I heard a decent amount of people don’t consider it helpful when they already know Japanese which makes sense but if you don’t know nothing about the language is it helpful? Besides the games there is a digital text book too.
I only played their hiragana game and I wouldn’t recommend it in general.
As a game it’s just okay. Classic JRPG with a battle system that’s basically just matching kana to their letters. If you want to have fun you’d be better of picking something like Pokémon and setting it to hiragana mode.
As a way to learn it would be okay except all the gameplay gets in the way. Learning kana well enough to get started everything else only takes a few hours over a few days. Adding all the time of playing the game just makes it inefficient.
Make flash cards or get an app like Kana or use realkana.com and get it over with. You don’t need a game for it.
For Kanji it may be better but I haven’t tried their game for it.
Knowing nothing about the game other than that it’s *a videogame trying to teach you a language* I’d say it’s probably useless. It’s just going to be basically giving you the same amount of info a flashcard could give you in a fraction of the time.
Edutainment games like that basically boil down to learning some vocab… and since it’s got non-linguistic gameplay then you waste a lot of time doing that. To learn any language, especially Japanese, you’re gonna have to put up with a rough start to nail the basics down.
I wouldn’t recommend gamifying kana or core vocabulary for two reasons
– it makes for a boring game
– thinking about your “gems” or “experience points” or whatever gamified stuff distracts from what’s otherwise a simple task
For kana you just need to practice them repeatedly over a long period of time. No spaced repetition, just use random drill. It only takes about an afternoon to get familiar with them, the you can drop to like 10 minutes a day, and then stop that once you start reading.
Then basic vocabulary is just quick explanations plus Anki. The most you should gamify it is to try to keep a streak or celebrate milestones of how many days you’ve studied.
I think “toughen up and exercise self discipline” is overrated advice, but these things pay a lot of benefit for not much effort, so *just do it.* See, like, the Moe Way 30 day guide for a very specific training routine.
“Here’s a video game, survive” *is* a good intermediate to advanced activity, but there simply aren’t games that cater to beginners well. Earthlingo is the closest I’ve seen (unfortunately, it doesn’t play well with the complexity of written Japanese, but I might unironically use it for French).
One thing that video games can do is give you instructions or clues that you need to respond to – occasionally you’ll even need to write or coordinate with other people. This interactivity isn’t found in other kinds of consumer media.
But they can also have “low language density” – you don’t need to read or understand much to play – so there’s a big spectrum in how helpful they are for language learning. And this varies between different parts of gameplay. Grinding levels in a JRPG is low-density (put on a podcast!) but advancing the story gives you quite good density, at least as much as manga. Visual novels have very high density but lower interactivity than puzzle-heavy adventure games do. Newer RPGs give you a *lot* of help that means you don’t need reading comprehension.
Video games with enough density to actually help you start at about the same difficulty as manga. Not accessible to complete beginners – manga is more accessible since you can flip through them freely, skip hard parts, reread things you’ve forgotten, etc – but also not very hard at all. Pokemon is pretty good for this, IMO, and I’d recommend to start once you can enjoy reading an easy manga cover-to-cover, skipping words you don’t know yet.
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I only played their hiragana game and I wouldn’t recommend it in general.
As a game it’s just okay. Classic JRPG with a battle system that’s basically just matching kana to their letters. If you want to have fun you’d be better of picking something like Pokémon and setting it to hiragana mode.
As a way to learn it would be okay except all the gameplay gets in the way. Learning kana well enough to get started everything else only takes a few hours over a few days. Adding all the time of playing the game just makes it inefficient.
Make flash cards or get an app like Kana or use realkana.com and get it over with. You don’t need a game for it.
For Kanji it may be better but I haven’t tried their game for it.
Knowing nothing about the game other than that it’s *a videogame trying to teach you a language* I’d say it’s probably useless. It’s just going to be basically giving you the same amount of info a flashcard could give you in a fraction of the time.
Edutainment games like that basically boil down to learning some vocab… and since it’s got non-linguistic gameplay then you waste a lot of time doing that. To learn any language, especially Japanese, you’re gonna have to put up with a rough start to nail the basics down.
I wouldn’t recommend gamifying kana or core vocabulary for two reasons
– it makes for a boring game
– thinking about your “gems” or “experience points” or whatever gamified stuff distracts from what’s otherwise a simple task
For kana you just need to practice them repeatedly over a long period of time. No spaced repetition, just use random drill. It only takes about an afternoon to get familiar with them, the you can drop to like 10 minutes a day, and then stop that once you start reading.
Then basic vocabulary is just quick explanations plus Anki. The most you should gamify it is to try to keep a streak or celebrate milestones of how many days you’ve studied.
I think “toughen up and exercise self discipline” is overrated advice, but these things pay a lot of benefit for not much effort, so *just do it.* See, like, the Moe Way 30 day guide for a very specific training routine.
“Here’s a video game, survive” *is* a good intermediate to advanced activity, but there simply aren’t games that cater to beginners well. Earthlingo is the closest I’ve seen (unfortunately, it doesn’t play well with the complexity of written Japanese, but I might unironically use it for French).
One thing that video games can do is give you instructions or clues that you need to respond to – occasionally you’ll even need to write or coordinate with other people. This interactivity isn’t found in other kinds of consumer media.
But they can also have “low language density” – you don’t need to read or understand much to play – so there’s a big spectrum in how helpful they are for language learning. And this varies between different parts of gameplay. Grinding levels in a JRPG is low-density (put on a podcast!) but advancing the story gives you quite good density, at least as much as manga. Visual novels have very high density but lower interactivity than puzzle-heavy adventure games do. Newer RPGs give you a *lot* of help that means you don’t need reading comprehension.
Video games with enough density to actually help you start at about the same difficulty as manga. Not accessible to complete beginners – manga is more accessible since you can flip through them freely, skip hard parts, reread things you’ve forgotten, etc – but also not very hard at all. Pokemon is pretty good for this, IMO, and I’d recommend to start once you can enjoy reading an easy manga cover-to-cover, skipping words you don’t know yet.