Recently a thread was started about flashcards and they will ruining Nintendo because of piracy (http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=10746). I have a flashcard, but I didn't pirate any DS game. What's the Flashcard for? Homebrew-software. It makes my DS even more valuable. I use DSOrganize, that takes notes, has a calendar and stuff like that. http://www.dragonminded.com/?loc=ndsdev/DSOrganize Licks Media Player is a MP3-Player that wants to look like an IPod. http://www.cecm.usp.br/~lucas/lmp-ng/ And some good homebrew games are also available. Not the same quality as commercial games, but nice enough. A touch of war is a simple realtime-strategy. http://www.atouchofwar.com/AToW.php Meteora is ... a don't know, but it uses the DS-features very good. http://meteora.lo2k.net/ Twin Isles is a nice strategy-game: http://h4ck3r.net/ If you can read german, the site http://www.homebrewwelt.com/ points to some homebrew. Do you have recommendations? I learn chinese and japanese and I think with the stylus you could learn Hanzi/Kanji very well, do someone know a program to learn this? Or another good and useful program for the DS?

Nobody has a recommendation for me? Hmm. One thing to note: If you want to write software for the DS yourself, try this tutorial: http://www.dev-scene.com/NDS/Tutorials

wow some nifty stuff there. A Touch Of War looks good. Sorry no reccomendations ive never tried anything like that.

I too learn Japanese with my Nintendo DS and there is a plethora of software packages for that... Here is what I recommend:

1) 漢字そのままDS楽引辞典: This is a dictionary software for the DS, For more information, go here

2) 250万人の漢検: If your goal is to simply read kanji, this software is great, but if you want to also learn how to write kanji, this software is a must have. More info can be found here

Here is a review for 200万人の漢検 (the first game).

3) なぞっておぼえる大人の漢字練習: here is what someone wrote about it:

I am very impressed with this title. At first, it seemed a bit spartan compared to the 200万人 title below, but I prefer it A LOT over that one now. Although you may need to trial-and-error your way through menus (well, on any of these titles), this one seems to be faster-action, and better for practice as a replacement for paper-based practice. More repetitions per minute. And it has some really cool vocabulary in some mini-games (my favourite is the weather report vocab). I haven't come close to seeing the levelling of the kanji, but I think this will help anybody from starting level up to the end of the Joyou kanji.

You may want to hold a little, though, since the sequel is coming out soon

4) 正しい漢字かきとりくん: This game, originally designed for Japanese elementary school students will help you learn the first 1,006 characters (including stroke order) of Grade 1 thru 6. I believe it also has a mode that will rate your Kanji writing abilities and, of course, drills that would help you memorize them Kanji.

So even without any prior knowledge in Kanji, you will find this piece of software pretty useful, hopefully! A sequel is also coming out.

There are many, many more software packages out there. You can visit this specialized blog for more info on learning games on the NDS:

Naruhodo!

I don't have my DS with me at the moment, but a great homebrew game I can recall was "AmplituDS". The gameplay is JUST like the PS2 games, but I find it to have a much simpler learning curve and just easier in general. Still, it has some nice tunes.

I used to have a plethora of homebrew stuff, but most of it was run down and not worth the 256k-1mb per program (which says a lot).

Thanks alot for pointing me to this program. I'm not sure if these are all released here in Germany, but I have to take a look. In the shops I never saw a Kanji-program. Thanks also for the blog, it looks interesting.

Well, you normally have to get those from Japan (or from Internet shops like Play-Asia.com)