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 consist of either 10 new words or 10 new kanji. The new words are no longer grouped into any sort of category and are very random. Based on the first few open plan lessons I’ve gone through the groupings have consisted of elementary words right alongside advanced words.
All of the remaining 2,000+ jōyō kanji (常用漢字) are supposed to be covered in the open plan. In the first 100 lessons the user goes through only the first and second grade kanji (even though the user is given the title of High School Sophomore by the time they finish the first 100 lessons). Unfortunately, almost 10% of the kanji, I would guess, are taught with an incorrect stroke order. Even those with correct stroke order look pretty bad at times.
After 100 lessons the user will have covered a little over 1,000 words in My Japanese Coach. Less than five of those were ones I didn’t already know. Again, this game isn’t really of much use to intermediate or advanced students of the Japanese language. However, after the open plan begins, every Japanese language student will likely encounter some new words. Unfortunately, with only one-word definitions and no example sentences provided you’ll have to turn to a better dictionary to figure out what the new words really mean, when they are used, and how to use them correctly.
Unfortunately, when a new word comes up, you can’t see the kanji for it. This makes things difficult for those who already know the kanji the word is made up of to quickly understand the meaning. For instance, on the screen that looks like the one shown here the word namaikina showed up. I wanted to see the kanji for namaiki (the na is a particle which My Japanese Coach annoyingly throws in sometimes, even though it isn’t part of the word namaiki). So I click on Write and then なまいきな. The above screen and the screen below appear.
Notice that the Kanji button on the screen below is not green. That means you can’t see the kanji for the word. Yuck. Instead you can only see the hiragana–in this case a な with incorrect stroke order. Blah. How useless and frustrating.
I then went out of the open plan lesson and after a half dozen or so clicks through the menus moved into the dictionary. In the dictionary I typed in namaiki and the screen below was the result.
Here I can at least see the kanji, but notice that a somewhat different, one-word definition is provided. The programmer was too lazy to connect the dictionary to the Write screen so users are forced to waste time clicking through numerous menus to get to the dictionary instead of just clicking on the Kanji button when the new word is being learned.
My Japanese Coach could have been so much better with just a few minor tweaks.
