Famicom Dojo Podcast: Learning Japanese Through Gaming

Google Goggles is my godsend for buying Japanese games. take a picture of the game, auto-translation. Android only I think, but incredible future tech.

Hey guys, its Satoshi Matrix from Famicom World. Thinking over what games are good for learning Japanese, I agree with you that the Pocket Monsters games are excellent, but the best game I’ve found to learn basics of Japanese is a DS game called My Japanese Coach.

My Japanese Coach is an interactive “edutainment” game that has ~200 lessons teaching everything from the various writing systems, phrases, common words, even kanji. You do this by playing “mastery” mini games that range from multiple choice and match the cards and wack a mole with words to more complex games like mill in the missing word or compose a response to a question.

There’s more than ten thousand words in the game with a handy English-Japanese dictionary and phrasebook. You can practice your calligraphy with the touchscreen interface, and the game even allows you to use the mic to record and compare your pronunciation to the Japanese voice.

It’s not a one shot solution for learning Japanese, but for those studying, it will prove helpful. It’s even great for those more advanced as when you start the game up for the first time, the game offers a prior knowledge test to determine what lesson to start the player on.

Since I just finished listening to this episode right now, and I’m currently studying Japanese in university, mostly because my teacher is awesome, but also because I had interest in Japanese. It’s fun, it’s one of the most fun things I’ve done in my life.

I’ve heard that some schools expect you to come in knowing Hiragana and Katakana, in our school they teach you Hiragana and Katakana within the first month or two, then you move onto Kanji.

I have to say that in Japanese, I personally hate listening to cartoon characters speak, just because it’s not natural. As a result, they’re hard to understand. We had a snow day make-up assignment, where we could watch anime without subtitles, in Japanese and write 20 words we didn’t know and looked up. I could only pick up words I actually knew. It’s hard to look up words you don’t know when they’re not written out. Looking back, I wish I had done the assignment with music though. I have managed to figure out what some songs have lyric-wise for a few new words (oddly enough through Vocaloid songs of all things, but a lot of those music videos also contain the lyrics so it’s not hard to use Google and attempt to figure it out). I ended up just writing a full page of Genkou Youshi about what we did during our snow days we had back in February.

Our course has listening comprehension where they use people voice acting. I just find it more difficult to understand them when they’re not using their actual voices, the listening comprehension uses cartoonish voices and I struggle to catch what they’re saying exactly.

We have students from Japan, usually Sophia University, that study abroad here, and they typically seem to be against any of us studying abroad in Japan, I’m afraid to ask why.

I hope this wasn’t too much to read, you said that you go back to older shows and read the stuff people post on them, so this is my contribution since this was about learning Japanese. Sorry about the bad punctuation, I can’t really figure that out outside of Microsoft Word.