Good, Not Great.
posted by TrevorL (COLORADO SPRINGS, CO) Dec 6, 2008
Member since Dec 2005
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I've just finished my third semester of college level Japanese, and purchased a DS so I could have a electronic kanji dictionary that could recognize handwriting. Seeing as this was also just released I figured I would give it a shot.
I put it in and it presented me with a 50 question quiz to assess my grasp of Japanese, which I demolished in short form. This left me a little put off because it only cares if you've made it to "pre-schooler" as the game calls it, or about a half a semester of Japanese. I was then presented with 10 vocab words I already knew, that the game wanted me to "master"...
It was at this time I came to the conclusion that this game wasn't for me and I started poking around to see what it offered to someone starting out with Japanese.
The vocab memorization games are excellent, as they work you to the point where you hear "watashitachi" and you instantly think "us". It also teaches grammar and sentence structure which is a plus. Once you know where to put your nouns, verbs and direct objects, you can take your burgeoning vocab and construct sentences upon sentences. It also has a dictionary with phrasebook that adds to the value immensely, although it is a little hard to get to.
The hirigana lessons however, leave something to be desired. The strokes for a number of the characters are just plain wrong, and completely disrupt the flow of your writing. While this may seem trivial, learning how to write hirigana and katakana correctly (and count strokes correctly) makes kanji much easier.
My suggestion is if you are interested in Japanese, this game is a great place to start- Just think of it as a primer. Then, if and when you start taking Japanese and want to use this to supplement you studies, REMEMBER this hierarchy from most to least correct:
Nihongo Sensei -> Nihongo text/workbooks -> My Japanese Coach
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