I’ve been wanting to learn the 百人一首 for a while, mainly because I like learning really obscure shit, and this is the perfect game for it! The 百人一首 is a collection of 100 famous poems. Each poem is written on a card, and this card game is played by many Japanese as part of New Years festivities. How the game works is, each poem is broken up into a top part and bottom part. The bottom parts are on cards, and spread out on the floor, kind of like Memory. Everyone sits on the floor by the cards. Someone reads the top parts of the poem aloud, and the players have to beat each other to find match the bottom part first!

So anyway, this game teaches you mnemonic devices in order to learn the poems. It takes the first character or few from both the top and bottom parts of the poem to make a silly phrase that will make it easy to remember. They also have silly pictures to make it even easier! You have an opportunity to memorize each phrase or picture, and then the game will quiz you in groups of 5 poems. If you pass the quizzes, you will then move on to compete against a lady wearing old school Japanese robes and speaking old school Japanese!!

In another mode, you can just compete against 5 different people (all dressed and speaking accordingly old school).

Another cool mode, is that you can have the DS randomly choose poems to read aloud, and if you have a set of 百人一首 cards, you can play along!

Only very advanced learners of Japanese would be able to benefit from this game, in my opinion.