Kanji fun

Learning is not always fun, especially if you don’t want to do it or if it seems like an impossible task. Learning Kanji when you’re not Japanese, and didn’t start at an early age, falls quite neatly into the latter category (or the first one too, but at that point you’ve got to be thinking about why you’re learning something like Kanji, which you can get by without). The thing with Kanji is that once you get the past the feeling of pointlessness, and the other one that makes you want to bang your head violently against a wall because people today are still using such an antiquated, and totally impractical, way of writing and communicating, you actually realise that it’s quite good. And interesting. And fun. Really I’m serious.

It took me roughly 8 months before I seriously contemplated learning Kanji properly. And I’m glad I waited because it’s made it that much more interesting, especially after you get to the point where you know and can read the phonetic kana alphabets fine but you’re stuck on the Kanji and therefore have no other option but to move forth. My first step towards Kanji mastery was to buy the first set of the excellent White Rabbit Press Kanji cards, which are used to help you train for the first levels of the Japanese Language Profiency Test. Cards are cool and being a teacher makes you automatically down with flashcards anyways, so it’s a winner. There’s a few annoying things about them, including the order of the cards and the usefulness of some of the example sentences/words, but by and large they’re a great way to get stuck into Kanji and open a whole world of daily understanding.

However they do have one massive drawback. And that’s the fact that they’re cards – and that to really master the buggering things you need to combine them with some writing practice like say the standard Japanese of copying Kanji over and over again until you master the stroke order and formation by heart. Which unlike the learning Kanji bit is actually not that much fun. It’s ok, but I got bored after about 30. There’s only so many times I’m going to be willing to spend my breaks at the board writing lines of Kanji and memorising the meanings and pronunciations. Yes I know I’ve got a low attention span, I blame video games and drugs.

Which leads me nicely into the point of this post. In the daily fight between practicing Kanji with my cards and brain and playing my Nintendo DS, Kanji cards lose on a regular basis. However I know that there are tons of Kanji ‘games’ (the actual Japanese word for video games, ‘soft, would apply much better for those in fact) out here and I kept thinking that there’s bound to be one that contains the mother of all combination: edutainment! Learning through fun, learning through using something that is fun which automatically makes learning fun. Can’t say I’ve been getting much luck finding that holy grail of ‘soft’, until I met a guy called Ed via the wonders of the interweb and real life who put me onto two of the best Kanji ‘soft’ on DS for people like me.

Ed’s studying Japanese in Tokyo (I’ll spare you the boring story of how we hooked up, this isn’t ‘my first diary’ ok?) and so is well placed to find out the good ‘soft’ for people like him and me (and maybe you) amidst the hundreds of useless ones. Well useless unless you’re Japanese that is. So yeah useless. Anwyays Ed posted on his blog about these 2 must have DS games for Japanese students, and I promptly thanked the gods and Buddha for delivering this gift to me.

You can get the full down on his blog, but here’s my own personal impressions too. The first soft is defiinitely the most useful one – Tadashii Kanji Kakitorikun is basically a Kanji practice game for Japanese school kids. The game covers the first 1000 or so Kanji that a Japanese would learn, split across six years. It includes practice for reading, writing and using the Kanji in compound nouns. And it’s great. There are two main elements to it that are perfect for beginner students of Kanji: a mode that allows you to just practice writing the Kanji, learning the stroke order and formation and being graded on it, and a mode where you have to write down the kana of the Kanji used in various compound nouns and single uses. That second mode has more though – for a start it allows you view the various pronunciations and meaning of the Kanji you’re being tested on (exactly like the cards but all in Japanese, which kinda actually makes you work harder but it’s still fun!), which the first mode doesn’t have, and secondly it not only tests you on writing the kana for the Kanji it then flips it and asks you to write the Kanji based on the kana, this way you practice everything more than once and you soon learn meanings, pronunciations and writing without even realising it. That second mode also gives you short sentences as hints, again perfect for practicing reading. Basically since I figured out how to use the second mode I haven’t put the thing down and learnt another 10 or so Kanji in the process, and that was two days ago. And there’s still another 2 modes I haven’t touched yet. The main thing with Tadashii, which Ed mentioned in his post, is that it changes your whole approach to studying and learning Kanji, especially if like him you’re studying in an academic environment which can be less than stimulating at times, or like me you’re stuck for time and want to be able to practice and learn on the go but with an added element of fun.

The other soft is not so amazing really, but still good fun. Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten is basically a DS version of those portable dictionaries and translators a lot of students have in Japan. As such it’s designed for Japanese people to use to translate from Japanese to English, it includes audio of English words, but it also works backwards. So you can write any Kanji or kana on the screen and look up the English meaning or pronunciation, and you can also combine Kanji and kana into short sentences and look these up. The best part though is definitely the stylus input recognition – simply put you can basically draw any Kanji you see and the soft’s UI will try and pick it up and give you the reading and meaning. So far it’s been 50/50 for me, making me think that you still need to get the stroke order right to really get the right Kanji you want, which isn’t that difficult as there is generally some sort of sense to the stroke order (ie. it generally always start from furthest left, but not always). Still that input recognition function beats any dictionary, and it’s a useful soft to have to look things up, especially if like me you don’t have a portable dictionary.

For anyone who has recently started learning Kanji or is planning to, I can’t recommend the first game enough. If you like your DS and want to get better at Kanji it’s an absolute winning combination.

It’s got to be said that DS games in Japan are a lot more varied and useful, entertaining, weird, fun etc… than most of the stuff you get in Europe and the US. Which isn’t that surprising really.