(Continued from Page One)

by Greg Jewell

On the whole, the main menu screen is thoughtfully conceived and displays easy instructions for getting started. The Grammar Highlights are also accessed from this point. However, because the games are represented solely by picture buttons, some of which are opaque in meaning and/or similar in appearance, it can be difficult to know what a game does without consulting the user's manual. A few of the game names themselves are puzzlers ("Jump!" in particular). It would therefore help to have pop-up balloons that briefly explain each game before the user commits to one by clicking.

Yet the need for help balloons becomes even more obvious when a game starts. The unlabeled buttons in each game too often call for a timeout with the user's manual. The conversations, short though they are, will take even longer to master as a user because their many features mean even more buttons. Fortunately, the manual is clearly and concisely written and explains the icons in each game, but thorough on-line help would better keep the learner "in the game" from the beginning.

The games and pronunciation practice features are for the most part impressive, although a few are underdeveloped or overly demanding. This review will evaluate most of the games at each level.

Level I Games
All of the Level I games have both practice and play modes for Listening Comprehension. In practice mode, the user clicks on an image to hear its corresponding word or phrase. "Concentration," "Memory Mania," and "BINGO" get their images from the same "visual dictionary" of a given subject area. The "Food & Drink" dictionary contains about 75 items; other subject dictionaries range from about 50 to over 100. In similar point-and-click fashion, "Match Up!" and "City Map" teach locative expressions, "Family Tree" teaches kinship terms, "Sketch Artist" and "Jigsaw Puzzle" teach body parts, and "Jump!", "At Play" and "At Home" teach a small number of activity verbs and "prepositional phrases" (user's manual, p. 36; but there are no prepositions in Japanese!).

Most games teach well, but not the final three. "Jump" ('tobu') attempts to teach present progressive and simple past tense comprehension by inflecting 'tobu' compound verbs (e.g., 'tobikomu,' to dive). While compound verbs are common in Japanese, using one at this level to teach basic verb endings is poor pedagogy. Even though the lesson focus is on form, the learner will attend to meaning as well--meanings that are too subtle in this case. Visually, we see boys jumping in various ways, but the differences just aren't clear from sight and speech alone (nor is the animation smooth enough). The user needs a written explanation, but none is available from any resource in the TriplePlayPlus! package.

In stark contrast to "Jump!", "At Play" and "At Home" are easy for all but the earliest beginner. In the first, the user practices by clicking on children to hear their activities, but there are only a few simple ones (walking and eating ice cream, for example). In play mode, one is asked to click on a child doing a particular action. It only takes a dab of basic vocabulary to achieve the goal of getting all children to board a boat and sail unevenly away. "At Home" is similarly unchallenging; clicking on six open apartment windows orally teaches the single activity visible in each. Play mode is a brief game of activity verb "Concentration." The window shades go down and the user clicks the correct one from the spoken prompt. There's not much to learn here.

The other games offer much more learning and enjoyment. In "BINGO," the user selects a set of 25 items from the visual dictionary to practice from and one of two levels of difficulty. The easy level involves clicking on an item uttered in a prompt; there is no mistake penalty and one wins upon correctly identifying all items in a row, column, or diagonal line. The harder level puts an X over a wrong choice and the computer could win. "Concentration" also lets the user choose a dictionary set, with difficulty levels of six or nine items put in an order the user must remember; the items are then hidden and must be clicked on from differently ordered prompts. "Memory Mania" is similar in concept to "Concentration" but requires dragging and dropping three to five items into their originally displayed order. A particularly valuable use of "BINGO" and "Memory Mania" is practice with Hiragana or Katakana characters or words when in Reading Comprehension.

Japanese numbers from 1 to 10,000 can also be practiced with these games; however, it's a shame that more complex numbers (e.g., 969, 5,251, 5,215) aren't included. Being able to comprehend and pronounce longer numbers is a requisite skill by the intermediate level.

