Mondai na Nihongo Review

Mondai na Nihongo (問題な日本語) from Hudson gives you the chance to tweak your Japanese skills and stop making the mistakes that native speakers often make themselves. The title offers a small variety of different question types, tests, and an intuitive interface. There's even a cute cartoon fox.

The biggest chunk of this game is its こつこつモンニチ (training) mode. In this mode, you'll be able to take short, ten-question quizzes on topics such as tricky kanji, elusive expressions, or the proper meaning of words. The basic pace of the game is one quiz per day and six quizzes per week. Once you have finished a week's worth of questions, you take a short test to review what you learned over the last several days. Scoring well on the test will unlock a new comic in the game's gallery that mixes Japanese learning with humor.

Dedicated students won't be left disappointed either. You are free to take more than one quiz per day, and making it to the review test in one sitting isn't too big of a hurdle. The game's flexibility in this regard is much appreciated.

After each question, you can choose to view a brief explanation of the language point, making the game a fantastic resource. Even if you knew the answer, it's usually worth reading the concise, informative background info and expanding your knowledge base. Much of the info found here is described in more detail in the Mondai na Nihongo books. Once you've seen a question in the training mode, you can go back and view it again in the gallery, along with the supplemental information. So as you progress through the thousands of questions available, the game sort of shifts from a quiz-based game to a language resource.

If you get bored with the standard quizzes, you can also go all out in the とことんモンニチ (challenge) mode. This mode features three challenges: survival mode, 3 minute challenge, and the 100 question super challenge.

The game also offers minimal multiplayer functionality, allowing you to select up to ten questions to send to a friend's DS to test their Japanese prowess.

The difficulty of the questions varies, but it's overall a pretty difficult game. It's targeted at native speakers and meant to teach the fine print in the language bible of Japanese. It's got questions on the now infamous ら抜き issue, making out the difference between kanji such as 概 and 慨, and proper use of proverbs and specific grammar patterns. The game isn't meant to teach so much as it is to point out common problems in modern Japanese. I can only recommend this to advanced users who already have a very strong foundation in Japanese and are looking to polish their skills at the near-native level.

The nice interface, decent music, clean design, and 3600 questions available make this a worthy edition to an advanced learner's Nintendo DS library.