Japanese Kokeshi

Learn the Hiragana and Katakana characters of Japanese effortlessly with your Kokeshi. Japanese Kokeshi lets you play to thoroughly embed the sounds of the Hiragana and Katanana characters into your memory. Play through beautiful scenes from Japan in different seasons and learn while falling in love with the scenery. Consider this app on your first foray into Japan and Japanese. Familiarity with the characters and their sounds will help you get the most out of travelling in Japan.

Japanese Kokeshi is designed to be simple and focuses on helping you memorise the sounds associated with each Hiragana and Katakana character. It is designed for players with minimal to no experience with Japanese but experienced Japanese players may find it useful to test their skills.

The biggest obstacle to learning Japanese (or any language) is the amount of memorisation required. As the creators of this game, we endeavoured to take some of the pain of memorisation away by gamifying this aspect of learning. We believe that this game will help strengthen your foundations in Japanese – especially if you are learning Japanese later in life (like us).

Japanese Kokeshi learns which characters give you the most trouble and will focus on these characters till you get them right.

Features:
1. Control method – tap anywhere on iOS, button press on tvOS. One handed play.
2. Game Center enabled – Gain medals and achievements when you have mastered a character. Compete on the leader boards.
3. Focuses on weaknesses to cover all bases – Japanese kokeshi will increase the frequency of the characters based on how many times you get them wrong.
4. Scenery changes with the scores. The higher your score, the more levels and scenes you will move through. Each scene moves from morning to night as the score increases.
5. No decisions, options or complicated strategies required – just start playing and Japanese Kokeshi will take you through both Hiragana and Katakana.
6. No in-app purchases – all features are included.
7. No ads or annoying popups
8. No internet connection required (except when you want to use Game Center and get scores on the leader board).
9. Limited fast movements or rapid zooms that make you dizzy. We built this game for everyone to learn, not just for the young gamers.

What won’t I learn?
Kanji – this app is not meant to overload you. Our aim with this app is to help you memorise Hiragana and Katakana while enjoying the backdrop inspired by real Japanese scenery.
Writing – Learning to write is not included in this game.

Please watch the video to get a feel for the game. We designed this game for ourselves and welcome any comments, questions or feature requests via our website at japanesekokeshi.com