"Match Up!" is good practice with common locative expressions. Looking at a picture of a kitchen or living room with red cards strewn about, the user hears an expression (e.g, 'Midori no tairu no ue desu' - It's on the green tile), then clicks on the correct card. Every pair of correct turns results in two matching cards, equaling a point. Missing twice gives the computer a point. As always, the spoken feedback is in polite Japanese. However, the settings are very American (the kitchen oven in particular). This would have been a good opportunity to include things more common to Japan, such as a kotatsu table, tatami mats, husuma doors, and a rice cooker.

"City Map" is well designed. The learner's task is to follow spoken prompts in order to move a car to a destination on a map. Listening options include: 1. left/right or N-S-E-W orientations, and 2. step-by-step prompting or all directions given at once. There is one point of confusion: in practice mode, one may hear the opposite direction when clicking one side of the left/right icon because the car, rather than the user, always determines the orientation.

"Sketch Artist" is another winner in listening comprehension. A face is shown for about eight seconds, then must be reconstructed through selection and drag & drop of parts to an empty face. With five faces to practice on, there is ample review of face parts and adjectives for them. "Jigsaw Puzzle" expands to whole-body assembly. Both games come under the "People & Clothing" subject area, which unfortunately lacks the verbs for putting things on different parts of the body (e.g., 'kaburu' for headwear and 'haku' for things below the waist).

"Family Tree" provides solid listening practice in three levels (immediate family only, parents' siblings and their children added, and extended to grandparents). In play mode, one person is circled and relatives must be clicked on according to prompts. The person circled changes often, and the game doesn't end until all persons have been covered.

Speech Recognition is available in "Bingo," "City Map," "Country Map," "At Play," "At Home," and the body part games--depending on the subject area. The practice and play modes are uniformly structured across these games, so learning the software in one will transfer to others. In each practice mode, the user clicks on an item, hears the pronunciation, then is prompted to repeat it into the microphone. If acceptable, a chime plays; if not, a low buzz is heard. Each play mode can be done as "two choices," in which the user hears a question and the choices and then must say the correct one; with "four choices," only the question is heard and the choices are presented visually. This approach is a sound one for learners who know the lexis well enough that they can focus on meeting the strict pronunciation criteria in the Speech Recognition component.

Still, the chances of getting one's pronunciation accepted are greater with the Level I individual words than with the longer phrases and complete utterances in the higher-level games. Although page 6 of the user's manual recommends Level I games for "accent reduction" because the pronunciation models are "tuned more closely for the shorter responses," reduction of accent is actually more critical in longer Japanese pitch-accent patterns. In any case, length of utterance has an inverse relationship to acceptability by this program, even though the user's manual goes on to claim that Level II phrases and Level III sentences are "tuned . . . so as to accept any reasonable pronunciation."

Level II Games
Most of these games do indeed build on the vocabulary learned in Level I. In Listening Comprehension, they involve hearing a description or a question, then choosing a correct answer. "What Food Is It?" uses the familiar BINGO format, but the learner clicks on an item based on three spoken clues. "What Is It?" gives two clues for finding an object in a room. "Who Is It?" gives three for selecting a person. All of the Level II games include buttons for repeating instructions, separate clues, or all clues together.

"What Number Is It?" practices cardinal numbers with a blackboard, and time telling with a digital clock. In both parts, a set of numbers is displayed, the prompt is spoken, and the learner drags numbers from the set to the correct spots on the object to complete each turn. It's very good for beginners.

"When Is It?" is more of a Level I & II hybrid. It shows a calendar with one picture of an activity on each day of the week. The learner then listens to a description of an activity and clicks the date on which it is pictured. At the second difficulty level, the prompts are events that occur before and after the target date. Although one might think that the learning focus here is days and dates, practice is with activity words, days of the week only, and "yesterday" and "tomorrow." This game does do better for teaching activity verbs than those already described in Level I. It is the only Level II game that includes a practice section. What is not included anywhere in this software, though, is solid practice with years, months, dates, and other common time expressions.

