WonderLang Japanese

The "one-size-fits-all" approach that Wanderlang uses for every language simply doesn't work well for Japanese.

I've been stuck in tutorial hell with Genki textbooks for months, so picking this game up was a massive breath of fresh air. Setting it to the N5 difficulty gave me a real confidence boost because it throws practical scenarios at you, like shopping or booking a hotel. The in-game dictionary and furigana support are absolute lifesavers when I completely blank out on a kanji during dialogue. Sometimes the speech recognition feature is a bit finicky if your mic isn't great, but you can mostly just use the on-screen keyboard to attack anyway. It totally beats mindlessly swiping on flashcard apps on my phone during my commute

For anyone who is new and looking forward to learning Japanese or any language really, the worst thing you can do is learn some foreign sounding pronunciation. Why start off so poorly and pick up a bunch of bad habits? The least this game could do is to provide authentic sounds so new learners could pick up on authentic pronunciation and learn to sound right and more fluent even if lacking vocabulary or grammar knowledge. English sounds so different just between British, American, Canadian, Scottish, Irish, Australian and so on, enough to make it a challenge for some to understand each other well; and here you probably have people learning a completely new language from scratch and already starting out with poor pronunciation due to this game. Great potential, awesome idea, incredibly bad delivery. Very irresponsible in my opinion. Too noob to be interesting for advanced learners, too distorted to be good for new learners.

Peak Japan was 1995 to 2025. Peak America was 1992 to 2016. Peak Thailand was 1994 to 2006.

Sadly I cannot recommend this game. It's a great idea, poorly executed. I saw some of the reviews commenting on non-native speakers doing the voice acting, but I figured if that was the biggest gripe, I could deal with it. I also bought it intending to play it on Steamdeck, as I enjoy using that when games support it. After spending some time troubleshooting the game crashing before I started it (that was likely a me issue, as I had installed it on an SD card), I eventually got it running on the deck. The gameplay on there didn't give off the best impression, and when the whole game crashed after only a few minutes on the deck, I gave that part of it up. I spent a little time on the weekend playing and getting familiar with the game, but after having played some more today, and reading their response to my feedback email, I can't in good conscience recommend this game. The voice acting isn't just non-native, there are errors (even in the video on here, the tiger character pronounces the "h" sound in the " he" hiragana character, which shouldn't be pronounced in that sentence. I also ran across a "jya" being pronounced "ya", as well as text dialogue where the subtitles and the di…

Ok game. Good learning tool. Will not teach you everything , but its a good way to learn some stuff and have fun. More entertaining than textbooks and flashcards. They are working on adding voice actors to everything too.