Experdize Japanese Doctor - Applied

How to play: this is a language game wearing a Japanese 診療所. You are the 先生, and you are not running the surgery — the surgery runs itself: she walks to the couch, the monitor, the laboratory bench and the medicine cabinet on her own, and files cards at reception and washes her hands when nobody is waiting. What you do is read Japanese and answer two questions for every patient.

Take as long as you like. There is no time limit and nothing to beat the clock to: a session is 10 questions, and it ends the moment you answer the last one. One question is up at a time, and the whole surgery stands still whenever anybody is talking — nobody walks, nobody comes in and no patience bar moves — so you can read every line as slowly as you need. If a row of answers is up, choosing one starts the surgery again; if there is no row — she says she is on it, somebody grumbles, somebody says thank you — tap the play button on the speech bubble when you have finished reading it. The stopwatch at the top counts up rather than down: it is your result, not your deadline, and your fastest run at each session is kept.

1 — What is wrong with them? A patient describes their symptoms: 飲み込むとひりひり痛みます。 — “it really burns when I swallow.” Pick the diagnosis off the row along the bottom. ⚠ Half the complaints name the illness and half only describe it, so you cannot get through by matching words alone. And the wrong answers are not random, they are the mistakes worth making once: 頭痛 headache, 腹痛 stomach ache, 腰痛 back pain and 歯痛 toothache — four compounds that all END in the same character and all read -tsuu, so the only thing telling them apart is the first one. Pick the wrong one and she is not stopped: she examines for it, finds it is not that, and walks back to look again — which costs her the trip, in front of you.

⚠ And one character has two readings in one room.薬 on its own is kusuri and the same character inside a compound is yaku — 薬局yakkyoku, the dispensary you are standing in. Japanese does this everywhere and there is no rule that decides it: the reading is part of the word rather than part of the character, so a learner who has “learned the kanji” still cannot say the sign over the door. The romaji under each line is where you check it, and on 上級 it is not there.

2 — What do you prescribe? She examines and asks herself 患者さんは喉の炎症ですね。何を出しましょうか。 — “the patient has a sore throat; what shall I prescribe?” Pick the medicine. ⚠ One idea is written four different ways on this row: 解熱剤 ends in -zai, 胃薬 in 薬, 抗生物質 in “substance”, and 痛み止め is a plain native phrase meaning “pain-stopper”. Two more are katakana loanwords (咳止めシロップ, ギプス). Four of the twelve are not medicines at all (点滴 a drip, ギプス a plaster cast, 包帯 a dressing, 安静 rest).

⚠ The politeness is in the verb, and it is not optional. Vietnamese ends a line to a senior with ạ; Japanese conjugates. Every patient here speaks in です・ます because a doctor is 先生 — 痛みます and never 痛い on its own — and dropping to the plain form is exactly as discourteous as leaving the Vietnamese particle off. It is the mistake an English speaker makes without noticing, because English marks none of it.

The sessions are the words, and the waiting room is the session. They climb together. The Difficulty row is how much of each line is written: 初級 writes the romaji and the English under every line, 中級 the romaji alone, 上級 the Japanese with nothing under it. The Session row is who is in the waiting room and what can be wrong with them: session 1 is ゆきさん and 健太さん with fevers, coughs and aches; session 2 brings 翔太くん, sore throats and flu; session 3 佐藤のおばあさん, cuts, dizziness and toothache; session 4 あかりちゃん, food poisoning and allergies; and session 5 田中のおじいさん, broken bones and blood pressure. From session 3 what was said fades a few seconds later — tap whoever said it to hear it again, free but for the time, which is the one tap left on the floor. And somebody is sent down the corridor for a blood test and comes back with the slip.

You cannot lose a session. Somebody who waits too long gives up and goes to the pharmacy instead — that costs you the care and your streak, and they say so — but nothing ends the session except answering its last question. What varies is your time and how many you got right.