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Shashingo: Learn Japanese With Photography – Review

Shashingo: Learn Japanese with Photography is an edutainment game that aims to teach you Japanese through taking photos in an in-game world. This is primarily a single-person effect by indie developer, artist, and game designer Ryan Pocock.

Studying is often not the most interesting thing in the world, so anything to make it more fun is welcome.

Wandering around town in Shashingo: Learn Japanese with Photography

Picking Up Language

A little background before diving into Shashingo. I took two years of Japanese classes and even lived in Japan for a few months long ago. On top of that, a large part of my university degree was about how language acquisition works, so I should even have the theoretical knowledge to back me up.

Despite this, I’ve never done well in learning it through regular study. Anime and games have taught me more Japanese than any class. Motivation plays a huge part in language learning and this includes having fun or feeling a sense of achievement. An edutainment product that teaches Japanese is a great idea to try and achieve this. Whether it achieves it or not is up for debate.

Photographing a sakura (cherry blossom) tree

Shashin Time

The basic idea of Shashingo: Learn Japanese with Photography is simple but clever. You find yourself in a small area in Japan, full of all sorts of shops, items that you might naturally find around town, and a few things that wouldn’t be out of place in a tourist area. You’re set a task to photograph everything you can find. This turns the photo into a flash card to help you learn the vocabulary.

On the face of it, this doesn’t sound particularly entertaining. There’s not even an in-game indication of how many flashcards are left to find to spark that collection instinct (145 flashcards with 400+ words according to a comment by the developer online). You can retake photos to get better ones, decorate the photos with borders and filters, and unlock new ones through a gachapon system, but that’s about it as far as acquiring the flashcards goes.

It is however a useful way to learn new vocabulary. Seeing something, and then immediately being able to find out what it’s called is helpful and it’s more interactive than reading it in a textbook. It adds some related words on the back of the flashcard too. All of the vocabulary on both sides of the cards has a voiceover so you can hear how it sounds.

A photo of a maid cafe in Shashingo: Learn Japanese with Photography

To give an example, there’s an establishment in the game. On taking a photo, it reveals the flash card メイドカフェ (Maid Cafe). On the back, there are three extra words in both Japanese and English.

  • 楽しい (Fun)
  • 可愛い (Cute)
  • 愛らしい (Adorable)

As you take these photos for the flashcards, they’ll be saved in an album you can browse.

While this element of the game is quite laid back, it is nice to soak in the atmosphere of this small but full slice of Japan, surrounded by cherry blossoms and with a relaxing lo-fi soundtrack in the background as you take photos. There’s a level of immersion that is useful too, with little things like signs dotted around with brand names like オタクマ (Otakuma) and signs saying how there are crane games on the second floor. Clicking the button provides an English translation to many of these.

Quiz mode for cat photography

Test Time

Of course, just showing you the word isn’t enough to learn it, at least for most people. Shashingo: Learn Japanese with Photography comes with two modes to help you remember.

Quiz Mode is a fairly traditional learning method. It shows the front of the flashcard with the photo and both the Japanese and English names of the items, and then it tests you on the three related vocabulary words. It does this by showing the words in Japanese only and then letting you select the matching English. So from the above example, it’ll give you 楽しい, 可愛い, and 愛らしい along with Fun, Cute, and Adorable. You have to match them up. If you get it wrong, it’ll tell you the correct answer.

Find Mode leans more into Shashingo’s photography gameplay. You’re given a task to find and photograph one of the flashcards that you’ve created. It’s an interesting way to reinforce the vocabulary, though it is quite slow to wander across town to find the correct location to test a single word.

In both cases, the tests are somewhat customizable which is great. You can choose to test reading and listening or just one of the two. Word sets can be set to categories like random, recently learned words, favorite words, or words that you’ve failed on a few times previously.

Shashingo: Learn Japanese with Photography's "Find Mode"

Failed words are particularly helpful, but it might be a bit too forgiving. I purposely got the answer wrong for a certain word repeatedly and it added itself to a weak word list after a few times. I then got it right once and it took itself off the list. I can tell you now that getting a word right once doesn’t mean I’ve learned it. Show me a flashcard with 全然 (not at all) and I’ll get it right about half the time.

