Forgive the re-post, but I wanted to give a more balanced review of the game below, because while I wouldn't recommend it to beginners, more advanced learners might actually benefit from the game.
I don't have many Japanese games and most of what I do have aren't really games so much as tools to assist with studying. For example, I have this electronic notebook that lets you record your school timetable and keep a daily journal;
It has games too though, so I might come back and review it at another date.
The game I want to review today though, is 'Obunsha dekiru jun, kokugo DS', which is a game for improving kid's kanji knowledge, specifically to pass the junior high entrance exams.
As you can probably guess, it contains kanji learnt up to and including grade 6. It contains several test categories including writing practice, various reading games and proverbs/yojijukugo. For every category you can customise your study by choosing different selection methods (I prefer the 'スライドしてアナウメ', which is shown in the last illustration below), and you can choose to study new words only (ふつう), study only the ones you previously got wrong (まちがえた) or both (ぜんぶ).
It's a nice little game but I couldn't sit and play for hours at a time. I don't think I'd recommend it for anyone below upper intermediate either, unless you already know most kanji up to 6th grade, because of the amount of time you'd have to spend looking things up in dictionaries. Much of the vocabulary appears to be N2 and N1, so for those who want a fun way to cover more advanced vocabulary while also improving their knowledge of kanji use, then this game might just do the trick.
The main drawbacks of this game are;
-The characters that are meant to assist you are kinda scary. The creepy woman turns into a kind of angry oni thing when you get a question wrong. I feel sorry for kids that have to use this.
-It never gives you the hiragana outside of the questions themselves. By the time you're able to view the correct answers, the question has long past. All you get is the kanji in an example sentence, but no reading. There are dictionaries too, and these contain example sentences, but again, no hiragana! So if you want to check the reading/meaning of a word you got wrong, unless you've already learnt all kanji up to 6th grade, you'll have to use a kanji dictionary which is very time consuming.
-The kanji are often warped in order to render them on the DS screen. This makes looking them up even harder. Again, it's not a huge deal if you can already read the kanji, but for anyone who can't, I honestly don't know how you'd stand a chance when some strokes are missing, or radicals appear as a completely different shape.
Despite the above flaws, I
do use this game. So for those who aren't put off by the points above or think they'd like to use it to improve their vocabulary here are the good points;
- Its vocabulary is vast! Altogether there are around 4500 questions, with around 950 separate jukugo, all with example sentences!
- It generally ignores easier words that it knows most kids will be able to recognise so you don't have to waste too much time with words you already know how to write, yet there are enough easier words to stop an upper-intermediate from feeling too dejected! It feels like a good balance to me at least.
- Each drill is only 5 items so it's really easy to find a spare few minutes to play through.
- After each drill you get the option to review the answers. It will show you the words you were just tested on, including those you got correct. If you click on a word, it will show you the example sentence again. I mentioned earlier that they will not show you the reading of the word though. If you knew the word, but just got the kanji wrong, you can then see the correct writing and try to remember for next time. If you don't know the word at all, you have 2 options; either bang the kanji into jisho.org, or try to make a mental note of the characters for now (easier said than done though).
- There is an option to only drill words you've previously got wrong. When you do so, words will keep returning until you get them right, but won't return again once you correctly answer. By following every drill with this mode you can see the unknown words again, which makes it easier for you to memorise the hiragana for looking them up. (Unfortunately however, this mode does not let you review the words again at the end, so unless you looked the word up, you'll have to keep trying until you get it right. You get 11 characters to choose from each time, so there are (if I've understood how maths works), 121 possible combinations for a 2 character jukugo, so your chance of guessing at this point is pretty low).
- It allows for a much richer knowledge than study methods such as memrise and anki. Playing through this game helped me to realise how often I recognise words by sight but when I'm asked to pick the kanji I get them the wrong way around or pick similar looking characters. I also love the way I have to pause and double check before I pick a character, because they'll give you similar characters with maybe a single radical difference.
So while I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone who doesn't already have a basic grasp of kanji, for those who are looking to reinforce their knowledge and take their reading to the next level, as well as allowing you to add a good number of N1 words to your vocabulary, then this game is maybe worth a try (it's available on
amazon at time of writing). I'd say it's a fair 3/5