been exposed to English all your life, learning three new alphabet families and a totally

alien sentence structure as compared to any Western method is like climbing Mount Fuji

itself. Still, giving it a go in this day and age puts you ahead of most, and the more

you work at it, the sooner you'll be demonstrating your knowledge to your astonished friends

who have nothing but thoughts of sashimi and Akihabara district dancing in their heads.

When Ubisoft and Sensory Sweep Studios decided they'd make the Japanese language a target

in their My Coach series, which had already touched on French, Spanish and Chinese, DS

owners around the USA like myself were licking their chops at the prospect of being able

to read all the grab bag manga I've been storing up. This is My Japanese Coach for the Nintendo

DS, a digital boot camp for otaku and weeaboos everywhere! Promising players they can learn

Japanese in as little as 15 minutes a day, My Japanese Coach will drill you with minigames

after you've reviewed a lesson, starting with the most basic hiragana, the phonetic Japanese

alphabet, all the way up to various kanji characters that represent words. Lesson maps

will take you through various locations in Japan, starting with the greatest tourist

destination of all, Tokyo, and its surrounding areas. Mini games consist of drills like Write

Cards which will train you in the way that you write characters, very important in Japanese

written language. The developers were keen to the use of the stylus, and it’s this

game that I use it more than any other game I've played on the DS. Other minigames like

Hit a Word are a version of Whack a Mole that will train you in how quickly you recognize

a word. After you complete training in romaji words, you'll move on to hiragana, katakana,

and eventually kanji. If you're eager for more knowledge beyond your current lesson,

My Japanese Coach has an entire compendium of Japanese words, their pronunciations, and

their characters waiting for you when you access the dictionary, where you can practice

each word by reading, writing, and even speaking it into the DS microphone. Just as with any

video game, My Japanese Coach has an overall difficulty on a learning curve, and my instinct

tells me that if you've only been speaking one language your whole life, chances are

it will make learning a language entirely unlike English that much more difficult. But

with enough hard work and practice, the words and characters will eventually stick, and

with learning, my friends, comes confidence. Buyer beware - My Japanese coach should be

thought of less as a video game and more as a learning utility. Use it as such and you

might learn something. Soon you'll be deciphering those imported Famicom games like a boss,

and let's face it, you'll have it easier than teenagers in Japan currently going through

exam hell. Ganbatte!