Japanese Basic: Hold a Conversation

How to play: you are a stranger meeting a stranger, and the whole conversation happens in Japanese — every word of it drawn from the Basic lesson you learned in class. Japanese partner speaks each line out loud — Japanese on the card, with the pronunciation guide and English underneath at the easier difficulties — and you pick the reply that fits from four choices. A right reply wins a heart; a wrong one shows you the line that would have worked, teaches why, and the moment comes back around later, so every conversation ends well however it goes. There is no losing and no time limit; the clock only remembers how long the conversation took, and the hearts how smoothly you held it.

Level and Difficulty are two different rows. The Level row is where on the Basic lesson scale the next scene sits — the same levels the course wall is divided into, numbered the same way. Each level plays the scene the lesson has reached: the lesson's early levels open the first conversations, and from level three the story holds at its fullest while the lesson keeps going. The three difficulties are how much of each line is written down: Beginner puts the romaji and the English under every sentence, Intermediate the romaji alone, Advanced the characters with nothing under them. The difficulty is a free choice at every level. It is the applied rung of the Japanese course — play the In Class lesson first, and every word here will already be yours.