Learn Japanese To Survive! Kanji Combat

This series has been a relatively relaxing introduction to the Japanese writting system. The first two games focused on the writing systems that only represent sounds and not meanings. This one focuses on Kanji, which is the writing system where each character can have multiple sounds in different contexts and different meanings when used by themselves or in a compound with other kanji. So while the first couple of games worked well enough as language introduction on their own, this one requires a lot more studying beyond just playing the game for an hour or two a day if anyone is going to remember everything. There are so many kanji to learn in this game that playing for a prolonged period of time and constantly being exposed to new kanji is very likely to burn out your brain, making learning the characters much more difficult than in the previous games. What makes this worse was that the game uses more than one font for the characters and some of the fonts completely change the characters to the point that they are unrecognizable from the font I was remembering earlier. There is also a type of battle where you have to select the kanji from your menu and it's so small that I have …

In comparison to Katakana Wars, I think this installment was neither creative nor useful in learning kanji. Among the three writing systems in Japanese, kanji is definitely the most difficult and grueling. One character does not simply have one reading. As such, reusing the same mechanics as Katakana Wars seem detrimental almost. You now have this whole block of text for many different words and it can easily get confusing after a while. Instead of the convoluted multiple choice options, a type-based answer system to a vocabulary question would have worked wonders in reinforcing both the reading and meaning of kanji. After all, learning the readings of one character would be alright if not for the fact that these readings have to be combined with other characters. Who knows... maybe future levels address which character combinations have this specific reading and meaning; I'm still in the early stages of the game so it might surprise me and then I have to redo this review all over again. I also heavily dislike the removal of the queue feature, why'd they remove it in the first place? If you really want to learn how to read kanji in a text, you're better off watching YouTub…

now i understand why i should hate katakana more than kanji

I learned what a bunch of Kanji means in English but their pronunciation is not reinforced well. As a GAME it is better than the previous Hiragana and Katakana offerings. As a LEARNING tool it is not quite as useful. Some game mechanics are odd but not detrimental. idk why I was upgrading weapons, I felt like i was going through the motions rather than doing it out of need as I never didn't one shot the enemies. Still a fun supplement to actual learning tools.

Katakana and I had beef. Some of the characters looked just similar enough that my eyeballs started filing complaints, so having a game force me to recognize them repeatedly actually helped more than I expected. Learn Katakana is not trying to be some massive, fancy learning experience. It is simple, direct, and built around practice. That is exactly what I needed. Instead of flashcard jail, it gave me a way to drill the characters through gameplay and slowly get better at recognizing them. The best part is that it made the process feel a little less overwhelming. Language learning can get frustrating fast when everything looks unfamiliar, but this made it feel more manageable. I did not come out fluent, obviously, but I did come out more confident with katakana. And considering how much my brain wanted to fight me on it, that is a win.

A good replacement to flash cards