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!
Finally sat down and played with this a little. Super smooth, thank you for publishing! Absolutely love that I don’t have to sign in to get started.
Some first impressions: I wish I could tell it that I already know the kana and a lot of the Kanji. I realize that, already being part way through the journey, maybe I’m not the target audience. But I enjoy in apps like this when I can build up a list of ones I already know and see how much of the whole set I’ve got.
Along similar lines, I’d like to see a quick way to select all the Kanji in a unit, or even just all three sets in a section.
It’d be cool if I could collapse all the sets at once, so I can quickly scroll down and see how many there are in a unit. That, or something above the fold that tells me how big the unit is. Also, coming in it’s unclear what the Units are based on, if anything. Are these JLPT levels, frequency-based, following along with some textbook? Another thing - I can’t look up a specific word or Kanji very easily. That’d be a nice feature.
Another nit - sometimes the loan words are not so useful to practice. It is good to see them and get exposure, but it’d also be nice to be able to turn those off at a higher level.
The practice flow doesn’t really have an off-ramp. Would love for it to tell me, like ok, you’ve mastered these, time to move on. Or, really, to ‘master’ things you probably need longer gaps in recall… but that pushes the scope into it being yet another SRS app, which I appreciate that this is not trying to be.
A point of confusion: was just trying to grind out the first few sets of Kanji to make them ‘mastered’, but I’m not sure why they’re not getting there. My progress shows me a few in ‘needs more practice’ that are all at 90+% and 10+ attempts, and a few in ‘mastered’. But clicking ‘Hide Mastered’ on the Kanji page doesn’t hide any, and there’s no indicator there of which characters might need more work. Nor is there on the quiz page. I think having something - a progress bar, color coding, mastery%, something - in both places would enhance visibility of progress, and motivate users by showing them that progress.
On a different note, I agree that Kanji Study is generally complex and over-monetized. Seems like a neat thing, but daunting.
Have a look at an app called Kakugo though. It’s libre software on F-Droid, and I think has a lot in common with this project.