Introduction:
KANJI INVADER is designed to provide learners of Japanese with practice in reading kanji. It takes the form of a game called "Space Invader," in which words written in Kanji and hiragana come down from the sky. The objective is to shoot down the words before they hit the city. Students can turn on and off the audio feedback to hear the correct pronunciation. Sound effect can be turned on if students desire more game-like atmosphere. A game can temporarily be suspended to check the pronunciation of the words students may have forgotten.
The system comes with the complete kanji vocabulary sets for NAKAMA 1 &NAKAMA 2 (Makino, Hatasa &Hatasa, Houghton Mifflin). Sets for other major textbooks are under consideration. (If you are interested in developing a set for a textbook you are using, contact me.)
KANJI INVADER makes the full use of Development Tools for Japanese (Hatasa, Henstock, and Hsu, 1992) to handle Japanese characters without a Japanese operating system.
KANJI INVADER is released as a freeware for noncommercial use. Anybody, including your students, can make a copy and use it on his/her Macintosh. The hardware platform is currently limited to Macintosh.
System requirement: Macintosh computer running System 8.0 or later. No Japanese operating system is necessary. Games go slowly on earlier models of Macintoshes. (G3 machines are recommended.)
This is Kanji Invader version 1.1. (A bug on the counter for remaining items has been fixed.)
Last update 11/4/2000 by Kazumi Hatasa.