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Serious Games For Japanese Practice

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Via: NihongoUp – Learning Japanese the Fun Way

NihongoUp is a Japanese reviewing tool for foreign students and native speakers alike developed by Philip Seyfi

I’ve just installed the free trial version of the AIR application from http://nihongoup.com/ and found out it has a few educational mini-games to help improve your typing speed on a Japanese keyboard, sentence structure and vocabulary.

When you start up the application, you have four choices: Katakana, Hiragana, Kanji, and Particles – all this packaged in NihongoUp learning game, which aims at keeping you motivated during the review of this most demanding language.

Hiragana and Katakana:

In this game, balloons with different Hiragana (or Katakana) come down: you have to type in the falling syllables before they reach the bottom of the screen.

Kanji:

In the kanji game, you get a sentence at the bottom with a highlighted section. You have to click on the balloon containing the kanji that can be correctly placed in the proposed sentence to move on to the next one.

The game is now available for JLPT 3 & 4 levels, but according to the website JLPT 2 and JLPT 1 sentence lists for the Kanji exercises are coming soon.

Particles:

In the particles game, you get a sentence with a missing particle, and then four choices. You have to choose the particle than can be placed into the sentence.

Overall Impressions from Japanese Speakers

“Nihongoup does some neat things for Japanese language practice. There’s some room for improvement, which is fine because it’s an early product. t’s kind of one of those things where it’s really good that it’s simple, but has room for a little more (I think?). I do wish the sentences were easier to read (more kanji, please!), and I’d also like to see more settings for different difficulty levels within each section (faster speeds, etc).”