Hiragana Workout is a powerful but simple and fun way to learn the Japanese Hiragana character set. Whether you’re starting out from scratch on your Japanese learning quest or brushing up on your Hiragana skills, you’ll certainly enjoy the learning experience presented in this game.

Hiragana Workout uses an innovative and intuitive method of engaging the player to memorize and guess characters. Our user testing on the game has shown that most players can learn the entire set of 107 characters and combinations in an extremely short length of time, and all while having fun doing it.

The game-play is simple. The player is presented with the character and is offered a chance to guess what the character is. A wrong guess results in losing a life and a penalty of progress through the game but a correct guess is rewarded and the player is allowed to progress. As you progress through the workout session, more new characters are presented. This incremental approach to introducing the characters to the player ensures that they are not overwhelmed initially and given the chance to properly memorize each character. The game also presents the players with characters they have guessed previously in the workout they can revise and reinforce the character in their memory. Essentially the game uses the tried and proven memory technique of Retain, Recall and Repeat but adds that essential layer of fun and a reward mechanism that makes the experience more engaging and so encourages the individual to persevere at the learning experience.

As well as character representation, Hiragana character pronunciation is emphasised during game-play, teaching and reinforcing the sound of the characters as the player progresses in the game. This feature can be easily turned off if it becomes annoying to advanced players but is essential to the learning experience for new players.

The game presents three levels of difficulty. The easy level introduces the player to the character set and teaches you what the characters look like and what, how they are represented in Latin characters (romaji) as you play the game. As the user progresses and learns the characters they are encouraged to make guesses without the help of the app. The normal difficulty setting takes away the training wheels but provides hints when needed. Players who can complete the hard setting on Hiragana Workout have become highly proficient at reading the character set and are ready to start reading the Japanese language written in Hiragana.

The app adapts to the players ability to learn. Players who pick up the characters set quickly are progressively provided with less help by the app to encourage them to recall the information independently. Independent character rcolection is rewarded more than. Players that take a little bit longer to learn the characters are provided with a little more help as they progress but eventually will need to recall the information independently. This adaptability to the player allows Hiragana to facilitate the learning capabilities of players at multiple levels allowing them to learn at their own optimal rate.