This is great. I get to buy not one but two new games for my Nintendo DS with a perfectly clean conscience intact. They have to be a good investment - they are educational . I admit, I already own that language game with a giant blue bird - Talkman for the PSP and I rarely used it. But it was more of a dictionary than a learning aid really.

The two new games are both about learning Chinese characters - kanji as they are called in Japan. That should be a good idea for me since learning Chinese signs is good both for brushing up my Japanese and will come in handy in Hong Kong since most of the characters have about the same meaning in both countries - at least that's what I've heard and hope for.

The first one is called Tadashii Kanji Kakitori-kun and is meant to help out Japanese children just starting school with learning kanji. In Japan you often see these seven-year-olds sitting on the subway practicing their kanji with small paper notes. It was about time that they were provided with a little more hi-tech solution. The Nintendo DS comes to the rescue and it is of course perfect for practicing kanji with it's touch screen and pen. Check out the commercial for an injection of Japanese cheerfulness.


Game number two might suit you better if you have trouble identifying with a Japanese seven-year-old. Here you get to be a kung-fu master. Better eh? A kung-fu master who defeats opponents by demonstrating his awe-inspiring kanji skills apparently.This is Kanji-ken where you write the correct kanji on the touch screen after reading the phonetic description of it. A concept that reminds me of the home made RPG Slime Forest where battles also are won by knowing your alphabets. In slime forest you start out with learning hiragana and katakana - the two phonetic alphabets of Japanese that you probably need to know before you start practicing with these two DS games - could be a good start if you can live with the graphics and have a sense of humor - there are some really funny RPG clichés in it.

I have already been through the slime forest myself so I'm ready for some kung-fu action!