Last year I decided that I would start learning Japanese. It’s always been something of a bucket list item for me, despite the fact I’ve always struggled with learning other languages. I failed miserably at French and German at school, and, despite my best efforts, I tend to butcher pronunciations in the worst ways possible, leaving me lacking in confi🎃dence to even try.
I can vividly recall a French oral exam where I mixed up ‘malade’ and ‘mauvaise’ and declared to the whole class I was bad because I ate a sick fish rather than I was sick because I ate bad seafood. I still passed as my teacher said, despite being weird, it still made sense. It was weird. I don’t even eat seafood, but it seemed like the easiest thing to remember at the ti🦄me. Clearly, I was wrong.
I didn’t let these embarrassing school memories put me off learning a new language, though. When it came to Japanese, I started with the basics in Duolingo, but I unknowingly fell into a pitfall from the get-go. I was using romanized words. My friend quickly course-corrected me and encouraged me to learn in Hiragana and Katakana. It&rs𒉰quo;s qu🍌ite overwhelming to not only be learning a whole other language but the characters too.
I had been burning through Duolingo, but I found learning kana slowed down my education because I struggled to remember which sound each character made. I bought Japanese handwriting notepads to practice my kana, using this alongside Duolingo to try and memorise them, but I still struggle. In my efforts to improve my poor learning skills, I decided to check out 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Kana Quest.
Kana Quest originally launched for PC in 2020, but it’s just arrived for Nintendo Switch, giving me the perfect excuse to take it ꦡfor a test drive and brush up on my Japanese at the same time. It’s a cute little puzzle game with pixel graphics that asks you to pair kana based on their sounds. Kana can match based on either their consonant or vowel sounds. ꧋For example, か (ka) can be paired with な (na) orく (ku).
You must move kana tiles arou🤪nd the grid to match them all in as few moves as possible. As you progress, you unlock additional mechanics, such as stone kana that can’t be moved, or mystery kana blocks that you’ll need to unmask by seeing which kana they pair with. If you’re not familiar with a kana or you’ve forgotꦕten the sound it makes, you can simply double-tap it to hear it.
Things are fairly simple to begin with, but new mechanics are added so frequently that you’ll soon find yourself trying to solve a grid with multiple special kana blocks and scratching your head about how best to shuffle each one around while still earning a gold medꦏܫal. As far as puzzle games go, this gets pretty challenging.
There are 13 worlds to complete, each with various levels and different pixel-art backgrounds and music. To unlock the next world, you have to earn a specific number of gold medals, so you’ll have to master the levels in a world before you can move on to the next in most cases. It’s not as easy as you first think, and I had to go back over a few levels to grind for gold to unl♏ock the next batch more than once. (If you’re really struggling and want a shortcut, you can opt to unlock them all in the settings.)
You could arguably play Kana Quest without caring whether you learn Japanese or not, instead simply aiming to match sounds in as few moves as possible while overcoming whatever mechanics are thrown your way. It feels as though the puzzle element has been prioritised over language learning. While it’s certainly true that you’ll become more familiar with the kana and their sounds from playing, you’re not actually learning how to pair kana together to construct proper words or sentences. It would be entirely useless as a learning tool for someone completely unfamiliar with Japanese as there’s no context to the kana being use𝐆d.
As a supplement to learning Japanese some other way, it’s not a bad little game to ensure you’re committing your kana to muscle memory. It’s novel and keeps you engaged because of the puzzle aspects, but I can’t help feeling it’s overpriced for what it is. My only other gripe with it is how sluggish it feels. For such simple mechanics and pixel graphics, why are there loading screens and a delay when clicking sometimes? I🃏 love the retro look and music, but I don’t love the old school loading times. Unfortunately, Kana Quest did 🃏not end my quest for the perfect learning tool.