Kiriku said:
But is it really a good way to learn English, through "English Training"? How advanced does it actually get? I mean, if it's just basic English you learn I get this image in my head of numerous people in Japan suddenly talking "English Training" Engrish, only using phrases they specifically learned from the game.
I was looking into this before for my girlfriend, to help her practice her English, and I think one of the main points of the game is listening practice. The Flash demo on Nintendo Japan's site shows off listening to English words of phrases, and then trying to write down what you heard. I don't know enough to say if that is the major portion of the game or not, though.
Listening seems to be one of the harder aspects to practice over there, because usually people don't have a lot of access to English speakers, let alone native English speakers who provide less than stellar practice material with their broken English. So I think this is a great product for Japanese consumers.
I do have to say, though, that I wish Nintendo (or somebody) would maybe throw some love our way. Even if you want to ride on the back of anime popularity or whatnot and advertise it towards the people who are learning Japanese because it is "cool" or so they can annoy others by tossing in random Japanese words every now and then, I'd like to see us English speakers get something to help us with Japanese - or, hell, a multitude of languages. The Japanese dictionary that Nintendo released is a nice little product, and with some minimal tweaking (and addition of Kanji search support, which no doubt would take a bit more work), it would be a stellar product for us English speakers.
Maybe if the Brain Training stuff sells any kind of decent numbers over here, companies will start to see that the US DS market can also support (and wants) non-game stuff like that.
