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!

I was never any good at writing beautiful kanji at the calligraphy lessons that was part of my brief attempt to learn Japanese at university. After years of almost no handwriting at all I soon started to wonder if those muscles in my hand that you need to have complete control of the pen might had become too weak to do it. But at least I'm pretty fast with a keyboard.

Those lessons were still a lot of fun as long as I wasn't writing myself and I instead could watch Kimura-sensei's flowing movements when she painted one beautiful sign after the other all made up of lines that narrowed at the right places in bends that was the perfect amount of non-perfect. It looked very easy when she did it of course.

One time Kimura-sensei brought lots of rice paper to class and said that we could all choose a word that she would paint and that we then could take it home as a gift. I think that was really sweet of her and I can't imagine the university was paying for it. The only problem was of course - what word to choose? Everyone were browsing through Japanese dictionaries to come up with something good, something that was both a good word and at the same time made up with kanji that looked good. People chose words like serenity, courage or hero. I really couldn't come up with anything I wanted at first. But then I had it. When I handed over the note with my word to Kimura-sensei she smiled and wrote:

任天堂

And now I can look at her graceful signs whenever I want, hanging on my living room wall they read: Nintendo.

I think I have decided. I'm going to study Cantonese in Hong Kong besides the computer science stuff. It was not an easy choice to make between studying Cantonese and Mandarin. Mandarin is useful in larger parts of China while Cantonese is the language spoken in an around Hong Kong. But I want to be able to understand what the old lady at the grocery store is saying and besides I think it really helps to hear the language being spoken all around you a lot when you're learning.

But Cantonese use tones even more so than mandarin. I'm a bit afraid of these tones. We're talking about the same kind of tones that you deal with when singing and everyone that has ever played Sing Star knows that hitting the right tone can be far from easy. The tones are used to distinguish one word from another so use the wrong tone and you might be saying a completely different word than you think you are. According to Wikipedia Cantonese "has nine tones in six distinct tone contours" while mandarin has only four. Scary.

These are some of the horror examples I found on this page of what you might say when using the wrong tones:

You try to say: Cigarette lighter (打火機)
But you really say: Beat up the waiter (打火記)

You try to say: Charity (慈善)
But you really say: You're crazy (黐線)

You try to say: My bill, please (埋單)
But you really say: To buy eggs (買蛋)

I bet many Swedes don't know this but Swedish is a tone language too. It's light years away from being as hardcore as Cantonese though. We only have two tones and they are only used in a few words (e.g, anden/anden, tomten/tomten for those who know swedish). I will try to comfort myself with this. Maybe I can learn a tone language - at least I have done it once.