Love Language Japanese

One of the first few visual novel I've played and I don't regret it. I've learned alot about Japanese in this game more than Duolingo, Miyuki best girl! (´⊙ω⊙`)！

i like them piktrues in them gaymes

No joke, this is how I started learning Japanese. There are a few issues throughout the game, but it's a good resource to learn hiragana and katakana if you're looking to also play a VN.

Why I hate and don't recommend the game:
1) The 58 Japanese lessons you read like a lazy game tutorial
2) The tests are at the end of every week, they get harder, later weeks you take 2 to 3 tests in one sitting, you only have 60 seconds to finish a test or it's an automatic game over.
3) There are typos and grammar errors in the lessons or tests.
4) The story is about an American teen boy who dreamed about going to Japan and attend his dream school. But the problem is he's flat broke after getting into Japan so he lives in a girl's only boarding house with his female classmates. Also stupid American MC lies on his resume to the principal and he can't speak Japanese. So instead of rejecting him, the principal decides to bombard the MC (and us) with lessons and tests to prove he's qualified to be at the school.
5) When the game allows you to breathe and have a social life you can interact with one girl per day. If you stick with one girl, she'll be your girlfriend at the end of the playthrough. Problem is said girl will not always be available everyday, choose the right dialogue boxes for extra love points and have 5 dates with her (hanging out doesn't count). If you did everything accurately she's your gf at the end of your run if not your single and have to try again from the beginning.
6) The characters at best are just generic visual novel characters. They get boring fast and you (the player) would be more worried about studying.
7) Text skip speed is the slowest I've ever experienced in a visual novel even on the "fastest" setting.
8) If you're a completionist, DON'T GET THIS GAME. While the achievements are not objectively hard to get you need to play the game 5 times minimum to get everything. Everything I complained about above you deal with them 5 times or more if you messed up. I heavily recommend cheat engine.

If you're genuinely interested in learning Japanese don't buy this game. First of all for a game or even a VN it's boring. There's no creative fun gameplay to have what you learn stick so the lessons are equivalent to studying with PowerPoint slides. The game is like school where it just reads the lessons, demands you to study when you have free time and demands you to pass every single otherwise it boots you out for being lazy and stupid so there's no flexibility to learn or take the tests at your pace. Also just like school the tests throw harder questions that weren't covered in the lessons. The further I played the game, I forget what I learnt, no longer cared about learning anything and I resorted to cheating on the tests using Cheat Engine to pause the time and use the game's slides or Google Image translation. I feel like if a school made a visual novel it would be Love Language Japanese, Heck there's a part in the story where you go to the beach and you're forced to endure lessons.

You can only either beat this game if you're already familiar with Japanese or like me use Cheat Engine

After a long break from studying Japanese I picked this game up as a fun way to review what I already knew. I think it works really well as a fun revision tool for very basic Japanese ~ but I would only recommend it you've been through a beginner textbook and started learning hiragana and katakana. The lessons are brief and basic and do not contain sufficient explanations to be able to pass the tests without a lot of trial and error, unless you do have some prior knowledge. On the story side of things, the plot was amusing enough to keep me playing regularly, but I probably wouldn't have finished the game if I wasn't playing it for the Japanese practice. The game itself is a great idea but I think it would really benefit from a few additions, such as an option to turn off romaji in the lessons, some actual in-game Japanese conversation practice with the girls (all conversations are in English), and a good proof-read to get rid of the English (and occasionally Japanese) typos.

Came into it with already basic Nihongo Jouzu.
Fun cheesy story.
Plenty of Fanservice.
Different archetypes to date.

Has some spelling and grammatical errors here and there, but nothing that threw me off
Ending was a little anticlimactic, never really got the chance to finish dating the woman I was going for.

Maybe not worth the default price, but a fun try when it's on sale, especially if you like a little Japanese language learning in between getting smothered by your teacher.

Started out having a lot of fun and learning a fair amount, even if the tests and quizzes are more time trials than anything. Downside is that at around lesson six, the tests start popping up with vocab that the lessons didn't teach. It's not impossible to jot down the vocab during the quiz, but in a game that is supposed to teach you these things, you'd think it would actually cover all the bases. You're better off getting the 'Learn Japanese to Survive' series to learn the language. Doesn't help that the devs just dropped off the face of the earth. If this is a "must have", wait for a sale.

