Quick Reviews Batch #1

There are SO many games out there, I won’t have time to review them all. (Especially since you may have noticed it takes me a while just to do one review – after all I have to get a good feel of the game before I can fully write about it).

In the meantime I’ll do short quick reviews. These won’t be in-depth but will still focus on the key components:

1. What language skill(s) does it teach you?
2. What learning levels are they good for?
3. Does it have furigana
4. Is it recommended?
5. Likeness to get a full review
6. Romulation id # (so you can try the games if you want. Remember, you should delete all games within 24 hours of first play. Then you should buy them if you want them)

Red title means a strong recommendation
Game #4114: Motto Me de Unou wo Kitae DS

• Reading Speed
• Beginner (reading speed) – Intermediates & Fluents (reading speed, kanji recognition, and reading comprehension)
• This “game” makes you read a passage. You tell them when you finished reading it by pushing a button, then it will tell you what reading age you’re at. It will then give you eye exercises to help your reading speed, and you get to try the passage again. (I ranked 7 years old first, then 13 years old). Now that you’ve been placed, you can still do passages, more eye exercises, and even have a new type of exercise where you read quick questions and answer them (“quick” because the text scrolls so you need to read quickly). For beginners, even though there is kanji, you can still benefit. Most have furigana so you can still read them – just ignore the ones that don’t. For Intermediates & Fluents, the passages do tell a story so it can be used for comprehension, but you don’t have to. It’s not like the game asks you contextual questions for passages.
• Furigana is available for kanji above Year 2/3 (using Japan’s year system)
• Not recommended. The eye exercises actually made me more likely to skip words. Obviously if you skip words you’ll read faster, but you won’t comprehend as much. Besides, pretty much any game/book/magazine can be used to increase reading speed – all it takes is practice. A children’s game will be far more fun to use for reading speed practice.
• Likely to get a full review

Game #2783: My Japanese Coach

• Vocabulary, Grammar, Kana & Kanji reading (+ writing, but please don’t use that….)
• Beginners – Fluents
• This game is the only DS game in English that does a good job of teaching Japanese. The vocabulary is pretty accurate, same for grammar. There are LOADS of lessons. This is a great game for beginners. For higher level students, you’ll still have to suffer through as you can only skip about 17 or so lessons. Lessons teach you grammar, kana/kanji, and introduces vocabulary. Then you have to play games to earn points and move up to the next lesson. Some games are pretty pointless, but others like Crossword, Bridge Builder (sentence builder), Flash cards, and multiple choice quiz are pretty good. If you’re a high level students, use hard as it’ll get you more points to move up faster. Whatever you do STAY AWAY FROM WRITING EXERCISES (I’ll tell you why in the next bullet point).
• Recommended. Even though this game takes a while to wean you off romaji, and it does have a few mistakes, and some of the minigames aren’t helpful, it is a pretty thorough language teacher so I would recommend it to anyone. However stay away from any and all writing mini games as the game does have stroke order mistakes! You do not want to learn wrong stroke order. But if you just want to be tested on reading the kana and kanji, you’ll be ok.
• Likely to get a full review (but only after I reach kanji level since I do want to do a thorough review, so it might take a while)

Game #2559: Shoho kara wa Hajimeru Otona no Eitango

• English/Japanese vocabulary
• Intermediates and Fluent for Japanese learning, Beginner 2+ for English learning
• This is an English-learning game for Japanese natives. From that perspective the game is very thorough on giving you common vocabulary and testing you for it. If you’re using it to learn Japanese, it can still be of some use. Many words in lower level use hiragana and katakana so even a beginner could read them, however I rate it intermediate + because a lot of the words use kanji for the japanese description and this game has no furigana (at least I’ve yet to see some…). So you could just cover the pictures and only use the reading to figure out what it means. Or you could hide the reading, look at the picture, and write down the word in japanese before writing it in english.
• Japanese person learning English: Recommended. English speaker learning Japanese: Somewhat Recommended – it can still be of some use. A lot of these words are common, so if you want to make sure you know common words(and thus common kanji), this might make a good quiz. However chances are if you use some of the better titles out there, you’ll end up learning all of this vocabulary anyway, so there’s no point in spending extra money for this.
• No Furigana
• Will probably not get a full review. (I’ll just say it’s just an English-learning version of Nazotte Oboeru. Same interface and everything).