Japanese with Mayu

This game shows lots of potential, but at its current state I unfortunately cannot recommend it. The Dev is working on new content and improvents as we speak, so in all honesty this should have been an early access title. The Idea to teach japanese with a visual novel style game is brilliant, as it has the potential to be a very fun and useful way of learning japanese. However in practice the game does very little to teach you japanese. As it is right now, it just presents you the text in both japanese and english at the same time, while highlighting a few key vocabularies to quiz you on later. The conversations use simple language and everyday subjects, so the game is clearly aimed at people who have hardly any foundation in learning japanese, however it fails to teach grammar structure or kana. It only teaches a few select words, which doesn't do too much for new learners. To be fair here, the Developer added some Kana functionality, so maybe they will expand on the rest. For more experienced learners having this extra bit of immersion can be good, especially if regular games are still a bit daunting. For me personally it was a nice and quick refresher. As far as the Story …

This is my first time playing a visual novel style game. I chose it because I am truly interested in learning Japanese and the pricing was perfect at $2.99. **Review (From a Japanese Language Beginner and First Time Visual Novel Player)** I'll start off by saying I love this game for what it's trying to do. It definitely has it's strengths and weaknesses so I'll try to cover them in a logical fashion. First, you need to already know some Japanese to understand this game to some degree. For example in the early part of the game it mentions buying water at a convenience store. You see the text and hear the phrase. But if you aren't familiar with Japanese you might be lost when it comes to remembering the symbols used or how it was said later in the game. This becomes extremely apparent in later episodes that I felt were too long and I became overwhelmed trying to remember what each phrase meant without a review list and no way to study without doing an exam. For a beginner like me, the Repeat button is the best physical feature as you can review the same line over and over to hear how it's pronounced. I felt that the audio along with the subtitles made it very easy for me to reco…

I picked this up because I wanted something that would help me practice Japanese, and I ended up enjoying it much more than I expected. The visual novel itself is genuinely charming, and having voiced dialogue made it a lot easier to connect spoken words with what I was reading. I liked how the learning aspect never felt forced. Instead of interrupting the story a lot, each episode ends with a short review that goes over the new vocabulary and phrases you just saw. I think the game currently relies on the player to be somewhat familiar with Hiragana already, and hopefully there's plans to add a minigame or introduction episode where we get to learn Hiragana first so it's more absolute beginner friendly. It's clear this was made with a lot of care. I'm looking forward to seeing where the story goes and hope the developers continue supporting it.

[i]Japanese with Mayu[/i] was an enjoyable experience for me. Its Japanese is at about an N4 level, so following along with it was fun. The dialogue does contain some more advanced vocabulary, but the Episodes' reviews will only quiz you on the highlighted words, which are ordinary N5/N4 vocab. The audio was rather good. Whether the voices were AI or not, they were clear and expressive. The only thing I did not care for was the garbled/fake katakana in one of the AI-generated backgrounds. Try the demo to see if you vibe with the format of this educational visual novel. If you do, I think you will find the story to be heartwarming, and the Japanese to be informative.

Came into this knowing 0 Japanese. Came out ready to RIZZ up the Japanese baddies on my first trip to Japan I liked how I could replay the audio for the quiz text. Would have also been great to be able to hear the other characters in the sentence so I can systematically see how the word is being used. Since I came in knowing 0 Japanese though, sometimes the selections that were pure Japanese characters were just a guessing game :( Overall a fun short experience, looking forward to the developer adding more chapters (Maybe some intro chapters for people with no experience)

Whoever this developer is they are destined for greatness! They are doing so many things right! This game was so much fun and I feel like I really learned alot of Japanese! So easy to pick up and play for any type of person or level of Japanese learner! The art style and the characters felt so real! I felt like I could be fully immersed into this world! I'm booking my plane ticket to Japan right now! I need alotttt more episodes and an J-drama adaptation! I'll also be waiting for the Korean story version soon! :O :) :D