I finally got My Japanese Coach a week or so ago, & I absolutely love it! It starts off with a placement quiz, and I just played dumb to just start at the beginning. Others have said that if you’re not good with hiragana, then you’ll just start at lesson 1. I’ve also read that it’s not good at placing advanced speakers. (My thought is that if you’re that good, you won’t need this game. Use it as refresher perhaps…)

You start off with a few vocab lessons, then some kana, and some grammar. In order to unlock the next lesson, you must master each word from the lesson you are currently in by playing games & earning points. If while playing the game,  you get an answer wrong or mess up, you’ll get less points for that word. Makes sense.

Each lesson will give you new words, with a chance to listen to them being said, you can then either write them, of record your own voice to compare to the speakers’.

The 1st section of lessons goes from 1-29 (of 1000 total!) As of this posting, I’m only up to Lesson 21.

1. Basic Words
2. Pronunciation
3. Numbers
4. Colors
5. Days of the Week
6. Kana 1
7. Months
8. Kana 2
9. Pronouns
10. Kana 3
11. Desu
12. Desu Tenses
13. Kana 4
14. Questions
15. Numbers 2
16. Number 3
17. Kana 5
18. Greetings
19. Verbs in Sentences
20. Kana 6
21. Informal Verbs

As you progress through the lessons you “travel” across Japan, and while on the map screen picking you lessons, there’s a paragraph of info on the top. (Lessons 16-20 are at Puroland!)

Also as you progress you unlock new games. The first ones you get are Multiple Choice, a Whack-a-mole game, and a word search.  By lesson 21, I have 5 or 6 games to pick from.

There’s also a reference section with lots of great phrases if you’re goin to travel in Japan.

All in all, it’s a great game for beginners, & It’s supplementing my class nicely. We’re covering different things in class, but the game is really helping with my writing. The Write Cards games make me think. ^_^;

My only beef with it currently is that when playing any of the games that require you to write kana, you can’t erase. Once you make a mistake, you can’t correct it & will have to do a game again to get the points needed to master the word.

Score:
4/5 Kitties

We’ve covered 6 lines of Katakana
a-ka, or sa-ta, na-ha, and now we’re up to the  ma & ya

I was waiting to do this lesson because I had nothing relevant to say about the kana. Luckily, today I found my topic. Well, won it I should say. In class today, we played a round of Katakana bingo.  Last time we played the Winners got 2 little bags of Japanese Candy & everyone else just got a single piece. Today, I won the bingo game & was given a bottle of Ramune, a Japanese soda. (Tastes like THIS, if you’ve tried either.) It’s kind of a pain to open, but there were several of my classmates that knew how it worked. The neat thing about this soda is the bottle. It’s called a codd-neck bottle, and is sealed by a marble & the pressure from the soda, very clever. A quick youtube search will get you TONS of how to “open ramune,” but most of them pronounce it wrong. It’s not  “RAMOON” it’s ra-mu-ne like all good Japanese students know.

When I get more, I”ll make my own “How-to video.” Now I just need to get the marble out…

But on with the Show!

One of the biggest problems I’ve encountered with Katakana is that ア (a), マ (ma) & ヤ (ya) look so similar. Just note the angles of the vertical straight lines, & if & where they cross the top part.

マ   ミ   ム   メ   モ
ma mi mu me mo
ヤ ユ   ヨ
ya yu yo

hiragana my-ya

Some words using these Kana:
ラ ム ネ
ramune

ニューヨーク
Nyuu- Yo-ku
New York

Practice!

がんばって
Ganbatte!