Practice speaking Japanese with AI

What Japanese conversation practice looks like here

You choose a game and a difficulty and start talking, out loud through your microphone or by typing. The game runs as a small 3D world in your browser, and you walk up to the characters and talk to them in your own words, with no answer buttons to choose from.

In the dungeon game you're locked up with an old prisoner, a nervous merchant, a bored guard and a ghost who treats every sentence like a stage performance. There are three ways out. You can bribe the guard, flatter the ghost into helping you, or crack a three-number combination. None of them works unless you can say it in Japanese.

How the characters adjust to you

On beginner the characters use simple Japanese, speak slowly and lead the conversation. If you go quiet, they give you a hint without being asked. When you get something wrong, they repeat what you meant, correctly, and carry on.

Say you're in the bomb game, with the timer running, and you need wire-cutters. You manage something like "ワイヤー、切るもの、ほしいです". The seller answers "ワイヤーカッターですね。はい、こちらです。" and hands them over. Now you know the word, and you heard it used in a normal sentence.

Characters gesture, change expression and hold up what they're talking about. The guard shakes his head when he means no, which helps a lot in a language where a refusal can be indirect. Intermediate uses more natural Japanese and only hints when you ask. Advanced drops hints and corrections, and everyone speaks at full native speed. You can change each setting on its own, even in the middle of a game.

Polite speech, casual speech and keigo

Most courses start with the です and ます forms, so a lot of learners end up speaking politely to everyone. That's a safe choice with the guard, who will probably talk to you in blunt plain form anyway. The ghost is different. A theatrical ghost wants to feel important, and that is what keigo is for, so something like "幽霊様、どうかお力をお貸しいただけないでしょうか" is a far better pitch than a plain "手伝って".

If you pick the wrong register, the game carries on, because the AI judges what you meant and a clumsy sentence that gets the point across still counts. The ghost will react to your honorific and humble forms, though, so you can hear whether they worked.

Listening to Japanese at real speed

Japanese you hear in conversation is heavily contracted. ている becomes てる, のだ becomes んだ, てしまう turns into ちゃう, and whole syllables vanish when people talk fast. If you learned from a textbook, this is often the reason you can read a sentence but miss it when you hear it.

Beginner mode keeps speech slow and clear. On advanced you hear the speed and register a native speaker would actually use. Every line can be replayed and you control the pace, so the sentence that went past too fast can be heard again as many times as you need.

When your Japanese runs out

On beginner and intermediate you can answer in English. The character understands and replies in Japanese, so the scene carries on and you hear how they would have said it. You can also turn on an interpreter panel, response suggestions or hints, each one separately.

Any line can be saved to your notes, and every playthrough is added to them when you finish. If a pattern keeps tripping you up, the site's free Japanese grammar walkthrough explains it properly.

New accounts get enough free credits for one full game. After that there's a monthly plan or a credit pack that never expires, and play costs about one credit per minute.