Kanakatana: Teaching Japanese through Game Mechanics

Designing a game that is both educational and enjoyable can present some unique challenges. Kanakatana is an exploration into finding areas of overlap between foreign language learning and role-playing-games (RPG). It is designed so that its most important mechanics leverage similarities between learning a new language and playing an RPG. We are able to demonstrate success of this strategy through a 21-person user study. We show that subjects without prior Japanese knowledge are able to identify individual Japanese words 60% to 80% of the time. Interestingly, the subjects' self-assessment of their own improvement is more pessimistic.