Has anyone used this game for studying? Obviously not as the primary source for learning the language, but for assistance. How did it work out for you?
I’m hoping it will help me retain words since I’ve have a really hard time remembering vocabulary and words in general. It’s my weakest point.
3 comments
I want to play noun town, but it’s only early access so I haven’t bought it yet…
I find studying vocab to be super boring, and already use video games to help and it’s worked well.
For example, while playing Zelda i will name things I see in japanese. But something made with this purpose in mind would be better.
If you get it, report back!
There is a review by someone who has “played* this game. For 12 hours on steam.
I think you should check there.
Most common thing I noticed from the positive reviews was that there are still plenty of bugs.
So much so that because there is so much mention of these I am uncertain if these reviews are independent.
There is a negative review that also speaks about the bugs. And the lack of furigana when they introduce new kanji.
This review got answered by one of the developers this I will quote
Quote
Hi Mitty, your review has some useful feedback that we will act on – thank you. However, we find a lot of your review a bit misleading and not aligned to what we’ve read in other reviews. Here’s why:
With 1,000+ words and phrases in the game, it’s only a small number of Japanese words that are “borrowed” words; so it certainly isn’t a “large majority”.
For these words, we also believe they are appropriate to include as they are literally the words used in Japan by most 10 – 40 year-olds., which was the target conversation type of our native translators and Japanese language teachers used to create them.
With so many words in the game some people will disagree with the interpretation of a word. i.e. how do you represent “paint”? Do we show a tin of paint, a paint brush, a splodge of paint on a wall? We try to show the item that we think is the most closely representative and always include the English word being translated.
The game doesn’t include furigana to help you pronounce the kanji. However, along with the romaji, it does provide four native speakers reading the word for you to listen to. This allows players to hear how the words are actually said, including tonal differences (such as the difference between sake (alcohol) and sake (salmon)). These differences are not representable in furigana, and we primarily want to get players used to listening-and-repeating the actual sounds, rather than potentially reading-and-mispronouncing or missing the differences.
If you can memorise all the content in 10 days, you probably don’t need language learning apps, because you will likely be fluent in your desired language in a month. We think it’s very important to draw a distinction between “being exposed to once” and actually having formed memorisations around the words that allow you to use them dynamically – which is exactly why we include a spaced repetition system.
Streaks are maintained based on doing one of any three actions, of which one is learning new words in the rooms. The others include revising words and talking to characters on the island. So, it is possible to maintain your streak infinitely.
You provided one example of a pronunciation issue, which is happily fixed for the next release! It’s also the only example in the game of a word that is an acronym; our speech recognition isn’t trained on acronyms so we’ve been resolving it.
P.S. we like the mini-games
End quote.
So the negative review mentioned the majority of words being in katakana.
That the game has full audio for the text and the difference between sake (alcoho)l and sake (salmon)
I find promising.
It seems that they primarily focus on making a gamified classroom. Which is not bad at all.
Depending on how much content they will provide I think it might be worth it.
What worries me is that you can learn multiple languages with it.
And Japanese has a different word order than Spanish , Chinese the only two other languages they point out. (There is “more” as well)
Anyway I think the setup is right.
I got the hiragana,katakana and kanji in the learn Japanese to survive series myself a couple of years ago. That one is a waste of your time in my opinion.
To be blunt, you need to learn a couple thousand words to be able to stumble your way through absolute basic reading/listening/conversation, 10k+ words to start to even feel literate, and countless hours of immersion to actually wire your brain to understand what you’re consuming aside from the vocabulary (grammar, context, nuance, emotion, etc). So, unfortunately, no, I don’t think it’s worth turning an already long journey into an even longer one by playing an educational video game, let alone one that showcases itself teaching you through romaji and translates 何ですか？ as `nanidesu ka?`.
If you’re struggling to learn words, it might be worth writing out your study habits (in the daily thread or in a post) and asking for advice about that rather than trying to turn your back on already established learning methods.