For those who have no idea in the world what NihongoUp. It’s basically a genius game in which you choose a specific area of Japanese to study, you can study hiragana, katakana, JLPT specific kanji, JLPT specific vocabulary, even particles and those pesky counters (I really should start studying those counters).  In the game itself a question is normally posed in the form of just a highlighted character or either an English or romaji reading, a variety of different answers fall from the silver sky and you must choose the right one. The more correct answers you choose, the faster they keep coming. Go download the free desktop trial if you feel like giving it a try. I was lucky enough to win a full version a while back from a good old J-blogger friend of mine, Jamaipanese.

The Application

The iPhone and iPod Touch version is almost identical to the desktop version, so don’t worry everything still there, even the way you navigate. The only difference is that when playing kana mode, unlike in the desktop version in which several and seemingly random charactors drop down towards the bottom of the screen at different speeds, growing in numbers the more you progress, you are given four different characters at the same time for each romaji character. Which makes sense because using the touch screen style game play would make it almost insane to attempt choosing the kana without accidentally pressing the wrong character.

The Positives

1. The biggest and most obvious positive of NihongoUp on your iPhone or iPod Touch is that you can study on-the-go, wait let me rephrase, play on the go, because NihongoUp is most fun!

2. Just like in the desktop version you have all those different aspects of the Japanese language to choose from.

3. Naturally, the ability to choose your answers via touch is very fun.

4. The whole application looks and feels great and smooth.

5. I found that playing music mutes the music, but not the sound effects.

6. I’m learning from it!

The Negatives (hopefully will be fixed in future updates)

1. The speed of the game play only increases after 20 correct answers, maybe there could be difficulty settings for this?

2. Even though it’s really superficial, the Japanese fonts are a tiny bit low quality compared to the English fonts.

Competition

That’s right people, for my first ever competition, with the help of NihongoUp, I’ll give away 2 desktop versions of their game. Sorry that I can’t give away an iTunes gift card so you could actually have the iPhone or iPod touch version, but working internationally on iTunes is a bit tricky. To win all you have to do is…

1. Have a twitter account.

2. Follow me, my account name is kumajira.

3. Tweet or RT the link of this post along with the tag #kumajira and #nihongoup. You could simply just RT this.

The rules are…

1. Only 1 tweet per person.

2. All submissions must be in by 4th of December (Brisbane Time).

I’ll pick two tweets randomly and I’ll contact you through a private message via twitter for your email address and full name. Nihongoup will then send you the code, and begin learning the fun way!