I am half way through this game at the time of this writing. That is almost six hours, so if you are considering it, expect to take about 12 hours to play through once.
What drew me to getting this was the idea of a visual novel that is designed as both an instructional tool, as well as a dating sim. In many ways it fills both of those slots, but at the same time, it is not without problems.

First of all, the good:
The story is cute, as are the cast of girls you have to chose from. Like most dating sims, it does not tell you how to win the hearts of your chosen girl and you have to stumble around figuring it out. This I think is good as it will mix up future playthroughs, which will only serve to strengthen the lessons.
Your initial lessons are in Hiragana and Katakana, followed by sound combinations. Understanding there, as in being able to sight-read them without effort is essential to developing good skill in Japanese. This is by far the greatest strength in this game. If a player puts in the effort, they can learn one of the most important foundational skills they need for effective learning. However, this focus on these alphabets comes at a price.

The Bad:
Typos? They exist. Every game of this kind has typos. Move on.
This game focuses on Hiragana, Katakana, and sound combinations. While those are good to know, and can help with Kanji learning via Furigana, the simple fact is, you need to know the Kanji for what you are learning. When dealing with Japanese, be it in games, manga, anime, newspapers, or any other media, you will be confronted with Kanji, and knowing how to read it as it is presented will make it much easier to practice, and keep your skills up.
But, I think my main complaint about this game is the total lack of proper explanation of the use of は as a particle. The game consistently refers to the particle は as Ha instead of Wa in all of the Romanji. This will set a beginner in Japanese with a very bad habit that, while forgivable, can be very embarrassing, as well as hard to change later in learning. Bad habits formed in the beginning can be very hard to overcome later in the cycle.

Overall, I feel it is a good game. It has a fun cast, an enjoyable storyline filled with every trope you can imagine, appropriate music, and will help you recognize some basic building blocks of Japanese. Maybe it will even teach you a few words and a little grammar along the way.

Its a good game but holy crap get rid of Max.

Seriously. The dude is a borderline predator and we're supposed to be okay with that?. He has zero likeable qualities and keeps doing stuff that shows he's not a good person yet we're forced to act like he's still our friend when I never wanted anything to do with him anyway.

The game itself teach me English Languages as well and the script of this game are OUTSTANDING for me to learn both english and japanese langauges . I must recommend to you guys if you want to have fun while educating yourself on langauges.

Went into this not expecting much, but it's doing a better job at getting Japanese to stick than some textbooks. The basic premise of the game is that you've made up a bs story to get accepted into a selective Japanese language school. As you got caught lying on your application, you are punished by being put back into the beginners class. Fortunately, or unfortunately, for you, there was also a mixup in your living arrangements and so you end up living with a bunch of cute girls in an all girls dorm.

I started this game wanting to learn Japanese, and not so much do the dating parts, but I can't say I wasn't interested in the dating aspect either. So I can forgive the cheesy as heck plot, even if it is cringy at times. I do like that you can date some "older" ladies, though I guess they're younger than I am, but not the mc.

Each day is segmented as a lesson, after lesson activities, some after school activities to raise your love meter with various girls, and then end of day activities (such as revision). At the end of each week, you have to do an exam and pass it, otherwise you get sent back home as per your punishment for lying to get into the school. I like this approach to the design as it follows what is a regular school day, at least from what my ancient memory recalls it being like.

The writing, on the whole, is pretty okay. It's not high literature, it's mostly just ego stroking for the player to reward them for staying in the game. Working towards a goal that is more than just learning the language is more helpful, at least for me. It's kinda like if you go to the gym to train but have no goal for the reason for training, and so you will burn out and quit. But as long as you're working towards a goal, you'll stay in the game.

Lessons in this game start off really basic, like あ = a, for example, but eventually become more and more complicated as you go. I feel like some of these lessons could have been condensed together earlier on, but it works the way it was done. As you progress, the end of week exams become more complicated as well. In the beginning you play match up like A = ? and a bunch of choices appear on the screen to choose from. But eventually you're substituting words or letters in words within a sentence. Each exam also only lasts for a minute and there are 10 questions in each. At the start, it'll seem easy, but if you don't actually learn the material, you'll get stuck later. One of the biggest criticisms of this system is that I think only 50% is a passing mark, which means that you can essentially just guess your way through the game. Have you really learned anything if you only know half the material? A 50% at the start will show the cracks at even 3-4 weeks in the game, where you'll just end up failing. My second criticism here, though it's also a positive, is that the 1minute window is too short, especially if you're reading new words or concepts. Though this does also improve your ability to read quickly, it also allows you to just game the tests if you read only say, the first word of a sentence and the missing letter is there, so you neglect the rest of the sentence which might be a detriment to learning.

