Great Learning Resources - Slime Forest!

lrnj.com - Slime Forest!

I am always looking for ways to learn Japanese interactively, as I have never been that great at just sitting down and studying for hours from a book. There are plenty of apps and websites that are designed to teach you (I intend to go over some of my favourites in a later blog!) but by far my favourite learning resource ever discovered is Slime Forest! Now, you do have to enjoy (and understand) RPG video games to enjoy it to the fullest, though it's not hard to get the hang of, and you need to keep an open mind about the graphics, but Slime Forest really is a one of a kind learning tool that I really think is one of the funnest ways to learn Japanese!

The game is basically an old-school RPG game, you have to fight monsters, explore dungeons and even save a princess! Of course the main point is to learn Japanese though, right? So that's the twist! In order to defeat monsters, you must quickly type the romaji corresponding to the Japanese above the monsters heads. You can start of simple, learning to quickly read Hiragana and Katakana this way, and eventually moving on up to kanji, vocabulary and grammar, it's great! It's also got a lot of subtle humour, which makes it all the more enthralling!~

The best part is, this project is still going on! The creator is still updating with new words, kanji and chapters often, so at the moment there is no real end to what you can learn from it!

I highly recommend this program, it requires downloading but happily works on both PC and Mac (Yay!) and even Linux! It also keeps track of what you have learnt, and reviews characters, so if you play it every day it will check you up on things learnt the day before to make sure it really is embedded into your mind!

There are only a few bad point about this game, but even then they are not so serious. One is that a few of the kana characters you are taught are no longer used in modern Japanese (Wi, Wu) so those already fairly familiar with kana may get a little tripped up on these at first. The only other point is that although it is very effective at teaching you how to read quickly, unless you keep up practising writing on your own, you may find it difficult to write certain kanji even though you can read them without hesitation!

I loved it so much I bought the full version, but for beginners the free version is more than enough to keep you going for hours and hours and hours! Here's a little run down of what each of the versions offer:

 

Free version of Slime Forest Adventure:

• optional introduction to katakana and hiragana
• start learning kanji recognition and readings
• Adventure begins with Episode 1:
  • 2 caves test on 100 kanji each
  • save the princess to win!

The Full version additionally has:

• expanded set of nearly 2,000 kanji
• complete readings training with ~3,000 example words
• the adventure continues on islands in Episodes 2 and 3 (more coming soon!)
• additional play modes and training topics

 As I already said, this is highly recommended by me as a fun, casual way to start learning Japanese, and to keep up with it, the free version is completely adequate, but of course the paid version offers a lot more, and it's only $25/£16ish, which is so much cheaper than a normal video game but much more useful and just as much fun, if not more!

lrnj.com - Slime Forest!

Keep learning Japanese, don't give up! がんばって！ And remember, please get in touch if you want to suggest anything, correct anything, ask anything or just chat!

Til next time~