is the same as ‘kuchi’ which means mouth. So you aren’t learning an entire new word. You just have to remember that things can go in mouths and out of them and an outlet is the mouth of a river where the water flows out.

   I couldn’t find anything too interesting about the word ’senrei’ but I did find out that ’sen’ is the same ’sen’ as in ’sengetsu’ or last month so when you see sen in a word, you know that sometimes (not always) it is telling you to look backwards in time. So i just memorize sen as meaning before or past and I already know ‘getsu’ is month. Now I have three words or pieces of words for the price of one…’sen’, ’sengetsu’, and ’senrei’. And then after looking these words up on google and planting them in my head pretty well, I reinforce them by playing the games on My Japanese Coach. In a few months, I should have about 8000 Japanese words memorized. Once you get past lesson 100 in this game, it is pretty tough to force yourself to keep at it but you just have to make yourself do it.

   January 2010: I am adding to my review again. I have now made it to lesson 252. I have found a misspelled English word and a couple misspelled Japanese words but I am not really too bothered about it. I think in about 10,000 words there would probably be a couple of mistakes. After progressing this far, I definitely recommend this game. My Japanese vocabulary is huge now and growing exponentially everyday. Also, it is no longer hard to get myself to do the lessons because it has become part of my daily routine. My goal is to make it to lesson 1000. This game might be the best $29 I ever spent. I think people who think this game is no good probably don’t have the work ethic or determination to ever really become fluent in Japanese. I think the mistakes I have found in this game are relatively minor compared to how much I have learned. I can’t wait to visit Japan with a 10,000 word vocabulary.

   February 2010: Now I am on lesson 297 and updating my review. At this point I feel pretty comfortable with Japanese vocabulary but my vocabulary is superior to my grammar because that is what you mainly learn with MJC as you progress in the game. I should note that I am finding My Japanese Coach is not a very effective way to learn kanji. At a later date, I will buy something else for this (maybe Kanji Odyssey by Coscom). But I do like My Japanese Coach for learning vocabulary but with the caveat that it must be reinforced with dorama or movies or other authentic materials or conversation. I had thought that I would stop using My Japanese Coach for a while and focus on grammar for awhile. But instead I am using both MJC and the book I bought on Japanese particles (one of my other reviews).

   April 2010: I just did lesson 313…twice. Apparently, there is a numbering mistake in the game so there are two lesson’s numbered 313. I guess if you finish all of the game then you will have done 1001 lessons rather than 1000. I’m kind of starting to wonder if anyone besides me has ever gotten this far in the game. I feel so alone. If anyone else has–please let me know that somewhere on the planet someone else has done it.

3. Bookworm — June 25, 2010 #

   Rating

   It does really well with the hands on teaching. The games are aimed at different ways of making sure that you understand the lesson, and keep on remembering the previous lessons. Sometimes, the lessons get mastered too quickly when I keep repeating a game until I know I got it right. Languages are hard. This is a good medium to give a boost to learning Japanese.

4. M. Saunders — June 25, 2010 #

   Rating

   Let me start by saying that I have been studying Japanese off and on for many years now. I learned some of the basic words and simple sentence structures as well as to read and write Katakana. However, I’ve never made a serious attempt to go beyond that, until now.

   I have used many computer Japanese learning programs and found all of them to be totally inadequate. I was cautiously optimistic about this DS title, but for under $[...] I decided to give it a try. Wow, I am impressed! The lessons are well structured and introduce around 10 words per lesson (from what I’ve seen so far), unlike books which want you to remember dozens and dozens of words right from the start. The voice quality is superb and (unlike most other recordings I have heard) does not speak so fast that you can’t follow it. I love the feature where you can record your voice and compare it to the native speaker’s, including comparing the wave forms. This helps you learn the correct timing and pace when speaking. The games are fun, but you need pretty fast reflexes for the whack-a-mole game unless you set it on easy.

   This program does have a few flaws. The stroke order for a few of the kanas is off (stroke order is VERY important in writing Japanese correctly). Also, hiragana is introduced too slowly in my opinion, but this is probably intentional as to not scare off people who have never written in Japenese. That being said, if you are serious about learning Japanese this shouldn’t be your only resource anyways. I highly recommend Easy Hiragana: First Steps to Basic Japanese Writing (Passport Books) and especially Easy Katakana.

