Mojipittan

[vertigo]

Would anyone recommend this game as a nice, fun way to brush up on your hiragana recognition and Japanese words?
From the description on Insert Credit today, it feels like it would be.
Any input from people who've played it?

[Darwock]

I don't know anything about that title, but I have to say that a fantastic method I've found for what you describe is to play the 'interactive story' type games they have in Japan. I'm sure there's a specific genre description for these but I can't recall what it is.

I'm currently playing through the 'blood: the last vampire' titles and due to my constant failure I have had to repeat most sections many, many times. Because everything is spoken with optional text it does wonders for language acquisition. I'd learnt several new words in the first night of playing.. that means I'd learned the pronounciation/kanji AND meaning without any english input at all! It all became apparent through context. After I stopped playing I went and confirmed everything in a dictionary and I was spot on. Really opened my eyes to different ways of learning.

[vertigo]

Great idea, thanks, I'll take a look at those a few months down the line.

I've often thought that learning tourist dialogue first is a waste of time when learning a new language in a serious, non-holidaymaker fashion. I've wondered if it might not benefit adults to learn a language in exactly the same way native children learn it i.e. with simple picture books in the beginning, then moving on to stories with simple dialogue and pictures to put things into context and progressing from there to teen books and newspaper articles then finally on to material specifically aimed at adults or involving more complex themes.
I think this is shown in a way where in Japanese schools they only teach certain kanji in certain grades, so in first grade you learn 80, second grade you learn 160 more, etc, so by 6th grade you'll have hopefully learnt 1006 kanji total, instead of being faced with a big scary wall of 1,945 of the buggers in one sweep and picking them up willy-nilly. Of course, in traditional language-learning texts the vast majority of written Japanese is Hiragana, but at some point you're going to have to take the next step.
Even taking into consideration that Japanese kids are meant to learn 1006 Kanji by the time they reach secondary school is a bit frightening though