Shashingo: Learn Japanese with Photography

I love learning languages through videogames, it's so much more fun and interactive than textbooks and classrooms.

Shashingo is a really simple game, there's no exciting mechanics or flashy special effects. In this game you walk around a small area of a city with a camera and take a picture of anything that you want to know the name of (both writing and pronunciation). After that, you can begin challenge mode, for which you can choose a variety of rules, and then have to go and photograph the random objects that come up, and you get a reward for taking the right picture. Despite the simple game loop, it acomplishes what it's set out to do, you have fun while expanding your vocabulary, and that's all that i need for giving it 3 stars. The fourth star comes from the aditional elements that the game provides, there's a small text book with basic lessons and cute illustrations, all kanji have furigana on top of them, there's a hiragana and katakana chart included, every picture you take comes with some related words written in the back of it (which also have audio for pronunciation), and any text you want to read from a street sign or poster you can just look at it and click and a small chat box pops up with the reading and translation.

If you're just starting to learn japanese and can already read kanas, i absolutely recommend you try this out. If you can't read kanas i recommend that you go for another game called "You can kana" first.