   Despite these minor issues, I think that any serious student of Japanese will benefit immensely from using this program. Motivation and determination are required to learn any language since it takes a huge investment of time and study. Using something that is as engaging as this will keep you interested. Plus, it is a game system after all, so if you need a break you can always pop in Zelda for a while!

5. J. Wu — June 25, 2010 #

   Rating

   Starter, I have next to none Japanese experience, the only phrases I know are the very basic. After trying out the other My *** Coach from Ubisoft and enjoyed them, I am excited to purchase the new installment on Japanese. So far I’m really impressed with the language programs by Ubisoft and My Japanese Coach is no exception. The best feature would be the ability to record yourself and compare to native speaker, this is especially important IMO when learning a language. The DS format gives you a very casual feel which makes learning fun and easy. It’s obvious that one would not be able to master a foreign language from just one DS game, but My Japanese Coach will definitely teach you plenty of words and phrases that will get you by some basic conversations.

6. Kirsten Kraft — June 26, 2010 #

   Rating

   I have been teaching myself Japanese for about 3 years now. I am now enrolled in a college course and I just received this game on the 16th of October.

   I really like how this game reinforces what I am learning in class. The vocabulary is pretty much where I am in class (of course there are more words in class). I really like how the game assesses your knowledge before you start playing, so you can start at a place that is comfortable for you. But, you can always go back and review previous lessons.

   The mini-games are fun and while some people don’t care for whack-a-mole, I think it is quite challenging when you have to read the word in kana and then whack the correct word.

   I am still in the process of unlocking games, but I think this is a great paperless way to supplement learning Japanese in the classroom.

7. Brock Hicks — June 28, 2010 #

   Rating

   My Japanese Coach is a great study tool for beginners and intermediate learners. I started studying japanese in college from the beginners levels to the intermediate level. I’ve read a great deal of comments about the game, I would like to say that My japanese Coach is simply a study tool/guide it is not meant for people to reach fluency but a simple tool to get beginners oriented with the japanese writing system, speach, and vocab. This game is not meant for people who’ve had 8 years or 6 years of training, know over 500 vocabulary, or is at an advanced level. So for those of you who are in this category i suggest you not buy it you should go to japan, you’ll benefit more with a real world experience in order to enhance your skills rather than using a computer game. If you have such experience my question is why buy the game in the first place? but anyway this is a great tool, japanese is a hard language to learn but anyone can learn it with the right tools. I understand the frustration of all the romaji but the game is encouraging you to learn outside the game, don’t expect this game to do all the work for you. Also i see a few issues with the stroke order but remember this is a program it’s not 100% flawless thats why you should use textbooks on hirgana, katakana, and kanji for learning the correct stroke order. Trust me doing this will ensure you that you actually go practice the writing rather than just using the Ds game. Taking classes, hiring a tutor, joining a japanese club, or if you know some or can find some international japanese students to conversate with then those are all great tools to use as well along with the game. For intermediate level individuals this game should be more of a tool for retaining memory for the things you should already know. I gave this game 5 stars because out of all the other programs i’ve used My Japanese Coach teaches GRAMMAR!!! a great deal of other programs do not, they simply focus on memorization. I love that it includes grammar. It’s the best tool i’ve ever used, it’s worth the money especially if your serious about learning japanese. Ganbatte!!!

8. W. Ziegelbauer — June 29, 2010 #

   Rating

   Hello,

   It seems that most who have written reviews here generally wrote them after completing only a handful of lessons. Since I’m currently up to lesson 70 after about two months of playing the game about 40 minutes a day, I think my observations may be helpful for those trying to figure out exactly how the program evolves as it introduces more complicated kanji and grammar.

   Let me give a bit of background about myself first so that you can better guage where I’m coming from. I’m already fairly conversant (though not fluent) in Korean from studying it during college and have previously studied Japanese on-and-off a bit here and there in the last year. Since Korean shares extremely similar grammar with Japanese, along with many Chinese loan words and concepts, learning Japanese has come fairly quickly to me. In fact, the biggest obstacle for me in learning Japanese has been the fact that my work schedule (50-60 hours per week for a large law firm) made it difficult for me to establish an effective, independent study routine.

   And that’s where this game came to the rescue. To a subway commuter, this thing is an absolute godsend. While it is impractical to try and work through a textbook on a subway (at least here in NYC), this game allows me to pass my commute with a variety of different drills that really let me absorb and internalize the vocab. As people have said, this program is inadequate as a sole source of study material; however, it has certainly filled a very important niche for me.