For both the quiz and find word modes, it rewards you with coins for correct answers. This is the currency used for the gachapon system. Unlockable frames and filters don’t feel like much of a reward to me, but I’m sure that some players will enjoy making the photos look nicer.

Japanese textbook in Shashingo: Learn Japanese With Photography

Learning Japanese

You might ask, is this a good way to learn Japanese? I do think it helps but only if you happen to be of the level it’s aiming at and you want to reinforce or pick up some new vocabulary.

The game itself recommends using multiple sources to learn and I wouldn’t recommend it for people learning from scratch.

There’s a short textbook found via the menu, with 15 lessons on some of the basics. It includes phrases in English and Japanese, with a Japanese voiceover, and it has a vocabulary list and some explanation of grammar points. It’s not exactly Genki 1: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese (a well-regarded textbook) or even Minna no Nihongo (which I used in class and was also quite good), but it’s a nice introduction. It’s certainly very basic though.

A hiragana and katakana chart is included, but Shashingo: Learn Japanese with Photography doesn’t make any attempt to teach these. In fact, the kanji has furigana (small hiragana as a pronunciation guide) on top, so it seems to expect you to already know it.

Traffic cone and several more complex words + kanji

The testing methods themselves are tried and true. They essentially work by seeing the vocabulary and then identifying it either from a small set of options or recalling it with minimal prompting. As mentioned though, the find mode is somewhat inefficient due to how time-consuming it is.

The word set is a little odd, alas. There are a lot of fairly standard early words such as the names of types of stores and basic verbs like ‘to watch’ or ‘to sing’. These make up the majority of the vocabulary included. Then you’ve got terms like 組み立てる (to assemble), 工事 (construction), and 精算機 (fare adjustment machine) thrown in, which according to a few sources I checked are JPLT N2 level vocabulary, which is far above beginner level. Some make sense given the context of things seen around town, while others I can’t see the logic of including.

I also feel that there’s some discrepancy in the type of gameplay and the aim. I think the general reaction to a game where you need to photograph objects and make flashcards is to do just that, finding as many as you can. But there are reasons why you limit the amount of new vocabulary that you learn at a time in language learning. Grouping is also often used and is said to help people remember, but you might find ‘balloon’, ‘advertisement’, ‘cat’, and ‘bottle crate’ together here.

Night view in Shashingo: Learn Japanese with Photography

Missed a Shutter Chance

There are some minor snags. They’re not enough to impact the experience, but worth mentioning.

Shashingo: Learn Japanese with Photography cycles between day and night as time passes. This looks very nice for the most part, but there are some obvious issues with taking photos in the dark. They can look quite nice, but I found myself trying to take a photo of a gate and not being able to distinguish what was even in the photo. It didn’t happen often, but this led to me having to either come back or wait when I came across objects like this.

As an aside on the topic of unclear photos, the first filter I unlocked was a pixelated filter. This didn’t strike me as a particularly useful tool for taking photos of things I wanted to later recognize and recall.

I did also find the user interface a little confusing at first and it doesn’t explain much explicitly. There are little icons, but there is a level of discovering what functions there are left to the player. Little things like not showing a title for the newly unlocked filter and how to see the amount of cards you currently are missing.

Flash card album in Shashingo: Learn Japanese with Photography

Verdict

Shashingo: Learn Japanese with Photography can be helpful, but it doesn’t quite pull off making learning both effective and fun. It’s a nice way to pick up some new vocabulary and supplement your learning if you happen to be a beginner at the right level. It won’t, however, teach you certain things you might need at that level or be as effective as more typical learning methods and is best as a supplementary tool. I do feel it could do with more gamification too.

With that said, it has a wonderful relaxing atmosphere and it’s a really unique idea. It makes a nice break from the textbooks while still learning and it’s more engaging than typical methods like ANKI flashcards.

SHASHINGO: LEARN JAPANESE WITH PHOTOGRAPHY IS RECOMMENDED

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC (Steam)

If you are looking for another game about Japan with a touch of informational edutainment, you might want to check out BAKERU.

Many thanks go to Autumn Pioneer for a Nintendo Switch review code for Shashingo: Learn Japanese With Photography.

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