Japanese lessons

James York, an English teacher and language acquisition PhD student, releases a Japanese course called Kotoba Miners using Minecraft as a classroom. The lessons involve various objectives which require players to read and speak to each other in Japanese to progress in the game. York says this is more beneficial than traditional classrooms for gaining fluency because it forces players to interact in Japanese:

The biggest advantage for Kotoba Miners is the fact that people can log in from all around the world at the same time and connect with other Japanese learners and actually practice SPEAKING the language. The majority of students that come to Kotoba Miners that have been studying Japanese in the past invariably say something along the lines of: “I’ve been studying Japanese for a while, but I’ve never actually spoken it…”