I was at the mall near here today and I saw his DS game that comes with a stylus made to look like a calligraphy brush. I’d seen it on the shelves for a while, but hadn’t remember to take a picture till now XD I looked it up on amazon.jp if you wanna take a look. As far as I can tell it’s to teach proper brush strokes for kanji characters. While to us westerners it may not seem that the order in which you write Japanese characters would matter, it is important because that is how they are written. Once you get to know hiragana and katakana you actually become aware when the strokes weren’t done in the proper way, and kanji can be a killer cause some have many many strokes. Plus because there are many similar looking characters the direction a stroke starts from can change what the character is.
pic from Amazon
June 12th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
That’s looks like a great game for a person learning Japanese, too.
June 12th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Cool. I love calligraphy!
June 13th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Yeah, I wonder how many characters it teaches? A couple thousand characters is generally how many you need to know to be as literate as an average adult in Chinese. It’s sounds like a lot but all languages are like that, you’d be surprised how many English words you know. And because we have so many foreign words in our vocabulary we have a ton of weird grammar rules. Plus the fact that the the invention of the printing press froze how words were spelled but the way we say words keeps changing. That was called the great vowel shift, so now English’s vowels are pronounced differently then other Romantic based languages like French or Italian.