Karuta App Training

While the Competitive Karuta ONLINE app is far from a substitute for actual karuta, I personally feel it can still be useful as practice if used in the right way. For that, here are some tips/guidelines on how it can and can’t be useful:

CPU Games: Aside from being a tool to initially learn karuta without the stress of having an experienced player simply take cards from you before you have a chance, the hard level CPU is actually quite fast and can be used to practice playing under pressure. As it consistently takes cards quickly and does not make fouls/otetsuki, it may be considered a decent benchmark for your ability to memorize and hear cards. You can also adjust the game values so that the opponent has less cards or you have more, if you want an extra challenge.

However, the app is not useful at all in the physical/motion-based aspects of the game, so it’s important to not fuss too much over trying to swipe or tap with your finger quickly compared to the other aspects of the game that you can practice:

• memorizing quickly and effectively
• strengthening your mental stability when a card is taken from you or you are notably behind*
• focusing and listening to the poems as closely as possible
• taking cards in the “end-game” quickly, e.g. by doing small, quick games of 4v4

*As a personal anecdote of sorts, the CPU would often crush me and I would grow very frustrated when it did, especially since it would often be because I thought I touched a card but missed, or it “stole” the card in the moment it was being sent out of the playing field, but the good thing is that you can always rematch the CPU, so that energy you might have spent being upset vs. a human player can simply be redirected into trying again and seeing what you can improve on.

The Flashcards Mini-game: Please see this post for how to use the app to help practice recognizing poems quicker

Branching Paths Mini-game: Although this mini-game takes some of the game’s currency system (“points”, I believe, which you can purchase for a cheap price) to unlock, it is a very good mini-game in my opinion. It allows you to practice taking cards in a sudden-death-like showdown (though sometimes with 3 cards), forcing you to distinguish between the unique syllables of friend cards as quickly as possible.

In doing so, you can practice cards of certain syllable lengths to get better at them, become more familiar with the poems, and measure just how quickly you can recognize cards when there are only 2-3 cards on the field (almost no memorization). In other words, if you feel that your hearing needs work or that you make a lot of fouls, practicing in this mode may help you.

Online Practice: Though online practice can be scary and nerve-wracking—especially with strangers—it is always good to get used to playing against other people, who will be much less predictable than the CPU. Apparently the best time to find ranked matches is at night time in Japan’s timezone, but you can also join the Online Karuta Practice group (see Other Resources) and practice with the players there if you are interested.

Overall Practice Idea: In the end, I feel that the most important part of practicing is to implement spaced repetition—do a little bit of practice ever day, or at least a few times a week, and don’t stress out over trying to get better quickly, but still make an effort to improve when you do play. If you do this, the poems should become more familiar, it should be easier to hear them, and hopefully your confidence will also increase, and you can transfer that sense of hearing, mentality, and the common elements of strategy between the simple app version of the game and the real thing, so that you can make the most out of what may be fairly limited opportunities to play vs. real people.