Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #922 in Video Games
• Brand: UBI Soft
• Model: 16428
• Published on: 2008-10
• Released on: 2008-10-14
• ESRB Rating: Everyone
• Platform: Nintendo DS
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .50" h x 5.25" w x 5.00" l, .25 pounds

Features

• Explore Japan as you learn Japanese from your own personal teacher, or sensei
• Compare your pronunciation of the sounds unique to Japanese with native speakers
• Learn and practice writing Japanese Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji characters using the DS stylus
• Play 12 different types of mini-games that test your grasp of the structured lessons
• Built-in dictionary and phrase book with over 12,000 words and hundreds of useful phrases

Amazon.com
Thanks to UbiSoft's My Japanese Coach for the Nintendo DS, you can carry a tutor in your pocket that lets you learn a new language in as little as 15 minutes a day. With plenty of entertaining lessons, loads of fun-to-play mini-games, and a host of helpful features, this unique language coach will have you not only speaking like a native in no time, but reading and writing like on as well!

Carry a tutor in your pocket with My Japanese Coach. View larger.

Learn in Fun and Interactive Ways
My Japanese Coach is an installment in the My Coach series from UbiSoft series that teaches the basic pronunciations unique to the Japanese language. This convenient and easy-to-use tutor allows users to compare their pronunciation to that of native speakers via the Nintendo DS's microphone. It also lets you use the DS stylus to practice writing Japanese Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji characters.

My Japanese Coach takes you on a virtual tour of Japan while you're learning the language. Lesson plans take place in a wide array of Japanese locations, from the densest of population centers like Tokyo, to the idyllic Japanese country side. You actually get to explore Japan while you learn new vocabulary as you open each point of interest.

Learn From a Master
Meet Haruka, the in-game digital sensei, or teacher, that exists solely for the purpose of teaching you Japanese. After giving you a small placement-style test, Haruka will get you started working through the various stages of your lessons. Gaining mastery points by playing the various learning games allow you to clear each level. Once you master all the words given in a specific level, you move on to the next level.

As you work your way through over a 1,000 lessons, your language skills are constantly tested and sharpened by various mini games. My Japanese Coach includes 12 types of mini games, ranging from Flash Cards, in which you hear a word and have seconds to choose the correct English translation, to Bridge Builder, where you are required to string words together in the correct order to create a complete sentence. And with mini-games that add a clever twist to classic favorites--like Memory that forces you to match the same words in two different languages--you will be sure to have fun while you learn.

My Japanese Coach also features a built-in dictionary and phrase book that includes over 12,000 words and hundreds of useful everyday phrases.

Meet Haruka, the in-game digital sensei, or teacher. View larger.

Sharpen and test your language skills with mini games. View larger.

Use the DS stylus to practice writing Japanese characters. View larger.

Customer Reviews

Have used many other programs and this is by far the best!
Let me start by saying that I have been studying Japanese off and on for many years now. I learned some of the basic words and simple sentence structures as well as to read and write Katakana. However, I've never made a serious attempt to go beyond that, until now.

I have used many computer Japanese learning programs and found all of them to be totally inadequate. I was cautiously optimistic about this DS title, but for under $[...] I decided to give it a try. Wow, I am impressed! The lessons are well structured and introduce around 10 words per lesson (from what I've seen so far), unlike books which want you to remember dozens and dozens of words right from the start. The voice quality is superb and (unlike most other recordings I have heard) does not speak so fast that you can't follow it. I love the feature where you can record your voice and compare it to the native speaker's, including comparing the wave forms. This helps you learn the correct timing and pace when speaking. The games are fun, but you need pretty fast reflexes for the whack-a-mole game unless you set it on easy.

This program does have a few flaws. The stroke order for a few of the kanas is off (stroke order is VERY important in writing Japanese correctly). Also, hiragana is introduced too slowly in my opinion, but this is probably intentional as to not scare off people who have never written in Japenese. That being said, if you are serious about learning Japanese this shouldn't be your only resource anyways. I highly recommend Easy Hiragana: First Steps to Basic Japanese Writing (Passport Books) and especially Easy Katakana.

Despite these minor issues, I think that any serious student of Japanese will benefit immensely from using this program. Motivation and determination are required to learn any language since it takes a huge investment of time and study. Using something that is as engaging as this will keep you interested. Plus, it is a game system after all, so if you need a break you can always pop in Zelda for a while! ;)

I really wanted to love this program...
I can tell that a lot of people are in the same boat as me. They've been waiting for a DS program that teaches Japanese (with an English-language interface) for so long. They had such high hopes! It has a cute sensei! Whack-a-mole! A thousand lessons! Yeah, lots of romaji... but we can get past that!

Unfortunately, it also has some serious errors in the writing training. Specifically:

Incorrect hiragana: na mo ya yo
Incorrect katakana: e ka chi ne no hi me ya wa wo

In other words, about 15% of the basic kana characters are taught and/or graded wrong in this program. Count 'em, 14 kana have either wrong stroke order, wrong stroke direction, or wrong stroke count. AAAAAGHHHH! How could they?

