Nazotte Oboeru Otona no Kanji Renshu

なぞっておぼえる大人の漢字練習


Nazotte Oboeru Otona no Kanji Renshu


- A Japanese learner's perspective review




Gacha-Gacha Review:


Level: Intermediate to Advanced Japanese students


The Good: Your one stop kanji shop! Includes practices, tests and games for all 1,945 elementary and middle school kanji. In practice sessions, readings are shown along with stroke order. Input recognition is very high. Excellent progressive learning system. Unlockable content. Various music and background noises (birds chirping, etc).

The Bad: Sometimes example sentences can range from easy to extremely hard regardless of the level of the question kanji, making the game frustrating for beginners. No good review system for going back to practice kanji that you want to review again.

The Ugly: As the title suggests, this software is for adults to *review* kanji, so at times it can be very difficult for a beginner or even an intermediate Japanese student. One theme layout can make the game tedious after playing for a while. The background music for the kanji logic puzzle section makes me question humanity and what it's capable of inflicting on other human beings.



Nitty - Gritty Review:

Still looking for a good kanji practice program for the DS? Is this the one that's going to get your money? In short...yes. With that out of the way, let's get right down to the nitty-gritty shall we?

First, again, I would like to point out who this title is aimed at. Obviously as the title suggests, this kanji practice software is aimed at adults who are reviewing kanji they already know. But being as it's for adults, it has some advantages that titles like Tadashi Kanji Kakitorikun (another software similar in design) doesn't have. One of the best advantages is that unlike other non-game, adult, kanji practice software like Kanken DS it's focus is not on kanji practice for tests or remembering often unused or obscure kanji, but rather on reinforcing the common and most often used kanji. As such, this makes it an ideal software for the Japanese student.


The game itself is very user friendly. After turning the system on and entering the game you are presented with the main option screen that is divided into three categories: My Training, Easy Test (簡単テスト), and Kanji Game.

My Training (screenshot to the left, categories read top to bottom, left to right) is where you'll be spending most of your time. It's sub divided into 5 parts. Today's Practice, Leveling Up, "Category" Challenge (actually 雑学 - ざつがく means "miscellaneous knowledge" but in this case it refers to challenging words divided up into specific categories like food, science, Japanese, etc), Grade Up Test, and 苦手克服 (にがてこくふく, or "overcoming the kanji you are weak at"). The top display screen keeps track of the amount of kanji (out of the 1,945) that you have both practiced and passed.

The layout of each section is pretty much straight forward. The top display screen shows you the sentence containing either the kanji or the yomikata (reading, both onyomi and kunyomi) for the kanji to be written. The input screen is where the user will write the kanji or hiragana to answer the questions or, as shown in the screenshot on the right, the stroke order will be practiced by copying over the red lines.

Input recognition is very high. I have had very few times where the software has failed to recognize what I have written. Stoke order is important though as with most kanji software, being able to write the proper stroke order increases the chances that it will be recognized by the software. If anything, sometimes the recognition is too good as it will anticipate a kanji being written half way through and pop up the answer before you are finished.

This software is outstanding in the fact that the user will be able to practice both writing the kanji and writing the readings of the kanji. For higher level Japanese language learners, it's almost an indispensable tool for studying kanji with. Not only that, the organization of how one studies has been well though out. In the "Today's Practice" part the user is always given kanji and readings in pairs. For example if the first question has 車 in it's question, the user writes the hiragana reading in the input screen. Then the next question will have しゃ or くるま in the question, so the user will write 車 in the input screen. Presenting the kanji in pairs like this really help to reinforce the kanji when studying I feel.

Beginner students to Japanese might find this title a little intimidating at times though, which is why I am not fully recommending it to them. The problem is that even with some of the easy kanji like 立つ or 日 (たつ or にち) while the kanji themselves are not hard to write or the reading hard to remember, in the test and practice sections the software uses a lot of harder kanji (and grammar) in the example sentences that contain the question kanji. In the screenshot below, the phrase 腹が立つ is used for the kanji 立つ. While not really all that hard in itself, the phrase (which means to get mad / become angry) is not one that a beginner will be familiar with. The software is designed to be used by Japanese adults who know how to read everything around the question kanji, thus giving them a hint to which kanji they should be using.

On the other hand though, for beginners who have a firm grasp of hiragana and katakana, this will be an excellent tool for acquiring new vocabulary and phrases. Also, as a little bonus is the fact that all the other kanji in the question sentence will have furigana (the small hiragana written above kanji) making looking up words in a dictionary thankfully much easier. Another good system for beginners is that you have the option of having the answer given to you, the question is marked as "missed" and not counted towards the total of anything, but the user is still made to write the kanji or readings to continue on in the lesson or test.

The game section is also very fun, if not also a little bit too hard for beginners. There is a square logic puzzle (where you guess which spaces should be filled in to make a picture of a kanji on a 15x15 grid) that is the most accessible to beginner students. This game though features the most annoying background music I have ever heard in a game (background music can't be changed in the games). Seriously, it gets into your head and lays waste to everything good you might have ever heard or know about music. It also the effect of making an otherwise fun game into a tedious choir. Other games are writing the kanji for the different prefectures in Japan and filling in the blank spaces for popular 4 kanji idioms. These sections are really only for the hardcore Japanese student, as even native speakers find these kinds of questions hard.

As you progress in your training and complete kanji, new games and background sounds become available. My favorite unlockable background sound is the "forest" sound of birds chirping.

Overall though this is probably the best kanji training software on the market today for students of Japanese. The fact that you can first "learn" the kanji by practicing the stroke order, then testing your knowledge out in the various tests and games (both writing the kanji and writing the onyomi and kunyomi) makes this worth the price of admission alone. The only drawback to the title is in the fact that once kanji are "learned" then they tend to disappear never to be seen again. Kanji that are missed in training lessons are sent to that 苦手克服 section where they can be practiced again, but once they are done correctly they disappear into the masses only to be practiced again if you go back to the level the kanji was in and go though the whole section again.

I would highly recommend this title to everyone, beginners should note though that a firm grasp of hiragana is necessary as well as moderate grammar skills. It will be great as a supplemental to intermediate students and a challenge to advanced students (as in the higher level kanji). If you have a chance to pick up this title, I don't think you will be disappointed.

P.S. I apologize for the number of times the word "kanji" appears in this review. I think it's about 十万. I am just as sick of typing it as you are of reading it. Sometimes those subject-less sentences in Japanese are quite nice to read.