My Japanese Coach dictionary and other features
Within an hour of receiving My Japanese Coach for the Nintendo DS in the mail, my 12-year old son came home. Needless to say, that was the end of my experiments with the game until today when he went to school, allowing me to finally get a crack at it again. Apparently he found My Japanese Coach quite addictive and learned a few dozen words last night and this morning before school.
I went into the audio section of the program (pictured to the left) and played around a bit. Although the game doesn’t correct your pronunciation, it does offer you a native female speaker saying a word. You can then record your pronunciation of the same word and play them both back simultaneously. This is actually more helpful than it sounds, and the quality of the recording is quite good.
While the speaker is native, I have a feeling that much of the character (both kanji and kana) drawing in the program is not done by a native Japanese person. This is unfortunate. As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog entry, some of the stroke order is wrong. If you, as the learner, write it correctly you will be marked wrong. You have to write the character wrong to get it right. Ugh.
If you go under Options/Credits you can see all the names of the people who created the game. They are nearly all non-Japanese names except for the voice actor. All of the beta testers have non-Japanese names. Again, this is unfortunate. Ubisoft should have hired some more native Japanese speakers and character writers to create and test this product so that it is 100% accurate and bug free. People purchasing this game want to learn how to write like the Japanese, not like gaijin.
Finally, for today, I played around with the dictionary. There is both an ei-wa (English-Japanese) and wa-ei (Japanese-English) dictionary. The wa-ei comes in both romaji and kana versions. While the dictionary is quick and handy, it isn’t huge at about 10,000 words (compared to a good electronic dictionary with more than 20 times as many words). Also, it includes only a one or two word definition without any example sentences so its usefulness is limited.
Related posts:
- Minigames in My Japanese Coach I’m up to Lesson 42 which means I now have 10 minigames within My Japanese Coach to choose from. Here is my assessment of the first five: Multiple Choice is...
- Canon Wordtank V80 Japanese English Chinese Dictionary After a year of use and tremendous assistance provided by my V80 I am going to part with it after purchasing a V300. I certainly don’t need both! If...
- More minigames in My Japanese Coach I’m now on Lesson 45 which means I have unlocked the last of the minigames. There are 12 in all. Yesterday I covered the first five. Today I will cover...
- Final thoughts on My Japanese Coach These will be my final thoughts, for a while anyway, on My Japanese Coach, the new game for the Nintendo DS. The lessons (pictured to the left) in My Japanese...
- My Japanese Coach screenshots, flaws After making it through the 100 “lessons” offered in My Japanese Coach the user is presented with the above screen. Apparently there are another 900+ “open plan” lessons which...
Subscribe in a reader or get updates via email