No, really... seriously, how COULD they? The correct stroke order for kana is in any number of reference books. You could choose from a dozen or more on Amazon. It's not some arcane 18-stroke kanji--we're talking about characters with four, three, two.. even, for pete's sake, ONE stroke. (Katakana "no" should be drawn north-to-south, not the other way.)

The worst thing is, lots of people using this program are going to be brand-new to Japanese and won't even know they're being taught wrong.

Writing Japanese is not like writing English. You can write a "t" with the vertical line first or the cross stroke first, and nobody cares. But Japanese is not like that. Stroke order matters. Ironically, the animated Haruku-sensei harps on that point a lot.

Ya know, I read the reviews that said there were a few problems with stroke order, and I still bought MJC. I figured, what the heck, it's probably just one or two things, they're probably low-usage characters, whatever. Ack, wrong. I mean, some of these syllables are used a lot--a LOT--in Japanese. It's as though you were a non-English speaker being taught to write your Gs and Ss backwards and your Ns and Us upside down.

Oh well... apart from that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

The interface is cute. I'm not crazy about most of the games I've unlocked so far... I find myself going to my three favorites again and again: flashcards (set on hard, so you get only audio cues); writing cards; and multiple choice. Those three will actually teach you something (word search in romaji?? really now). The placement test is not thorough enough--I don't know the days of the week at all, but somehow I got skipped past that lesson.

The vocabulary seems fairly well chosen (although they do start off with a strange selection of verbs--I would never have put kagayaku [glow], shinu [die], or osu [push] among the first two dozen verbs to learn in a foreign language). I wish there were exercises that actually gave you practice conjugating verbs, but perhaps that comes later on in the program. The audio is nice, and the fonts are readable. There's a dictionary, which also subsets to your learned-words list, and lots of tracking info. There are slots for three players (handy in my three-person household).

I dunno--I STILL really want to love this program, but I'm afraid Ubisoft (or whoever actually did the content) did a crappy job with it. If they got that many kana wrong, how in the world is one to trust the kanji? I'm going to bite the bullet and go buy Kakitori Kun 2 from an import house--it's got a Japanese interface, but I'll figure it out eventually, and I'll be confident I'm learning how to write correctly.

P.S. Guess I should add... if your main goal is to speak Japanese, this program should be fine. I know that not everyone places as high a value on being able to write Nihongo correctly as I do.

[EDITED TO ADD: The dictionary has a very nice feature: click on a verb and you'll get three pages of verb-specific info: formal and informal conjugations for non-past, past, neg non-past, and neg past; a list of bases 1-5 plus -ta and -te; and more conjugations (volitional, imperative, etc.) This is cool. Shame about the kana blunders, though--they've poisoned the well.]

Never thought learning Japanese could become addicting . . .
Well, it finally came out, and I bought it RIGHT away from my nearest game store. My Japanese coach is for the nintendo DS That helps you to learn Japanese. You learn to read kanji, write in Japanese, listen to Japanese, vocabulary, useful phrases . . . so far it seems to be worth the money I spent on it ($30).

The back of the case says that there are over 1,000 lessons, 1500 phrases, and close to 10,000 words in this game. I'm going to guess that at the moment, I know maybe 500 phrases, 300 kanji, and about 2500 words (and that's all being generous I bet). I could potentially DOUBLE my Japanese knowledge of Japanese if I finish this game, so I'm excited.

Anyways, a quick game review. You start off the game by taking a placement test in Japanese. They ask you 50 questions, usually relating to a vocabulary word, or how to read a certain kana character. If you miss two, then it stops the quiz and calculates your starting level (I scored 50/50 and moved directly to lesson 11.) The lessons are rather simple. It sticks to one type of topic, for example, using the "desu" form. The game gives you a couple of examples, introduces 10 new vocabulary, and then stops halfway thru to ask you if you want to practice what you have learned. This usually is in the form of a quiz/game, which are integral to "leveling up", or unlocking the next lesson. Only after you fill up the mastery gauge of each vocab/phrase/character, will you be able to move on.

Having only just started, it seems like aside from mastering the romaji versions of the vocab through memory games and listening (maybe 10 more types of games as well), you can also work on writing your hiragana and katakana, which will progressively become more difficult and become inserted into more of your lessons as you master them (I can only assume that at a certain point, most of your lessons will be conducted entirely in Japanese, or at a level concurrent to your Japanese skill). It should also be noted that you can record your voice when learning new phrases, and listen to the game read them as well. There are also some really cool bonuses in the game too. There is a dictionary, phrasebook, and a really cool way to track your progress.

The game also tells you at what level you would be at if you lived in Japan. At the moment, I can express myself as much as a 1st Grader (363 words mastered), but that will change as I work my way through the game. This is a great game for anybody with a background in Japanese already and will help you to practice your weaker areas. Personally, I can't wait to get into practicing Kanji and learning some new words in preparation for the San-kyuu proficiency test this winter.