   To expand on the above, here is a quick run down of pros and cons as I’ve observed them:

   Pros:
   
   -Vocabulary is generally presented in fairly sensible, interrelated chunks.

   -The combination of games that all stimulate your memory in different ways — in particular, flash cards, write cards, hit-a-word, and yomi — are all extremely useful in drilling the words into your head. I find that my active recall of many of these words is lacking; however, my passive recall is phenomenal.

   -The kanji, one of my personal weak points during previous attempts at learning Japanese, is also well-organized and presented at a reasonable pace.

   -The grammar sections are refreshingly well thought-out and the majority of the topics covered are supplemented by sufficient examples and lesson-specific games.

   -The dictionary function is very useful as well, though I wish it would let you practice writing any word you selected.

   Cons (this is surprisingly long, especially given my 5 star rating, I know; however, there are some annoying quirks to the game that may frustrate those who are not using it primarily to reinforce vocabulary):

   -The biggest drawback for me is that the game does not constantly test you on all the vocabulary you’ve learned, even if you try to play the game with only the “mastered” option selected; instead, the game will only test you on material from the previous 8-10 lessons or so. As you progress in the game, this means that the only way for you to review everything you’ve learned so far is to go back to each lesson individually — a tedious process which involves paging through the lesson to the end and playing the two lesson-specific games. This limits your review in two very annoying ways: 1) you will be unable to continually train older vocab in all of the 12 different games; 2) you will only be able to train older vocab against other older vocab in the same lesson. The second point is probably the most disingenuous and counterproductive because it lets your brain “recall the lesson” rather than internalize the vocabulary itself. You may not know a word very well, but you can recognize quickly every time when you only have to select it repeatedly against the same nine other vocabulary words in the same two games. I’ve found this an obstacle to refreshing or re-memorizing the older vocabulary because it only teaches you to have a passive command of a word relative to others in the lesson.

   -Another big drawback is that the non-lesson-specific grammar games are atrocious at higher levels. Instead of drawing on the passages used in the lesson-specific grammar games, the general grammar games seem to pull 3 to 4 sentences from some other, seriously-lacking source. These other practice sentences (use mostly in bridge builder, spelltastic, fill in the blank, and scrolls) are rarely helpful. For example, I recently had a grammar game where three our of four of the questions revolved around fairly banal sentences using the word “ikura”, despite the fact that neither the word “ikura” nor the grammar employed in the sentences was at all relevant to anything I had studied in the past 15-20 lessons. This limitation relegates you again to going back to each lesson and playing the lesson-specific games for review.

   -A smaller drawback that should be noted is that it does not teach you the competing Kanji pronunciations in terms of On and Kun; which, from what I understand, will make it more difficult to truly master the Kanji later.

   -Finally, as many have noted, the game is blotched with a few tiny programming errors here and there. This can be anything from a mis-conjugation in a lesson to even having a game freeze up (only happened once) when it seemingly drew a vocabulary word for which there was no information. Given the scope of the game, these things are relatively minor.

   Overall, the game has been a huge boon to my studying and I highly recommend it to those looking for a mildly entertaining way to drill vocabulary and reinforce grammar. I currently have a private Japanese lesson every weekend where I review the concepts and vocabulary introduced in the game (occasionally supplementing them with material from Japanese for Busy People) and have found that this game can provide a solid foundation for self-learning but only if you are willing to review the material with a native speaker to ensure you are understanding it correctly.

   Hope that was helpful. Good luck to all in their studies.

9. P. Blankenship — June 29, 2010 #

   Rating

   Simply Amzing. This game piqued my interest at first when I watched the video somewhere on Amazon.com, and it captivated me within minutes of first strating up my game.

   Not only will you learn to read, write, and speak Japanese when you play this game, you’ll enjoy learning it. During each of the lesson portions you will receive instruction on the Japanese language that is simplified to make the transition to a different word and alphabet structure a smooth and easy one.

   The Words and phrases being coached for each lesson can be clicked on the touch-screen to here the pronuciation (Excellent for Audial/Mimicry Learners like myself)when the “Hear” is selected (default).

