Unlike most other people I'm not particularly interested in playing Japanese RPG's, but I was browsing through some of the available DS titles at White Rabbit Press and thought a few of the educational/training games looked intriguing. The ones that caught my eye were:

Tadashii Kanji Kakitori-kun-Kanken Taisakku
Bunsho Yomi Training
Nihongo Kentei DS

Anybody have experience with these games? I'm wondering how effective they would be for an intermediate learner trying to get to advanced.

Edit: I'm also interested in the game, Kanji no Shou.

http://www.gemaga.com/2008/07/26/nazotte...intendo-ds

Check that game out. Don't listen to the review there, that was just the first site that came up.

This game is great for kanji learning. It's got some good phrases, and will cover pretty much ALL the rare kanji readings (especially for the simple kanji). I recommend ignoring whatever level it sets you to (it decides based on your age, and assuming you grew up as a Japanese person in Japan), and just do the levels one by one, trying to ace them all.

It makes you both read the kanji as well as write them given hiragana prompts.

I seriously couldn't recommend this any more.

P.S - Unfortunately I have no experience with the games you listed. However, I may try them out, as I have a flashcart and can do that simply for free. If I do I'll get back to you.

Thanks! I also find the other thread where most of these games were discussed.

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=381&page=1

Alright, so I was bored and decided to try the first two games you mentioned there. I'll give a short summary of my ~40 min experience with each.

The Kanji kakitori-kun game was OK. I would say don't buy it if you don't have a flashcart, it's not worth the import price on it. It was OK for getting some vocab, but the way it did it and the way it tested you was rather irritating. It would put up some 原稿用紙 with a sentence or two on it and ask you to fill in the missing kanji (furigana would be next to it). It would range from the first kanji of a verb, to just one kanji in a compound, or maybe all of the kanji in a compound.

The game frustrated me a lot because it was clear it used stroke order to determine what you wrote. Since the game took you to a screen where it would animate the stroke order if you got something wrong, it was quite particular about what it wanted. It took me FOREVER to write in 水 because apparently I have the left side touching the middle line... which is apparently bad.

All in all, I'll fool around with it some more, but there was other games I was more impressed with, which brings me to...

Bunsho Yomi Training.

Great game. A lot of fun. It's got a bunch of different modes that all will apparently lead to you reading faster, and understanding. Some of them were tough, like knowing where to put a comma, but others were definitely very useful. Not sure if I would buy it, but it was definitely worth the download and I will continue to play this more.

I haven't tried the other two games you mentioned, but I did try a game called 問題な日本語. This game was hard! It takes you through all these different skills (kanji reading, grammar, keigo, katakana word spelling, etc) and then tests you on them all after each skill is completed in a course. It also draws up a neat pie chart to evaluate how you did on each disciplinary. Also, I think I remember it saying that if you get a 90 or better on these tests, you get to read some new manga, haha. I only got a 70, so I'm not sure what that means yet.

Anyway, that's all for now. If I try out some more I'll let you know.