Finally, the "Word Building Game" (Reading Comprehension only) provides an engaging way to take Kana word learning in Level I BINGO to the next level. At each turn, a picture from the visual dictionary is displayed along with a few Kana characters. The object is to drag characters into boxes to form the word that matches the picture. The characters can be clicked on to hear their pronunciations. The three skill levels comprise words of up to three, five, and seven characters. 10 turns make a complete round, which can be made more challenging by setting an optional timer.

Level III Games
Although conversation can be a game, calling these six short dialogues "games" might seem a stretch beyond formal lexicography. However, they do have practice and play modes, the latter of which have shortcomings. The conversations are presented in lively cartoons of eight or nine frames, each containing a speaking turn by two of the characters in it. The reviewer's favorite is the humorous "Looking for an Apartment," in which a potential tenant is shocked by the condition of the apartment she visits.

"At The Market" -- full-screen view (129K jpg)

The practice modes for listening and reading are one and the same. The user can click on buttons to hear the entire conversation, a single speaking turn, or individual words (displayed in Kana). By default, the speech rate is natural, but either the whole conversation or a single turn can be heard at slow speed by clicking on the appropriate "turtle" button. "Turtle" speed is very slow, though not much lower in pitch, and will be appreciated by beginners.

Listening Comprehension play mode should only be attempted after becoming familiar with the conversation, and might still prove frustrating. It involves clicking on blank conversation balloons outside of the cartoon, hearing the turn the balloon contains (mouse button kept down), then dragging the blank balloon to its correct place in the cartoon. This might sound intriguing, but it is all rushed by a fast-moving timer that is neither optional nor adjustable. The more wrist-friendly approach of letting the user simply click each prompt and cartoon balloon would have been better.

Reading Comprehension play mode is based on the two difficulty levels of reordering the scrambled Kana words of a speaking turn, with either word-by-word feedback (right/wrong) or feedback delayed until the whole phrase is finished. The degree to which this is challenging, however, will depend on a turn's length; some turns have only two words!

Speech Recognition practice mode consists of two kinds of pronunciation evaluation, although the manual doesn't make this immediately clear. One is evaluation by the computer after clicking a balloon, hearing the turn, then repeating it into the microphone. The other is self-evaluation, in which the user clicks a balloon, hears the turn, clicks a record button, speaks, then manually terminates recording. To self-evaluate, there are three buttons: one to play the model, one to play the learner's recorded voice, and one that automatically plays back the model then the learner. Although recording for self-evaluation isn't as easy to do, it may be less frustrating than trying to get past the stringent rate, rhythm, and articulation requirements of the first option, particularly on a long turn. Speech that would be comprehensible to a native speaker might still not pass muster here.

Play mode puts the user in the role of the second person in each frame of the conversation. This is a neat idea, but there's an added complication: the user must first always select the correct response to make from two or four choices. While it may be interesting to do it this way, it should have been made optional, since hearing the choices constantly interrupts the natural flow of the conversation. Even so, the fastidious nature of the computerized speech judge might make it too hard to get past frame one.

Finally, the Grammar Highlights section contains some good explanations, but like the games is something of a mixed bag. The best of its 14 sections are "Common Expressions" (19 in all, with audio), "Particles," "Verbs," "Adjectives," and "Numbers." "Pronunciation" would fare better with audio demonstrations of pitch-accent and contrastive consonant and vowel length.

The less impressive sections are too brief and contain a couple of misleading statements. In "Nouns" the reader is told that "If you are unsure about how to make a noun plural, use 'takusan' (many) before the verb." The fact is, Japanese nouns cannot be made plural. 'Takusan' is a quantifier, not a pluralizer. As with the (non-existent) "prepositional phrases" of Japanese pointed out earlier, this is another stumble into the trap of explaining the grammar of one language in terms of another.

From a language learning standpoint, TriplePlay Plus! has a good deal going for it, but there are some minuses. It excels in listening comprehension and vocabulary development, and does well in Kana reading instruction and practice. It is, however, weak in grammar practice and provides explanations of uneven quality. Its greatest overall disappointment is the difficulty of its pronunciation training.