
well
A DS is cheaper then an eeepc and I wouldn't be suprised if the material was better/more stimulating as well.
Japanese teachers might feel a little uneasy about their job security, as one of the country’s schools has begun trialling Nintendo’s DS console as a way of teaching kids to read and write English. DS_school_Japan A Japanese student learns English with her DS Image courtesy Reuters According to a report by Reuters, Japan' …
It's simply computer aided learning with a tool that spurs the kids' interest. Good thing. It will not be a substitute for a good teacher though.
When I was a kid, I learned *a lot* of English by playing games. If I wanted to know what was going on, I had to understand the language. This was before each and every game was localized. Along this line—long long ago(tm)—it also helped that games actually featured text instead of voice. Next time when someone inquires about "where" I learned English I might answer "on Monkey Island" *arrrr*
Isn't the obligatory Sony PSP mention missing?
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/04/03/PSP_to_be_used_in_schools/1
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/sony-unveils-new-education-initiative
http://www.nforcershq.com/uk-school-trials-sony-psp-as-academic-tool/
The fun part is that these stories are more than a year old now...There, that's better. Oh, wait, I feel another more balanced link coming on...
Education on handhelds! (DS, PSP and Windows CE PDA)
http://www.sums.co.uk/
Not nearly as much fun as a story about Japanese school girls is it?
Paris, because she'd know what to do with a handheld in a classroom. (I can't believe I just wrote that.)
Can someone make this available to people in the US? It would be nice to hear English around these parts again. Not only that, but we could massively reduce governmental waste of our tax dollars by removing the "necessity" of translating and printing government documents in multiple languages. I find it quite sad that countries who do not use English as a first language have a greater percentage of English-speaking citizens than the US (or at least large portions thereof).
I follow the new games that come out.
My conclusion; WTF!? Here's a couple of English teaching games for the DS, available in Japan (Yes, these are real, and NSFW):
http://kotaku.com/5011773/another-moe-english-ds-with-game-promo-video
http://kotaku.com/5011297/ds-game-teaches-english-with-jailbait
I'm feeling kind of dizzy imagining what the girls versions are like.
in this case it's no bad thing: English tuition in Japan is legendarily bad. Most teachers can't speak the language, and pronunciation is usually mangled to fit katakana. This is why most Japanese students end up with an excellent grasp of English grammar, but can't speak or understand spoken English.
What the hell? My experiance of the Japanese and Japan (and that of a number of Western English teachers I met) is that they tend to have a wonderfully wide vocabulary but absolutely no concept of English grammer. Which makes drunken conversations relatively fluid as with a bit of hand waving, their vocabulary and our basic grasp of Japanese you can get past most things.
Also we discovered that shady looking youths in caps were often the ones who knew the most English grammer.
@As a DS Fan
Heeey it's Moe-tan/Pen-chan that's such a retarded series, but the duck was funny.
I taught in summer schools for several years, and agree Japanese and Arabian teaching of spoken English is pretty poor, a bit like French taught in GB/US. The Nintendo will fix part of this, by providing correct sound patterns, but will not provide talking practice. That part, I approached by, for example, trying to get students to butt into an argument - though they were really too polite for our lifestyle, which worked against my purpose.