Learning Chinese is difficult but this game does it's best to ease the journey, albeit not that well...

User Rating: 6 | My Chinese Coach DS
My Chinese Coach is another installment of educational games for the Nintendo DS. Ubisoft has already released many other games in the My Coach series. The first had My French Coach and My Spanish Coach. They've also just recently released the advanced levels for the previous two languages and a few others like My Japanese Coach.

The basis of the game is to Learn Chinese but the name is a tad misleading. Chinese has many dialects. Mandarin is the one spoken by most Chinese but in overseas communities, where you might try to use your newly acquired language skills, is Cantonese. The game doesn't make this distinction and this starting point is a large failure. Even ignoring this, the game makes another error by not making the distinction between the written characters. There are two different Chinese Character sets. They are either Traditional or Simplified but the game only gives you the choice of simplified. This is again problematic because though simplified is used in Mainland China, it is not used much in southern China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singpore or Taiwan. To simply not mention this is very troubling.

Ignoring these initial issues, My Chinese Coach, approaches the game exactly the same way as the other games in the series. You learn through a series of mini games and you can only advance by getting enough points to prove that you have learned what the words are. One of the key things about Mandarin Chinese, are the tones. There are four tones but sometimes the game doesn't do a great job of distinguishing them. Without knowing the tones, it's basically impossible to really learn which words are what.

Although the game does have a sound recorder feature, it's fairly useless if the tones are not accurate and if the user hasn't learned the distinctions. It's like telling someone to study the last chapter of the book without reading the first chapter. It can be dangerous and lead to very poor learning habits.

Games include the same assortment from the previous games such as hitting moles with the correct word or multiple choice or memory games. The only real distinction in this game is the fading characters game. Writing the Chinese characters is no simple task for many simply because there are thousands of them and it is not an alphabet. Another problem, is the stroke order. You can write the word, but without the correct stroke order, the game will not accept it and it will be wrong. What was also annoying was the fact, that sometimes, even with the correct stroke order, it can not detect it at times and it won't accept it until you tap the screen one more time. It's annoying and it seems that this aspect of the game doesn't work well at all.

The game also have a reference option to look up some common phrases if you're really not that interested in learning. I really wouldn't recommend that people go to Mainland China and take this game with them to travel as there are far too many subtleties of the language that take years to master for most people.

In the end, My Chinese Coach is not very polished. It has hundreds of lessons and quite a few mini games to play, but it doesn't focus on a lot of the basics it needs to and learning Chinese this way is going to be very difficult. It's good in short bursts but don't think you'll learn Mandarin quickly or accurately as much as you might need. Take a class instead but what can you really expect for thirty dollars anyways?