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Idea: include a guide on how to learn Kana more effectively with this game, like pronouncing the Kana out loud every time you see it and so on. Also, maybe you could later implament a Kana drawing game? Just like these few modes that are now available, but there you must draw the image of the Kana with your mouse. Would be fun for touchscreen users :)
Kana drawing sounds fun, but there are too many different typefaces and that makes it difficult to recognize a kana (if you draw a き, how does the game determine whether it is correct?). Besides, it's a better idea to write kana on paper anyway.
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You missed out some Youon inputs in all-input mode, which are recognized by Windows IME. At least the following:
ちゅ cya
ちゅ cyu
ぢゅ dyu
ちょ cyo
ぢょ dyo
Also, the adventure mode is really tedious.... ......But then again this isn't meant to be the next Anti-Idle, I suppose. :)
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Oh neat, as someone who can speak Japanese this looks pretty interesting if a bit easy. I was very suprised to suddenly see a new game by you!
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Very nicely done. Was just thinking about brushing up on my Kana again. Pacing is a tad slow for my purposes, but for someone who's just picking the alphabet up its probably fine. :)
I find my self kinda wishing there was a prounounciation guide. Mostly because the kana with "I" and "E" can be pronounced in ways unexpected for English speakers.. but this *is* an alphabet teaching game not a language one. So not a big deal. XD
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I have found those sites very helpful in memorizing hiragana and katakana very quickly through mnemonics and imagination:
http://japanese.gatech.edu/WebCTVista/JAPN1001/contents/Lesson02/hiragana/mnemonic-hiragana.html
http://japanese.gatech.edu/WebCTVista/JAPN1001/contents/Lesson02/katakana/mnemonic-katakana.html
Awesome game. 10/10. Thanks! I have a friend in Japan who has been helping me with some Japanese. I help him with English as well.
Hi! Katakana already exists, it begins at stage 26 of Adventure Mode (because it is advised to learn Hiragana before Katakana). But if you are too lazy for that you can also try Free Play Mode, where you can practice any set of characters you want!
Hi! As noted in a few comments below, you can change the font of the romaji text in the bottom menu, which is accessible from the main menu. Thank you for playing and I hope this resolves your issue!
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It would be really nice if there were Randomize Font checkbox that will randomly pick one of the kana fonts each time a level begins.
Well, I suppose you can always toss some coins or roll some dice to pick a new font before trying any level :P It's a little more effort, but a randomize font option is probably not too useful anyway (I think?).
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In response to the questions on my original comment about the in-game lag.
I am using opera browser on a latest macbook pro, flash player is up to date and I have almost no problem playing other games either on flash or no.
Also, when I leave the game open for some time the slowness and lag become intolerable. It seems to me some kind of memory leak problem. I find this game very useful and nice but this breaks all the fun. Please fix.
That is odd, I really have no idea why that should happen in the first place :( During my testing on many different computers, I did not notice any significant lag issue (the worst computer I tried this game on still managed to run this game at 30~45 FPS and without any significant freezing), and I haven't heard any other lag complaint from many other people who played this. Are you playing on Mac OS? Have you tried a different browser (Safari maybe)? In any case, I'm very sorry to hear that you have to encounter such lag issue, and while I would definitely love to fix it, I'm afraid I'm not really able to.
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One easy to fix complaint I have is that in the english font, 'h' and 'n' look very similar, which makes things difficult when you're reacting quickly. Maybe choose a different typeface where the two letters are more clearly different.
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5/5 This is really really awesome! I started playing and loved it but unfortunately don't want to continue because I'm currently taking a Mandarin Chinese class. Something like this with Mandarin would be such an amazing supplement to my class, does anyone know if something similar exists? :)
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Great game so far. Obviously a little rough, but I'm interested in getting my kana skills back and this seems like a decent way to do it. I'll continue to play when I have time, but for now you got a 5/5 and a favorite for a job well done. If any huge, glaring problems arise I may update to a 4/5, but for now I'm psyched. Keep updating, please!
Well, if such problems do arise, I would also greatly appreciate it if you tell me what they are so I can look into fixing them! :P I hope you enjoy Kana Warrior!
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Really great game! I knew hiragana and katakana before, but I took way too long to read something before (and had trouble between "sa" and "chi" for example). Now I can almost recognize instantly which kana is what :3
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I've heard you all on the desire for a kanji version of the game! I'm collaborating with my Japanese teacher and will do more research to hopefully release a kanji version of the game (which will also teach you words and stuff). It will likely take a long time, and there's no promise that it will be released, but I will definitely try my best!
Well, as long as you continue to come back every half a day and post this comment over and over, that's more play count for me, so I don't really mind it.
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one thing that i would love to see is a way to kinda decide for example that a certain character wont show up before i have passed x characters (in free play) for example i would like my free play to start with 10 characters but when i have passed lets say 30 of those 10 new characters will get added to the random pool of available characters
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Is there a way we can play this on a different website? I would love to be able to share this with my classmates but the Australian government forces public schools to use filters D:
Hi, I'm glad to hear that you're interested in this game and would love to share it with your classmates! Unfortunately, this game is exclusive to Kongregate (at least for now) so you cannot play it on a different website. But I guess it should always be possible to play this at home :P
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Tukkun? Think I know this guy from somewhere... why don't you try to do an idle game as your next project? No... even better do an anti-idle game \o/
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It pretty interesting, I like the way you set this up and also made it for school, very cool, I always wounder about Chinese Letters
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This is painfully easy considering I'm nearly as good at hiragana as I am at the roman alphabet. But the Katakana I can still learn.
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Great game! I have recently started a Japanese course and am finding this extremely helpful!
A suggestion, though: Your 'enemy' generation routine seems to just be spawning following a random() call, which is ending up generating lots of few characters and a few of the others. For example, I just did Level 9 and got only two Ha and 3 Ho. A small change would be to instead generate a list with (for example) 5 of each and then shuffle them, so as to maintain a fair amount of all kanas. Im not sure if further on when there are more characters if it'll make much of a difference, but it certainly helps in the beginner levels when we are learning the consonant sounds.
5/5
Actually it's not entirely random - there's some extra code to make it so that it rerolls if the same character appears twice in a row, therefore reducing the chance that the same character appears multiple times in a row.
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If you ever wanted to further develop this project, I think it would be amazing if, when you shoot the symbol, the person says "ku!" or "sa!" (for example) to help learn pronunciation. Great learning tool and certainly helps in remembering the characters.
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This is a cool project and somehow reminds me of clockworks. You should check this game, maybe it can provide you additional ideas. However I believe it is more effective to learn kana and languages by drawing the kana itself, not by just repeating. I found it hard to memorize all the kana.
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5/5
I love it. It's a sweet game. I'm trying to learn Japanese and thinking of doing Hiragana and Katakana first. This game will be one of my learning points! Thank you.
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It seems a little unfair that if I can't type a character fast enough in free mode my mastery will immediately go to 0
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Can we get an actual pronunciation of the characters? For example, I don't know if "i" sounds like "ee" or "ih". My best guess is "ee", but I won't know without looking everything up.
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always wanted to learn that shit in the "not so boring way". and now not only i learn, but in addition i get exp for that! 5/5 and favorited
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I tried to learn reading Japanese characters many times and it never really worked, but I feel like this game is really helping, I'm "playing" little by little everyday and repeating stages and I feel I'm slowly recognizing characters naturally. Great work and thanks for sharing this project on kong :)