Sunday 19 February 2012

terrible design choices

What were the developers of this program thinking???

Up until now it's worked fairly well. A little too much focus on romaji which I'm not sure is terribly useful. Kana introduced slowly with big displays and lots of practice screens for you to draw them, simple little games that are just about tracing the symbol over and over until you can do it without the prompting.

Their choice of fonts leaves a bit to be desired as any time they're not on the Big Friendly Demo Screen the diacritics are absolutely unreadable (to the point that you can't even tell whether or not they're present on some kana) but context in vocabulary is usually good enough to guess.

So we get to the first kanji lesson, and what do they do? Show you the symbol ONCE, with absolutely no options to practice it or trace it or even get them to repeat the strokes on the page, and then expect you to be able to draw it perfectly from memory, with 'correct' stroke order, on a blank screen. WTF???

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