Learning Japanese Characters Game, ideas?

General Discussions
#1

Hia,

I’m trying to learn Japanese and I was interested in writing a game which will help me practice the character sets, Hiragana and Katakana.

Basically I got the idea of creating a game because I thought it might be an effective way, since I can still remember the cheat codes for doom (iddqd), the spell in Dungeon Master to create a fireball (Ful Ir) and the name of the most southern town in Ultima 6 (yew). So, games are efficient as a learning tool. I just need to force the player to know (and/or learn) the combination of sound -> character to practice recognition. for example
http://www.genki-online.com/images/moji/hira20/242b.gif
is “ka” in hiragana.

I was wondering if you have any ideas on what kind of game i could design, given this goal? Obviously it need not be a MMORPG, some sort of sokuban or tetris clone will do, but perhaps you can think an interesting variation of an existing game, or think of an entire new game, which will make the user interact between character->sound pairs. What do you think?

Regards,

  • Vincent
#2

maybe a typ’o’shooter like the one in Crimsonland…
The only way to destroy the enemies is spelling correctly the name (written in Kana)
First the enemies are named with one character, but increasing the diffculty, they can use more than one kana, or use compounds like sho, double vocals as in suupaa.

Ot seems funny to me  8)

Rafael.-

#3

I actually wrote some learning thingy for that very purpose, too. Screenie here.

But its just multiple choice. However, the pseudo random stuff works nicely (and I’m almost proud of it). Its basically like a double pooled shuffle list (heh). See the debug info at the top… first row is how often was asked for that kana and below is how often it has been used as “detraction”. As you can see one number in the lower row is 3, but we cant use the same one for detraction twice… therefore another random kana gets injected (which means at the end one was shown once more and another one was shown once less than the average).

Its possible to make that perfect if you calculate em ahead of time, but mine generates a “set” (stuff to show) one at a time, which spreads the cpu-load far enough to just do it inbetween (it only takes some msec).

http://kaioa.com/k/kf_data.zip (~925kb)

That package should get you started. It contains:

  • 24 textures (<=512x512) with 2 sets (hiragana and katakana) of 12 different fonts. (White antialiased characters with transparent background. Pngquant-ed to 16 palette entries and pngout-resaved with 8bit for better compression - it cant get any smaller without visible degeneration ;))
  • 106 oggs with Nihon-shiki matching file names (nice female voice… well, its not my IP mind you)
  • listing.txt file with the ogg to Hebon-shiki(Hepburn)/Kunrei-shiki/Nihon-shiki mapping
  • charmap.txt with xth-texture-subimage-index to nihon-shiki mapping

Compiling that bunch of files and assembling those lists took bloody ages. Well, there is no need to reinvent that (mindless zombie work) wheel.

HF :slight_smile:

#4

rdcarvallo: nice idea. something like “missiles are incomming! which missile should the defense system aim at”… a bit like hangman. guess wrong and the missile will come closer :slight_smile:

oNyx: wow, tnx… these are indeed exactly the things i need to start! perhaps i’ll make a rough version of a game as stated above to get the hang of it… mhhh… tusaki’s 231 different japanese-character-learning-games… has a nice ring to it :slight_smile:

#5

oNyx: unfortunately, according to winrar, that archive is corrupt (unexpected end-of-file) :-[

#6

Yes create a image and let user read what anime character said. For example BA - KA. The easiest words to learn are naughty words.

#7

according to winrar, that archive is corrupt (unexpected end-of-file)

Ooops… gonna check that :f

Mh… I just downloaded it and it seems to be alright. But one file was missing… I uploaded it twice and there was apparently some kind of error.

I’ll upload it again and check if everything works.

If winrar fails again you can try: jar xf kf_data.zip

Ok its up and I checked everything. The filesize is 925,696 Bytes and the location is the same.

#8

私はも日本語お習います :slight_smile:

Edit: I ran this through an online translator to see if I’d got it right. Seems like I should use は or も but not both. Try this

私も日本語お習います

I thought about language games too, although it would be all too easy to spend loads of time programming, whilst thinking one was learning japanese ;).

Still, A reckon a J2ME Flash Card programme would be useful, although not a game as such. Perhaps allow datafiles of kanji characters as well, since it only takes a couple of months to learn hirogana & katakana anyway (with regular practice).

Alan

#9

oNyx: archive works fine now, tnx :slight_smile:

Alan_W: yeah you are probably right ^_^… “regular practice” is my problem, unfortunately… :-[ anyway, i’ve been bussy, i’ll upload something tonight to show you all ;D

#10

I’m looking forward to it :slight_smile:

#11

Pah! It ain’t a game unless it contains zombies!

“Katakana of the Dead” anyone? Each zombie has a number of characters assigned to it, the user has to type the English pronunciation to defeat the malodorous foe.

Actually, reading the previous posts properly, exactly like what rdcarvallo was describing… only with, you know… zombies. ::slight_smile:

I’ll get my coat.

#12

ok, here’s a small demo… it’s not really a game right now… just something I want as a background for the main menu :stuck_out_tongue:

http://cal007300.student.utwente.nl/vincent/japanese.jnlp

it’s a japanese kana starfield! :slight_smile: I dont know how it will run on your computers, my video card is pretty good… basically I have 400 kana’s floating around with around 20-70 triangles each. later on i will update the program so you can change the number of particles…

bleb: zombies ! yes… safe the beautifull anime girl from the blood thirsty zombies by selecting the right kana :wink:

#13

Runs fine’n’smooth here (k7 500/ati 9100).

Issues:
-Antialiasing typo in the dialog :slight_smile:
-There is no check for that AA extension (I can select it but it will bomb out)
-After hitting esc there was still a leftover javaws thingy running in the background, which I had to kill manually

#14

typo: got it ;D

no check for AA: any thoughts on how I would check for that? and the available modes? 0,2,4,8,16 are hard coded as options.

ghost process: odd! i’ll debug that when I get home. (at work now)

#15

I’d really like to watch the demo, but it forces me to install java 1.5.0_02, although I have installed _04. can you update the webstart demo please?

#16

Nice demo. Very smooth looking characters. :slight_smile:

Have to set Anti-aliasing to none though & kill redundant javaw.exe process after closing program though. Maybe add a System.exit(0); in your keyhandler, to force shutdown.