Sashingo: Learn Japanese With Photography has a simple premise that you can certainly surmise from the title. In this game you’re dropped into a miniature version of Shibuya, Tokyo carrying around a camera. You’re free to explore of your own accord, but are only armed with a small polaroid camera. Whenever you capture photos, the camera focuses on a singular object in frame and gives you the Japanese words and the accompanying Hiragana/Katakana letters. There aren’t real goals, but you are encouraged to discover all the words across the map and collect these photos into your album.
I think the free-flow nature of Sashingo is a fun and creative approach to teach players basic Japanese words and phrases. You can choose to take a small exam where the game shows you a word and you need to go out and find that particular object. It’s a pretty fun method of combining exploration with learning a real-life language. The game does a good job in this particular educational approach. Words are spoken clearly for the player and there’s an extensive manual that teaches more applicable phrases that you can practice to communicate in basic Japanese. In a sense, I found it more involved than Duolingo. While Duolingo is a pretty good learning tool, I’d hesitate to call it fun. Sashingo makes learning and practicing the words a lot more player-friendly. It does not feel like you are being graded and you have a lot more control over the way in which you pick and choose the vocabulary you wish to expand.
While I’ve always had a love for Japan and visited the country multiple times, the language will always remain a barrier. I’ve picked up Duolingo and my partner has taken quite a few courses learning Japanese. But the real challenge with learning a language is daily practice and being “forced” to speak it. That tends to be the only way you can improve your skills. Sashingo sits between a rock and a hard place; the game just does not feel like a great starting point to learn Japanese. While, yes, it does use proper educational methods to teach Japanese words, it lacks certain basics and especially interactions to give a good sense of how the Japanese language is used. The manual goes a bit more in depth on these situations, but that comes down to reading and hearing voice clips speaking particular phrases. It makes it hard for that way of learning to stick, since the game itself doesn’t reinforce it.
However, I was pleasantly surprised that my partner loved watching me play the game and helping out with learning the words. As she has a very (very) basic understanding of Japanese thanks to her courses, she immediately knew what bottles, bicycles, traffic lights and cars were, but also liked learning about words that’d never come up in her classes such as construction site, garbage bin and cardboard box. At this intersection, Sashingo shines in particular, as a supplementary material to expand vocabulary, but also as a fun interactive practice tool. The “game” aspect is a bit undercooked, and while you can shoot with a lot of different filters–which you can buy after successfully completing a test–there aren’t a lot of ways to express your own photographic style. There is a very good zoom and focus feature, but no way to tilt the camera or take selfies. It makes the game feel a bit distant and grounds it more as an educational tool, which can be a bit lacking for those who like photography games, such as myself.
Sashingo: Learn Japanese with Photography could be a great supplemental tool if you’re already working on learning Japanese. Its cute artstyle and miniature version of Shibuya is fun to explore and allows you to learn and discover a ton of Japanese words, but it falls a bit short as a full method to learn Japanese and as a photography videogame. Still, on your flight to Japan this is a fun way to learn a few words and phrases that you can put into practice when you’re there.
