Obunsha Deru-Jun Kokugo DS Review

Obunsha Deru-jun Kokugo DS is an average title for anybody who wants to work on their Japanese skills. As the title implies, it focus on Kokugo and it includes mostly short drills.




The main chunk of this game is a variety of short drills. First you can select the drilling format from a few options including True/False, Fill-in-the-blank, and Guessing. Once you've selected the format, you choose the topic:

Writing Kanji
Reading Kanji
Homophones/Synonyms/Antonyms
Four-Kanji Compounds
Usage
Idioms

After you complete the quiz, you're graded on how many problems you answered correctly. The best part of this software comes in here. You can select "Review" to go over the content of the questions and study up on the meaning and usage of different parts of the language. You can also re-take the last quiz and put your new knowledge to the test.

In the options menu, it's possible to adjust the number of questions asked in each round of drilling.

The game also allows you to access the information mentioned above from the main menu by accessing a rather large set of dictionaries. These cover the topics above and allow you to look up different points that may be confusing you.

For example, you could open up the homophone dictionary and look up かえる. The entry describes the verbs 代える、換える、変える and how they are different from one another. This is definitely a handy feature.

As you progress through the drills, you can unlock two "minigames". The first is a fairly poor game where you write out kanji. The writing recognition is fairly dull, and while the stylistic representation of your writing is nice, it's often a bit inaccurate.

In the second game, you battle against a computer opponent. A question appears on the top screen such as "Select a kanji that represents a color", and you'll have to dig through a small pile of cards using the touch pen to find the correct answer. The game often tries to confuse you by putting characters like 黄 next to 横, so you have to pay close attention. If you're too slow, your opponent will snag up the card before you do. This game can be pretty fun and there are a few difficulty levels.

Overall, this title has some decent production value. The music is relaxing and the whole game is wrapped up in a historical/fantasy Japanese theme featuring a small cast of characters. The player takes on the role of a kappa if you were interested. Loading and screen changes are accompanied by quick displays of Japanese language trivia on the upper screen. These often disappear too quickly to be of much use, though.

As mentioned above, I found the game to be fairly average, so this probably isn't a "must buy". The drilling aspect left me feeling a bit empty. It seems like you spend too much time selecting answers rather than writing them out on your own, so the benefits are not as great as a more demanding game.

Obunsha Deru-Jun Kokugo DS is intended for Japanese junior high school students, so the difficulty level is pretty high from the perspective of a second language learner. I recommend this title for intermediate to advanced learners. You should probably stay away if your abilities are much below JLPT Level 2. And if you know any Japanese junior high school students, you might want to recommend it to them.