[Multilingual Monday] Another Game Review!
One of my biggest complaints about the Rosetta Stone series was that it was very cookie-cutter, and more unique aspects of a language were ignored when a cookie cutter format was decided upon, and thus focus on things that might help people learn Romance languages, didn't help anyone learning a language like Korean, and that hurt the effectiveness of the software.
Sadly, that's just one of many problems plaguing Japanese Coach for the DS. I have been speaking and reading Japanese for a while, but that doesn't mean that I've learned the entire language and welcome more knowledge on the language -- indeed, to eventually say that I've mastered the language. And I won't lie -- I've been using this game for the last three weeks and learned things I didn't know before. Mind you, they were somewhat ODD (did I NEED the verb for "to persecute"??) but I learned them regardless.
About the gameplay: there are at least 100 lessons on the game, and if you do well on a pre-quiz you are advanced to a further lesson. Here is the game's first problem, as it will not allow the player to advance past lesson 17, where you are still learning kana and what to call your father -- pretty basic stuff. A somewhat stereotyped 3D Japanese woman named Haruka teaches lessons on various points in the Japanese language. Usually a lesson will contain at least ten vocabulary words that you will focus on ten vocabulary words (at least), and through playing various minigames mastery points are earned, and enough mastery points will unlock a new lesson and, sometimes, new games.
The game isn't all bad, certainly -- it's not too bad for vocabulary drill. Games like Flash Cards, Multiple Choice and Memory drill you on the various words that you've yet to earn mastery of. A dictionary will allow you to review what you've learned, and a recording feature allows the DS mike to record your pronunciation and compare it to Haruka's. That being said, though there's an option to drill on mastered words, there is no setting as to which words you'd prefer to focus on. This means that, if you are at lesson fifty, then 500 words will be randomly chosen.
So yeah, here's where I get kvetchy, as there are some glaring problems with the game:
INCORRECT OR INCOMPLETE INFORMATION: While the game drills you on the correct way to write kana and kanji, there are several times where it teaches the incorrect stroke order. While stroke order is somewhat unimportant in English, it's quite important in a language like Japanese. Several of the kana have incorrect stroke orders, and several of the kanji do too. 山, for example, is a three stroke character (middle vertical stroke, left-most vertical stroke angling to the right along the bottom, then the furthest right vertical stroke), whereas the game teaches three vertical lines and a horizontal base stroke, and this isn't right at all. The concepts of "give" and "receive" are very dependent upon social levels, superiors and subordinates, etc., and thus there are several possible words, but the game only gives one word for "give" and one word for "receive", and their use in certain conditions would result in possible insult. The game is very vague during several of the grammar lessons, and players need to figure out key information for themselves, like verbs ending in -u needing a -w added during certain conjugations. There is a "Fill-In-The-Blank" game, but for lessons like one on commands it never specifies what level of politeness it wants, resulting in a technically correct answer but incorrect in the eyes of the game.
INCONSISTENCY: The game uses Latin transliteration, and I have no issue with that, particularly when you're just learning the script. Some games continue to use the transliteration long after you've learned kana and, okay, that's odd to me, but not my main beef. My question is the transliteration itself, which is inconsistent. One example is は, which is usually pronounced ha but as a topic marker is pronounced wa (one of the few kana peculiarities). In random places you see both ha and wa for the same topic marker, with no rhyme or reason. Katakana words are another problem -- a word like エレベーター, erebeitaa, "elevator", is transliterated as "erebe-ta-", and in some games you need to write the hyphens, but in others trying to type a hyphen counts against you, and it's pretty random here as well. The handwriting recognition is also pretty poor; I can make a perfect kana or kanji character and be marked wrong for some odd reason, yet make something not even CLOSE to the character I'm supposed to be writing and be counted correct.
POOR GRAMMAR FOCUS: The game's focus is on learning words, and most of the games drill you on the ten or so vocabulary words per lesson, meaning that grammar doesn't even have a back seat, but rather is being dragged along in a hitch. Major points -- like verb conjugation -- are discussed, but the lessons are somewhat vague, as Haruka prods you to "practice making sentences!" Well, Haruka, isn't that YOUR job? To HELP in this regard? Lazy bitch. :: laugh :: Really, the only grammar-esque game is "Bridge Builder," where you take "bridge pieces" featuring words (or parts of words) and slam them all into sentences. But where is the help making a verb past tense? Or drilling on using the Japanese potential? Adjective conjugation? No games focus on this at all.
SO WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? I've never seen software able to replace an actual learning environment, and this doesn't change that opinion of mine. If you're in a Japanese class and need to drill on words? This isn't a bad game to have, certainly. But if you're looking at becoming fluent? This will help you learn WORDS but you'll still be stuck in manipulating those words for your needs if this is all you have to fall back on. Several design flaws make it far from ideal, and cookie cutter minigames from other series (Spanish and French) are ill-suited to the Japanese language.
So yeah, it's m'eh.