In LA

Slime Forest Adventure is a Legend of Zelda style adventure game in which the character learns the meaning and pronunciation of Japanese characters during battles with agressive sentient slime creatures.

I used to play this shareware game a long time ago, and learned to recognize a few hundred kanji (as well as all katakana and hiragana) in a couple of weeks just by playing the game. I quickly registered it, not because there were any features to unlock but to help ensure that it would continue to be developed and to show some gratitude for the fact that the program had helped me learn all of those characters.

Playing Slime Forest Adventure is a bit like studying with flash cards, but is better and smarter in that it makes the repeat intervals just right, has kanji you’ve forgotten attack you viciously, and introduces new kanji in a very intelligent manner — all similar looking kanji are presented as a group so that you quickly learn the differences between them. I think the game currently can teach 800-1000 characters.

I hadn’t played the game for quite a while, mostly because I spend most of my computing time in front of Macs these days, and the game was Windows and Linux only. But I just checked out the website, and the developer has ported the game to OS X now. Hooray.

So if you’re trying to learn Japanese, give Slime Forest Adventure a try. I’ve downloaded the Mac version and have started playing again. The meaning of the kanji characters is in most cases the same in Japanese as in Chinese, so this should help me with both languages. Hopefully the fact that it now tests for pronunciation as well as meaning of Kanji won’t make it too much less relevant for my Chinese studies.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 3rd, 2005 at 2:16 am and is filed under Chinese language, Geeky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.