Whilst browsing on steam, I recently stumbled across a recently released game titled ‘Sashingo’, which aims to be an ‘edutainment’ game that helps you learn Japanese through exploring and snapping pictures of objects found in its fictional Japanese streets. Essentially, the premise is that you’re dropped into a 3D environment resembling a Japanese city with a camera, and you can run around taking photos of objects, which generate a flashcard showing the vocabulary word of the object. After taking a few pictures, you can then test yourself using the game’s ‘find mode’, where a word in Japanese appears and you have to find and photograph the object that matches the word displayed.
I’ve played it for an hour and found it a lot of fun and it’s quite polished, though the price tag is pretty steep. Has anyone else played the game yet? I’m happy to answer any questions!
I own it and have spent about an hour playing it. I think anyone who’s spent a lot of time learning Japanese is going to find it pretty limiting. It’s a cool idea for a program. You can take pictures of things and then flip the pictures over and learn verbs that are associated with those things. There’s a sort of “mini-textbook” included with the game that contains some Japanese basics that I think would probably be fantastic for beginners. Overall, as far as educational materials go, it’s not too bad for the price, and it’s relaxing and inviting, but if one’s going to be comparing it to the content of a typical game, then, yeah, it’s going to seem a bit empty for the price. I’d definitely recommend it for someone just starting out. One can change their text settings from romaji, to kana, to kanji as one’s studies progress, which seems like a pretty useful feature.
