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Here's another japanese game that will require no previous japanese knowledge (I would think...)

Ubisoft is coming out with a game to teach japanese for the nintendo DS: "My Japanese Coach". What are people's opinions on this? I haven't played much of their other similar games, so I would be interested to hear what the quality of those are.

My Word Coach, My French Coach, and My Spanish Coach have been out for a while and My Chinese Coach has been released fairly recently, I think. I know the Chinese Coach game includes a section about kanji so I assume the japanese Game, currently due to be released mid october, will too. It would be nice to be able to study kanji so easily on the go.

There's not a lot of game information about it so far, obviously, since it hasn't been released, but I look forward to seeing what it's like and I hope it is good.

I took two and a half years of Japanese in Highschool(currently now 3 and a half years ago.) And yes, My Japanese Coach is very basic and I can't give any imput as to how much or well it'll teach you if you don't know any Japanese to begin with, however for someone who has neglected their knowledge for almost 4 years it's a nice refresher on kana and basic vocabulary. Haven't gotten far enough to know if they teach you kanji, but a few of the games will randomly throw in some kanji so I assume there will be at least a little.

rolleyes Just another tidbit, they do go over at least some Kanji. Don't know the extent yet.

Lol, when I first came here to Japan, I found out that 3 or 4 of the kana I remembered and learned in my high school Japanese classes the stroke order was taught to me wrong. As much as it's important, sometimes it's not. The only time it would be important would be when writing katakana shi(シ）, tsu（ツ）, so(ソ）, and n（ン）　because those characters look way too similar sometimes.

This is the one I have:
http://www.play-asia.com/paOS-13-71-9g-77-4-49-en-15-kanji-70-1j6j.html

Great if you already know Japanese and just need to brush up on kanji.

If you're new to Japanese and want to learn some cool kanji, this is NOT THE TOOL FOR YOU! You can learn the stroke orders and readings for the kanji, but you won't know what they mean or some examples of words they're used in... Chances are you won't take much from it.
However, this can be solved very easily. Download this free program:
http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~grosenth/c_download.html#SIMPLE

You can look up kanji meanings, readings, radicals, and much more in it. It also has a very full dictionary with both kanji and kana. Combined with this, Tadashii Kanji Kakitori-kun is a very useful tool. If you're using DS homebrew, I also recommend looking up DSLearnJ, a simple flash card program with Japanese character support (you can fully customize the flash cards using the above program I linked to).

Lastly, I use this for a list of kanji in the order Japanese children learn them: http://japanese.about.com/library/blkodarchives.htm
Trust me, you should learn them in order even if some of them seem "useless" to you. It might seem random at first, but they must have planned and organized it very well since you often get the same on-yomi (Chinese-based readings) on kanji in a row, making it easier to memorize them.



DO NOT BUY THIS!
This game is pretty much useless. Do not waste your money and do not give those half-assed producers a profit. There are numerous mistakes and the game doesn't allow you to proceed unless you do things their way (the WRONG way). You will be teaching yourself that wrong is right and right is wrong.

The "proficiency test" at the start is a total joke, using words like "samurai", "anime", and "ninja". They teach you a bit of vocabulary, which is good, but there are many flaws in the lessons. In the middle of a lesson, they'll start discussing something you already covered; they show you the examples from old lessons that have nothing to do with the current lessons.

Understanding verb conjugation is an extremely important part of learning Japanese (or any language), but the way they teach you is extremely difficult to remember, and they refer to it in an equally difficult way in later lessons. Rather than saying something like "tabemasu" (the polite form of "taberu", "to eat"), they'd say "base 1 + masu"... And you have to remember their retarded base 1 to base 7 or whatever in order to conjugate anything. It's all very, very stupid.

I thought the game seemed kinda useful at first, but trust me, it's a waste. It's easier to learn from free resources on the internet than it is to learn from that heap of junk.