Almost forgot

Last month in Japan, I picked up three DS kanji games in Akihabara:

First of all, I bought the Rakubiki Jiten Dictionary, that I wrote about a few months ago. It’s really nice, I like the jump feature which allows me to understand words I don’t know the definition of the word I’m looking up. The big drawbacks of this software are the start up time, and character recognition takes forever, they’ll need to speed that up in the next version.

The next title I found was ２００万人の漢検とことん漢字脳 (middle). I’ve been studying using this game the most. It’s easy to use and gives my mind a good workout during the morning ride to work.

Finally, I purchased なぞっておぼえる大人の漢字練習 (top-left), which is supposed to be a kanji game for adults. I haven’t used it much, but my wife found it amusing during our long train rides in Japan.

I’ll try to do some in-depth write-ups sometime.

New game

I got Animal Crossing on Sunday. So far I’m really enjoying it, although I don’t have as much time as I would like to play it. What sucks is that to do some things you need to play at certain times. For instance, the store is open from 8 am to 11 pm. While those are pretty long hours, I’m at work from 7:30 am to 5 or 6 pm. Then after I get other things done, I’ll start playing around 10 or 10:30 pm. It doesn’t leave me a lot of time to sell or buy things.

Animal Crossing is a fun, addicting game, I just need to make more time to play.

I want this.

Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten, is Japanese/English dictionary software for the Nintendo DS. I really want to get this. I know that Pink Godzilla and various online stores sell this “game”, but I’m holding out to order on Amazon Japan, when a couple more kanji titles come out at the end of September, and just order them at the same time.