To give a little background I’ve been taking Japanese classes for about two and a half years now (one hour classes twice a week). Before that the only Japanese I knew I knew from watching anime, but I never said any because I didn’t want to be one of those people you can tell learned all their Japanese from anime. I got this for my birthday and have been tearing through it for a few weeks.
On Amazon the description says it has 12,000 words and 1,000 lessons. I’m on lesson 80 or so and I’m guessing the total is more like 120 lessons. In addition to the lessons and minigames it comes with a Dictionary searchable by English or romaji. There’s also a Phrasebook with common phrases you might want to use like “where is the bathroom.” All words in the dictionary and phrasebook you can see in English, romaji, kana and also press a button to hear the pronunciation.
The game allows for three different profiles. When you first pop in the game you’re given a 50 question multiple choice quiz of words and hiragana. From this quiz the game decides what lesson you should start at with a maximum of skipping to lesson 11. Each lesson has ten new vocabulary words and/or a new grammatical concept. The words you see in hiragana and romaji, and you can practice writing them and saying them.
Unfortunately the writing in the game is a little finicky and the stroke order of some characters if flat out wrong. Two examples that come to mind are the hiragana よ and katakana ヒ。Turns out the wikipedia entry on My Japanese Coach has a list of some of the characters with incorrect stroke order.
The way you unlock new lessons and minigames is by “mastering” the ten vocabulary words given in each new section. You do that by playing minigames that award a certain number of points depending on the game and the difficulty level of the game you played. Once you reach 14 points per word then the next lesson is unlocked. There are 12 minigames in total, 5 of which need to be unlocked as you play. When playing the games you’re given the option to quiz either just the ten new words or all the words that you’ve “mastered” so far.
Multiple Choice – In this game you’re given a word in English and four options in either romaji, hiragana or kanji (depending on your current rank). This is a good game for quizzing and reading hiragana, but a lot of times when quizzing words you’ve mastered you’ll get three wrong answers that aren’t even the correct part of speech for the word you’re trying to figure out. This could’ve been made more challenging. Also, when you’re wrong they show the correct answer, but Haruka doesn’t say the correct answer which would’ve been helpful.
Hit-a-Word – This game is kind of fun, but its value as a learning tool is kind of questionable. Basically it’s wack-a-mole but you have to hit the moles with the word you’re given at the beginning of the game. Only on the hardest difficulty are there three wrong answers, and if you’re like me, once you figure out the proper answer you’re focusing more on the pattern of hiragana rather than actually reading it. I suppose it’s meant to help read faster, but it doesn’t really past the first time you read the character.
Word Search – This game is okay but I don’t really play it at all. You’re given a list of words in English and you have to find them (in romaji) in a grid of letters.
Fading Characters – This game is fine if you don’t remember how to write your kana or kanji, but if you want to be pushed to remember from memory then it doesn’t help because it shows you the character before you have to write it yourself.
Write Cards - In this game you’re given a word in English and whether they want you to write in hiragana, katakana or kanji. This is a good game for practicing writing, but once you’re comfortable writing in hiragana it doesn’t serve much purpose until you start learning kanji.
Flash Cards – This is a basic flash card game where you’re given a word in Japanese and four possible English answers. I play this one mostly with the Multiple Choice games because it helps to hear the words said aloud when learning them.
Memory – This is a card flipping memory game with blue and red cards with English and Japanese respectively. I don’t find much use for this game because I think the challenge of matching cards doesn’t help me learn the words any better, but rather it just makes it more cumbersome. Even playing a regular card matching game I can have difficulty.
Bridge Builder – This game I like, but it rarely is very challenging. You’re given a jumble of words and you have to put them in the correct order. Because one of the most difficult parts of Japanese is the word order I was hoping for a game like this. Unfortunately I still encounter sentences that are only three words long, but there are still sentences that are pretty long. Though if a word is particularly long, it’s obvious which space it should go in.
Spelltastic – I think this game is pretty easy even for beginners, and doesn’t do much help at all to learning the words. You hear Haruka say a word in Japanese and then you have to type the word out in romaji. This is really not hard at all.
Fill-in-the-Blank – In this game you’re given a sentence in English and incomplete in romaji. It’s up to you to figure out the missing word and type it out in romaji. This is okay for quizzing vocab words, but still not very hard.
Yomi – This game is kind of similar to Fading characters. In this one you have a kanji and one of its pronunciations of which usually there are two or more. It’s pretty good practice for learning kanji better or just brushing up on what you’re already pretty familiar with.
Scrolls – In this game you’re given a sentence in English and romaji or hiragana with one word highlighted which you have to write in hiragana or kanji. This one is more useful when the answer is kanji because kanji have different pronunciations so it can be difficult. For other vocabulary words it’s not quite as helpful.
Ideally I hope to learn more vocabulary from this game, but don’t expect to learn much grammar. Sometimes it helps reinforce what I already know, but sometimes the way that it teaches grammar isn’t very substantial. Sometimes it’ll give a phrase as one word and a definition, but from this game you wouldn’t know that it was actually two words. For example the phrase かもしれない kamoshirenai which it defines as “perhaps.” The phrase is the two words kamo shirenai (or kamo shiremasen to be more formal), but from this game I’d think it was just one word.
Also I’m not sure how well people will learn to conjugate verbs from this game. There are so many verb forms and different groups of verbs that conjugate differently depending on which group they belong to. Sometimes it simplifies phrases too much without telling you precisely what you’re saying in Japanese. Like the sentence “tabenai hou ga ii desu” they’ll translate as “you shouldn’t eat” when really it’s more like “it’d be better if you didn’t eat.”
Quizzing small grammatical words or particles using flash cards isn’t very useful, but it’s necessary to unlock new lessons. Also there are some situations where you’re not given the correct answer if you get it wrong which means to find the answer you have to go back to the lesson and look the word up. Since there’s no customization for quizzes I can’t choose the words that I would like to quiz myself on once I’m very comfortable with certain vocab words.
Overall if you’ve taken several Japanese class be prepared to be bored for quite a while, but it’s pretty good for beginner Japanese students. Not all the minigames are equally useful, but it still manages to be pretty fun.
