My Japanese Coach: A Review

I was pretty hyped as i heard from a friend that MyJapaneseCoach(MJC) had an iPhone app coming out. I had tested the DS version and it was pretty fun to toy with it.

For about 3 weeks i played MJC while on the Bus, waiting outside or any other occasion where i had some free time. I played till the 109th Lesson so far. Maybe things will change later on, but it doesn’t seem so. I should note that i have a rather bizarre level in japanese, i am studying since about a year. I am really week in reading and writing Kanji, but i have a rather large vocabulary (around 600 to 1100 words depending on how strict you consider it).

The first hundred levels.

I got almost immediately to lesson 20 or so, i don’t know whats happening before, but i think it’s learning hiragana, katakana (which i had to do the end) and some basic vocabulary.

The app is organized the following way: You have lesson in which you have to study a given set of 10 items. Items can be katakana, hiragana, kanji, or words written in hiragana with there English translation. Some lesson have grammar rules embedded within, so you can study how to make some sentences. One finishes learning katakana at lesson 24, at lesson 44 you start kanji.

Beside the lessons, there are mini-games. The mini-games get unlocked when passing given lessons. Playing the mini-games makes you interact with the vocabulary you are supposed to learn during the lessons and gives you point when you interact successfully with a given item. Once each item has gotten 10 points, the next lesson gets unlocked.

There is a third component which is like a library where you can look up things you already have studied.

Minigames

Here is a review of all minigames i unlocked so far:



Multiple Choice
This is a classical one. There is one English word given and you have to choose between 4 option in Japanese. This became the main way for me to get points and advanced in the levels.

Since all 4 option are in the set you study it is pretty easy to process by elimination if you aren’t sure what the exact word it means. At the end of the drill, you should be able to recognize the right word pretty easily. Stopping to play in the middle of a lesson for a day makes it much harder, as you will probably forget mostly everything you didn’t knew before.

Hit-a-Word
There are 9 holes and moles come out of these with signs containing vocabulary you have to study. You have to hit those who have the right item.

This app is useless at least to me.

Word search
there is an array of letters. The vocabulary you learn is hidden inside, either horizontally or vertically (diagonally as well in hard mode).

The app felt also kinda useless, even though note quite as much as the last one.

Fading Character
You have to write the word, sign after sign. After each attempt the sign in the back gets a little bit faded out. In the third step there are no sign at all.

This app was great to learn how to draw some signs. It would have been even better if the second time, the sign was drawn again, in order to see the order again.

Write Cards
You are given a word(in hiragana) and have to draw the sign. The main game to finish a lesson in which you have to learn kanji.

You will be using a lot, since it is the hardest and fastest way to get points. You need to know the kanji in before (using the previous app for example) in order to finish that one, since it won’t show you the expected result anyway.

Flash Cards
The reverse game to multiple choice: given a japanese item, you have to choose the right english translation.

That direction was always easier to me, as the app was pretty far down in the list, i tended to not use it that much.

Memory
Memory game with the items of your lesson, the pairs consists of one card in japanese (hiragana & katakana) and one in english.

About as useless as Word-Search imho.

Bridge Builder
You are given different parts of a sentence and have to put it back into the right order.

This app had great potential, but there were a few caveat: first everything was written in romaji, which was really annoying, second they didn’t implement the fact that sometimes multiple order could be ok, which can be very frustrating, third i thought the sentences weren’t all that great. Some few lesson were obviously meant to be finished with this game, and they had great sentences to work with, but most of the other lessons had either really basic one, or at least very uninspired ones. The idea was very neat though, and with better material, this could become a great way to train actual sentences.

Spelltastic
The word of the lesson are read out loud and you have to write them up.

While technically a nice idea, the input method was just gruesome. Had they used the iPhone input method, and if one had been able to use the hiragana input from the iPhone, it would have been just great. That way felt like a small torture for people actually used to have a really nice input method.