I feel like if you fly through the game though, you'll have a hard time with it, and so I've implemented a few rules that I do in each of the in-game days of learning.
1. Do the lesson
2. Take the lesson quiz at the end of the lesson 3 times.
3. If I don't 100% a quiz, I reset my counter and need to 3 more lessons at 100%
4. Do the all lessons study at the end of the day with the same rule as 3.
5. Review lessons if needed
6. Do one week of this per real world day to prevent burnout or mental strain. So that's 5 days lessons, 1 day exam.
You could probably also hand write your lessons too so you get used to writing in Japanese if you wanted to. Much like any learning material, you only get as much out of it as you put into it!

There are, however, a few bugs and typos in this game. The most predominant one I get is that in exams, if you press an answer as the timer hits 0, the game thinks it should go onto the next question still. So on the final exam, you will get like a 70% but be able to continue on until the end of the questions. This can change your score to a 100%. In these cases I do this exam but then reload at the end and try again. Other bugs have been covered in reviews here, but I don't see them often enough.

Overall, this is a pretty alright learning assistance tool for the language. It does have some flaws that make it not ideal, but they can be overcome with supplementary material. Love Language Japanese is a good starting point for beginners.

Well, in 27.1 hours I have learned the Hiragana, the Katakana, and a few words and sayings in Japanese!!! I've got my moneys' worth out of this game already.

I really like the idea of using the plot of a gal-ge to drive the player to actually learn a new language. Having just failed out of the class (for the first time), I can say this... get a notebook and a pen and be prepared to actually study, like a Japanese student should. That is what I plan to do, start over with a fresh save and take the language part seriously.

As a tip; pay attention to and learn all of the vocabulary words well. If you are not fluent with them later in the game, it will cause you problems later. You will be reading longer and longer sentences, and translating them against the clock, so you can't look things up very much during the tests.

As a warning; this game is a bit glitchy, and the English is not so hot.... but the art is, and that might help. There were times when there were multiple lines of text overwriting each other, but a quick save and reload fixes that.

As a summary; if you like visual novels and want to learn Japanese in an interesting way, Love Language Japanese is worth the investment in time, money and effort... I think.

My standards aren't particularly high for positive reviews, but this game aims at two targets and goes right between them. On the learning side, you'd do better just using a language learning tool for about 3 hours. I suppose if you don't even know if you're interested, this will give you a taste of Japanese, but nothing beyond that. I know it isn't meant to, so no real disappointment there.

However, the whole VN and romance part kinda falls flat. You need to play through the game once per waifu and focus all choices on that waifu to see all her events (which is never explained, so your first run through is bound to be a bust). The characters just aren't all that deep or compelling, so it never really felt worth it.

I don't want to touch the entire assets thing, it seems to be legal that they're using assets from an already made game, whatever. My big problem with this, is that while it has a good focus on educating the player on Japanese language, it doesn't actually have a good implementation.
It seems not a lot of thought was put in to how the lessons would work after they're first viewing and how studying works as well. I was expecting a cliff-notes in the notebook to help refresh my memory of the hiragana I got thrown at me for 30 seconds but the only option is to repeat the lesson entirely, go through the animations and hope you didn't miss anything via misclick. On top of that, the pop quizzes and study sessions are terrible; They are short-burst (5 Problems) that never really randomize and spread over all of the characters you've learned.

The only good thing I can state about this game for the moment is that it has led me to find online resources in pursuit of a more proper and effective education. This game can be great, it just needs to improve interaction with the player so they can actually memorize the characters they're being taught and offer more resources to help facilitate the learning it boasts.

Overall I really enjoyed this game but there were a few minor issues I had with it:

1. All of the tests are timed. You only have 60 seconds to answer 10 questions. It's not a big deal at first, but once the questions start becoming more complex and take longer to read, it can feel like you're being rushed. The time limit does eventually increase but not until much later in the game. I strongly recommend you familiarize yourself at least a little bit with hiragana and katakana before playing, since you will be expected to be able to read pretty fast at times and it may be overwhelming for absolute beginners.

