As a long time Japanese learner, I always wanted there to be a simple online trainer for learning kana, Kanji and vocabulary - like Anki, but for the web. Originally, I created the website for personal use simply as a better alternative to kana pro and realkana, and as an alternative to Chase Colburn’s Kanji Study app, because Kanji Study was pretty complicated for me to use as a beginner and didn’t have a simpler way of just grinding Kanji like you can grind the kana on kana pro.
I’m doing this because I grew tired of all the subscriptions and paywalls. I want to make the most user-friendly, customizable, aesthetic and fun platform for learning Japanese currently available. Accessible to all, fully open-source and free forever - and driven not by profit, but made by the community, for the community.
We already have more than 30+ active contributors from all over the world, and we really want to make the first definitive 100% free, open-source platform for learning Japanese - in contrast to most other apps for learning Japanese, which are often paid and monetized aggressively.
If you’re interested, you can check it out here: https://kanadojo.com/ ^ ^
GitHub if you’re a dev and interested in contributing: https://github.com/lingdojo/kana-dojo
The app is still in its early alpha stages - but with your help, we can make it even better and give the Japanese learning community its first completely free, open-source and community-driven learning platform! どうもありがとうございます!
I gotta ask, why is that there are tons of dedicated open source tools for Japanese but not for other languages?
The Venn diagram of weebs and FOSS devs is a circle.
I think it goes something like: you spend nearly all of your time on the English speaking part of the internet - > for English speakers Japanese is one of the hardest languages you can choose to learn - > people want strong tools and resources to help learn it.
Couple that with the reach and popularity of Japanese media and boom.
Yep, I think that pretty much nails it. The combination of being super popular in the West, plus difficult with lots of info to memorize, organize, and analyze. Tons of people try to learn it, and find it difficult enough that they think, ‘if only I had a tool that could show me the parts of the Kanji this way, or that could display flashcards that way’. So there’s this super rich ecosystem of learning material.
Makes sense.
Though it is possible that with the sentence
“you spend nearly all of your time on the english speaking part of the internet”
You could be implying there is another part of the internet where open source language learning tools for other languages are as readily available as those for Japanese. If that is the case, could you guide me towards that?
I think it’s possible, but I don’t personally know. I started with that point/assumption because “Japanese is a hard language to learn” isn’t generally true, but is true for English (only) speakers.