   You can also select “Speak” then click the word/phrase to go into the compare mode. Here you can hear the selection then RECORD yourself speaking using the built in DS Mic (or a peripheral one :p), play it back, and play it back simultaneously with Haruka’s (your coach’s)example so you can compare side by side…with you ears.

   Finally you can select Write and click on your selection…THIS IS PARAMOUNT for Japanese (and the Chinese version). With the Spanish version you at least are intimately familiar with the English Aplhabet (I hope) and therefore the writing simply becomes a matter of memorizing new words. Japanese has THREE APLHABETS: Hiragana (Characters for Japanese words), Katakana (for foreign words, mostly english and names), and Kanji which is abeast I have yet to tame. BUT herein lies the beauty of the DS’s Touch screen, you can practice WRITING the characters including stroke order. *sidenote: it won’t break it down into each stroke, but it will show you the order* You can either trace the example on the pad, or clear it off and try from memory and then drop the trace down on top of it to compare.

   This Feature of learning the writing portion alone makes this game worth the investment. The only slight downside is that you have to go to each lesson where you learned the alphabets in thirds or quarters per lesson to practice each set of characters this way. There isn’t a function to practice all the characters in one module. But it’s really doesn’t take more than 10 seconds to get to a different set to drill.

   Further to help you practice, test, and retain what you’ve been taught, you play games such as Word Search, Flashcards, Fading Characters (it lets you trace the characters 1 or 2 times then has you write it from memory). New games unlock as they become applicable. For instance Fading characters unlocks when you start learning the Japanese characters, and other ones for vocabulary and sentence structure respectively.

   Finally the feature that makes this game a true value at only $XX.xx- the Dictionary and phrasebook. While it may not be as vast and complete as some of the paperback or even digital versions, it let’s you search by content (social, traveling, dining, etc.), word, or even Favorites you’ve marked for quick reference.

   This feature gives you the translation, Japanese AND Romaji (english letters to Japanes sounds), AND AND AND it Pronounces it for you verbally. This means that at the very least, this Game makes a great traveling companion for visitors to Japan because even if you don’t know the language, you can search for the phrases you need, see them written (for street-side comparison), hear the pronunciation so that you can be understood by locals, or as a last resort, hand them the headphones and tap the phrase you need to convey to them and hte game will say it for you XD

   Anyone learning Japanese that owns a DS…no you know what? Even if you don’t have a DS: BUY one and buy this game. This will help as a Supplimentary Study aid, a dictionary, a translator, and a teacher. I wish I could give this 6 stars.

   The only real drawback on this game: you still have to practice Japanese to Learn. I mean, what is that about? I didn’t just magically learn it?

   The hardest part for me was getting over the weird/lazy feeling of learning a SECOND (not to mention THIRD) Alphabet. You can’t learn Japanese by just playing this game straight through because the mastery points used to evaluate whether you learned the material aren’t completely fool-proof, and you still need to continue using and practicing the language to really learn it. In the end I think the best thing to help me learn in addition to this game would be to live in Japan with a Family for like…ever. So I’ll let you know how that turns out if they release a version with a teleporter or a free ticket/accomodations to Japan

   Until then, this will still be a great way to learn Japanese in as little as 15min at a time.

10. K. Fitzgerald — June 29, 2010 #

    Rating

    I am also a student of Japanese, but it has been many years since I have taken Japanese classes. I was fortunate to have a two tutors and only four students, so I learned my Kana well. That is the only bug I have with this game — the kana strokes are off, and I get so irritated when it buzzes me and I know I am drawing the Kana correctly! But the teacher is a lovely person, and she gets so excited when you do well on your test or games. I enjoy the bits of Japanese information that come at the beginning of each lessons, too — this is great if you love all things Japan. The games are incredible, because they force you to think quickly, and they are so random. With standard class/teacher learning, there’s lessons and there’s paper tests. If I had something like this when I first started learning, it is so much better than flash cards or writing endlessly on paper. I also like that it (so far) doesn’t bog you down with Katakana…I learned Katakana first, then Hiragana. Since Katakana isn’t really used as much (for Foreign word, e.g.), the Hiragana really serves you well. I do wish I was learning a little more Kanji, but I’m only on lesson 11. I will definitely consult my Kanji dictionary, and I recommend, if you buy this game, get a work book for Kana and Kanji and make sure the stroke order is correct (this game can be off). Stroke order is crucial..especially when looking up a Kanji that you don’t know.