2. There are a LOT of typos and grammar mistakes in this game. There weren't any so bad that I couldn't understand what they were trying to say, but there are some lines here and there that you can clearly tell were not written by a native English speaker, and it kinda messes with the flow at times. Nothing too major though.

3. If you're here looking to learn some Kanji, you're gonna be disappointed. There is only one lesson that teaches you any Kanji, and it's not until the very end of the game. It's not really a problem per se, but I think it's something worth mentioning for those interested.



TL;DR this game has its fair share of flaws but it is nonetheless a fun visual novel with interesting characters and you will definitely learn a lot of basic Japanese words and phrases. There are a few ecchi scenes here and there but it's not really that kind of game tbh.

The game is fine, overall, though I'm not exactly sure how well it will teach you any Japanese. The lesson format ends up being too short to really drill anything down, and the tests become more of a speed challenge than anything up until the last 2 or so hours. I already knew a fair bit of Japanese before playing this, though, so I could be wrong.

The biggest problem with the game is the typos. There are only a couple in the first few hours, but the back half is pretty riddled with them, including in some lessons which I'm pretty sure would have been super confusing if I didn't have the little extra Japanese experience I had. The fact that most of the game relies on only hiragana/katakana + romaji is also a huge shame. When sentences become long, it's really hard to parse out what's being said, which is why kanji is a thing.

The girls and story were cute and fine. No real complaints there.

Edit: As a side note, the fact that this is a visual novel that somehow runs poorly drives me nuts. It can't even play the opening theme without stopping and skipping, which is bizarre.

This is good for learning basic japanese but there's issue with the quizzes.

それはすしです
this is a sushi

The answer must be false. *Sore それ* was used and not *Kore これ*, but when you answer *false* you will be wrong.

It's exactly what you'd expect. OK writing, not great learning pacing. My only real COMPLAINT is the error with SHI being written as SI which isn't a japanese sound.

A few english typos as well. A few "you go it" and such.

Change SI to SHI please :)


Edit: I have to say it's starting to look pretty sloppy. LOTS of english typos, the story is kinda lazy and the tests need a lot of refinement. You can get the same question 4 or 5 times in a row. Would be really decent with a few more months of refinement.

So this is probably the most difficult game I have ever played. I wish the actual lessons were more in depth, because its basically a matching game with 30 symbols you dont know the meaning of unless you repeat the 30 or 60 second long pop quizes to the point where you memorize what they look like, not necessarily what they mean. Miyuki definitely does not help boost confindence either.

A great game, but here's some bugs.

Some known bugs/problems I've came across so far:

1. Minor typos with the language lessons and dialogue
2. The majority of the time, loading a save causes the music and sound effects to cut out, sometimes not returning until the next day
3. Sometimes there's no music after a scene changes
4. A lot of times when the scene changes to the house, it cuts to the beach sunset scene for .5 seconds
5. Sometimes loading some specific scenes causes it to be replaced by the beach sunset scene
6. Reading notes when the day just started sometimes restarts the day after reading the notes
7. The volume configuration (not sure if its the same with other settings) resets after the game is closed
8. Saving the game on the lessons screen and loading it will cause the white board/backdrop to be messed up
9. Some CGs in the galleryare unlocked before you even get that CG in the playthrough, for me, all sarah and helen dates were unlocked before I even got to date 3
10. Not sure if this is intended but a person can be in 2 places on the map at the same time, this happens when they normally should be at one place but they also call you out to a date at another place

None of these are game breaking bugs by any means but it would be nice to see it get fixed

Thought this was just going to be a wifu simulator with some random clicker language stuff on the side. No, this is actually running you through what I assume is some begginer level Japanese. Wasn't ready for it and never had an interest in the language at all, but hey, good to see they actually put some effort in it rather than some fake stuff. As someone who constantly turns the voice acting OFF, I'm completely fine not having it. Over all, when its on sale, I'd say pick it up just for the sharts and farts, because this was a lot more than what I was expecting and I'm pleasantly surprised.

The story is pretty good, i'm in love with it, all the enviroment it's awesome and all the art on the game is on point, i already study japanese, so i find this game very interesting, it's interesting in terms of the certainty of what the game teaches at the language level, pretty pretty cute, i like it a lot <3

No voice actors, you can play it at 4k 144 refresh rate though >_>
Looks like a very promising game for learning Japanese :P