A DS is cheaper then an eeepc and I wouldn't be suprised if the material was better/more stimulating as well.

you might as well say teachers should fear computers because they will take their jobs.

i for one welcome out new nintento based overlords

or am i the only one that sees all this DS based teaching as part of the RotM

All your base are belong to us...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base

Dave

P.S. Mine's the one with the pictograms on the back.

Make well and happy studious in harmonious language!

Nintendo ediicate success with most excited training legimen, never to make doredom. Studious will be engage in repeats of english trial to sure complete mastermind of idiotic english languages.

If there's anyone who reads El Reg and didn't already know 'All your base' i'll eat my hat.

And wikipeida is a horrible thing to link to!

Random p.s. It seems wikipedia isn't part of the Firefox spell checker. Thank god for that.

albeit with slightly fewer interactive logic puzzles and martial arts

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.)

It is very common for English-speaking people to use the DS to learn Japanese. Lots of software packages for those kinds of things. They are being replaced by mobile phones now though.

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.

I use some of the higher level English Teaching software for Japanese students to work on my Japanese, as it also teaches correct kanji stroke order via the touch screen. It is very handy as a dictionary, even though a lot of it is well beyond me at this point.

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.

As an aside, those particular games are aimed at a very specific market and there are probably dozens of increadibly boring versions, versions with giant robots, versions with gay guys and versions with a fantasy warrior theme.