New Release Tuesday - My Japanese Coach

Hello and Welcome.

This week we are going to talk about a ... well, not really a game per se, but a piece of DS software:  My Japanese Coach.

I swear, the power of the Nintendo DS continues to amaze me.  Even before the Wii, Nintendo managed to create a device that transcends the common notion of gamer.  Considering that they have sold 81 MILLION DSes world wide up till now, I would say it is a pretty viable platform for anything.

So, now we have software on the DS that will help you to learn man languages: French, Spanish, Chinese, among others, and finally Japanese.

Being someone who took 2 years of Japanese in college and has been to japan numerous times, I was a little skeptical of this at first.  My main skepticism came from how the experience would be presented.  Would it be for those people whom knew no Japanese? People who knew just a little (I know some of you Anime watchers out there no SOME japanese...).  Or people who had formal training in the past?

Surprisingly there is enough here for all but the most fluent Nihongo speakers.

With a total of 100 scripted lessons (teaching grammar), then 945 more lessons of Vocab, this is a fairly fleshed out piece of software.

There is an initial "Placement" exam that allows you to skip up to 11 levels based on your proficiency.  For the unitiated, it starts of using "Romaji" or english characters, but by level 13 it is consitently using Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji for reading, and writing with Hiragana, and Katakana.

Lessons start with basic vocab and grammar and are completed by "Mastering" words and phrases.  To master these phrases you must play a number of games (Very much like Brain Age actually) that involve writing, listening, and even speaking.  There are also flashcard and memory style games, just to name a few.

Will this game make you fluent in japanese?  Far from it (though it might help study for the 4th (lowest) level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT)).  But it will give you a great base to build your Japanese proficiency on.  As with any language (even your native), mastery comes from constant studying, practice, and every day speech.

Anyway, I plan on buying this for my wife, so she and I can talk bad about all those Gaijin around us.  Hopefully my friends *hinthint* will get it too so we can all talk to each other in this wonderful language.

Come on people, I need someone to practice with!  All that being said, I leave you with this:



I mean really, don't you want to know WHY they have these games?

~K