Learn Japanese Reviews

The name is quite misleading. It should be called "Hiragana with examples". You go through each character in hiragana, you get a word which uses it, then you answer a question with three possible answers. Imagine my surprise when I finished the whole thing after just 4 hours. Unfortunately it's too late to refund. You can find this kind of contents for free anywhere!

okay.. I think the devs heart is in the right place... but... This game/lecture, from the word go, throws words at you quite nonstop, seemingly just kinda expecting you to remember them. Knowing a decent bit of Japanese already, I have no problem with this, other than being bored out of my mind, but I imagine that this will not attach itself to a beginner in any way. The structure seems to be lecture, quiz, lecture, quiz, which is fine, but lectures contain way too little, fully relying on the user instantly memorising words. This will likely confuse users as Hiragana is thrown at the user with no prepwork. There's also the matter of "kanojyo" (彼女/かのじょ) romanji will confuse most users using other material, as that's usually written "kanojo" in other material. Not super far into it, so don't know if that will happen continually, but suspect that will happen with other words using じょ. Let's leave aside the Japanese part of it, and look at it from a game perspective. The game is a VN style game with voicing. Nothing much to it. I do notice that it refuses to proceed seemingly randomly from time to time until some time has passed, so if you need to get to a particular word again, that quickly turns irritating. Artwork thus far is 2 girls, one doing the lectures, one doing the quizes, so they basically act as a visual differentiation between the two "modes". Seems they both have the same voice though. Constructive feedback time. - Spend some time on introduction, and specifically introducing Hiragana, as most English speaking users will barely have seen that before, never mind actually being able to read it. - No idea if the delay I mentioned is engine weirdness. If it is, and you're unable to workaround problems, maybe look at other engines? RenPy comes to mind, but sure there are others around. - The tricky part, the structure... I have never written lectures, so I can only guess at this. Doing a "lecture, quiz" cycle is probably fine, but you need more meat on the bone in the lecture. Keep in mind that users new to Japanese need to be introduced softly into it, it's a whole new set of characters to learn, even if the user were to be happy with hiragana and some conventional Japanese (I do not know if katakana and kanji shows up later?). I'll keep poking at this when time allows, but I would not recommend this to a new learner in its current state. I do appreciate the effort though, and the heart seems to be in the right place, doesn't look like a cashgrab or something like that, genuinely feels like an attempt to help learners... well... learn. So do keep at it!