My Japanese Coach starts out with a placement test. It tests your existing knowledge of Japanese with a simple word test and depending on the results, chooses a suitable lesson to start you off with.
Rather impressed with what little Japanese I knew, the in-game teacher, Haruka (no, I will not call her “sensei”) decided to start me off at lesson 5, which teaches you the days of the week and how to use them in basic sentences such as “What day is it today?”
The interface is obviously entirely touch-sensitive and consists of three tabs: Listen, Speak and Write, all of them doing exactly what you would assume. The “Speak” tab allows you to record your own voice and listen to it in sync with the Haruka’s, so that you can see exactly how your pronunciation differs from hers.
Once I was done recording my voice for various words and sentences, I figured the game would let me move on to the next lesson. But that wasn’t the case. My Japanese Coach, in a very pleasant twist, reinforces what you have learnt, making you repeat various exercises (such as a crossword and a “whack the gofer” mini-game) until you max out your word mastery for each word and term on a ten-point scale.
Being able to write the words doesn’t count toward this, though, which can be a good or bad thing depending on what you personally want to focus more on. Likewise, while you have the option of listening to your pronunciation in sync with the teacher’s and striving to improve it, the game itself is not capable of judging this.
Regardless, by the time My Japanese Coach let me move on to the next lesson, I had every day of the week, “What day is it today?” and “Today is…” down perfectly. Not that it was very hard. During the lesson, it also explained the concept of words like “desu” for people with no prior knowledge of the language.
The next time you boot the game up, you will be presented with a menu, consisting of several choices: Learning, Games, Options, Difficulty and Credits.
‘Options’ speaks for itself: volume, mic sensitivity etc. I haven’t looked at ‘Difficulty’ yet, so I’ll leave that for another post. ‘Learning’ allows you to resume your lessons and ‘Games’ takes you to a rather vast list of mini-games to improve your word mastery. Again, this is what allows you to unlock further lessons, not what you do during the ‘Learning’ section.
I was a little disappointed by this aspect of My Japanese Coach. The next lesson, lesson number 6, just so happened to be the one where you start to learn how to write kana, starting with “a, i, u, e, o,” and having the game judge your performance by how fast you can whack a gofer with the correct vowel isn’t quite what I was hoping for. Still, the handwriting software is pretty neat so I pushed on.
My Japanese Coach’s handwriting software has a neat feature whereby it will try to make sure you aren’t going about writing a letter or word the wrong way. After a certain number of strokes, the digital ink will stop to flow. If you haven’t gotten the full letter down by then, this is your indication that you’re doing it wrong. So, for instance, if you try to draw a pair of boobs while writing “い,” you won’t be able to. Not that I tried or anything, of course.
So, quick recap. Here’s how the process goes: Lesson (Listen, Speak, Write) > Games > More Games > Mastery Achieved > Next Lesson Unlocked.
I’ll try to keep penning my thoughts on My Japanese Coach as I explore it further. What I can say, though, is that the software is a very convenient way for beginners to start learning.
- By Ishaan Sahdev