Fill-in-the-Blank

There is a Japanese sentence and the English translation. The Japanese sentence has a blank which you have to fill.

Again this could have been a great game, sadly the input method and the fact that everything was in romaji just made it useless to me.

Yomi

The things you are supposed to draw appear on the left side. You start with a kanji and then one way of how it is pronounced.

I mean WTF!?! I want to learn how to draw iot, i don’t need to see it right away, if i want to study it, there is a place for that in the lesson… And why having to draw hiragana?? At that stage i am suppose to know them already right??

Scrolls

You get a japanese sentence, all written in hiragana with some of it highlighted in red. You have to draw the corresponding kanji on the right.
Great game!! Really hard but there you learn a lot imho. You practice the link between pronounciation and written things. Also you see actual usage of the word within a sentence so to give you an idea of how it is beeing used. Absolutely great game!

Open plan

After 100 lesson, the game goes into the so called “open plan”, in which the lesson are only a given set of items you have to study, be it vocabulary or every 5 or so lesson some kanji.

conclusion

As for the learning:

After getting open plan, i became less and less thrilled, eventually stopping since i didn’t expected anything new coming in and the way it worked so far didn’t leave me the impression that i was really learning something toying with that thing.

Long term memory: One huge problem one encounters while learning languages is that it doesn’t suffice to know a word at some point in order to memorize it forever. That is, vocabulary hast to be worked with regularly or one forgets it. Thats exactly what this app doesn’t do, once you have studied something, you will never see it again, unless you train on the not new part, which mixes things that are so easy that you don’t want to be bothered with with some few and apart things that you actually forgot.

There is a second, kinda fundamental problem, words can have different meanings, and different word can have almost the same meaning but be suitable in different context. The very simplistic approach of MJC of one japanese word, one english word, together with allmost no example of hoe it can be used makes it difficult to really understand what you are learning. Also the lists of word you use can appear extremely random at times, due to the lack of related material, you might not have any use for that word, behind the relatively abstract goal of going to the next lesson.

Also relying on romaji all the time was incredibly annoying. not only are the items presented written in hiragana and romaji, which made you loose time when looking up the hiragana. One had to go out of the learning mode in the game mode to have the game at least with hiragana as choices, and not romaji. I really believe that immersion is important to learn a language, every occasion to practice hiragana is a good one. Either you still need romaji to quickly see the pronounciation and you need to practice more hiragana, or you don’t see any difference anymore and hence you don’t need romaji anyway.

Big technical issues

One should also note that there are some technical problem with the app. First of all, it is obvious that they ported it from another system. The port was made with little love, especially when it comes to the keyboard, which sucks beyond understanding. It is hard to use, made for people with a tiny input needle and not for relatively big fingers. While there are some great mini games and ideas in it, the difficulty to go quite fast to the place you want to be (read: the game you want to play) makes it terrible. I wouldn’t mind useless app, but they keep being on the way while i want to access to the good ones, which sucks a lot.

Also the database is completely messed up. Unless for some apps which you are supposed to use, you won’t get the right item to play with, which makes you take more time to finish the lesson. Sometime it is even impossible without playing Multiple Choice, so it seems. Also it is impossible to train kanji only since the games keeps proposing useless kana word which you only have to spell right.

Also usability sucked a lot, especially when you are used to apps with great usability an functionality (like all the apple apps and a lot more). I think they didn’t understand that iPhone user have higher standard when it comes to design and functionality that say the DS users. This one is just too poor when it comes to that. Having to scroll down for long times to go to the place you were suppose to go, for example the open plan lesson in learning mode, show that they didn’t think it through.

A few weeks ago, i would have say that nevertheless, lacking any viable alternative it might make sense to buy the app. Now that smart.fm is out, a strong player in the learning app world has come. You should check it first, to see if it meets your needs, since it is free. I plan to do a review of it in a couple of weeks, after having gain some experience with it.