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!
Love the concept and a first try of the website was also nice.
Coming from Kanji Study I want to ask if there is a SRS (staggered repetition study) mode planned. It’s what i mostly use in Kanji Study but there it was lacking for me as it only tracks Kanji and not words (it asks for words in the tests but the answer correctness only gets tracked for the one Kanji you have to fill in, not the whole word). I’m a dev so i might contribute at some point but atm my home PC isn’t set up for programming and I’m often too exhausted after work to program in my free time as well
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.
This is awesome, thank you for making it open source. I really appreciate being able to give it a try without having to sign up and what not as well, good touch!
I’ve been looking for something like this for a while, THANK YOU for making this <3
This is really good, thank you!
You sure managed to hook me right in!
Great job, haha! That’s amazing. I never personally reached more than 4 stars lol
That’s actually pretty cool. I learned some vowels.
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.
Incredible. Thanks for sharing!
This is HUGE, I’ve been looking for something like this for a while, awesome work. And extra kudos for making it so pretty!
I used to live in Japan like a decade ago and spoke Japanese then but have lost a lot of it cause I never use it. This was a ton of fun to come back and review. Tysm for sharing!
This is really cool, but I’m curious about one thing: why are there only three light themes vs approximately eighty dark themes?
Yeah, that’s 3 light themes more than needed
Why do you hate accessibility?
Is light theme an accessibility feature? High contrast is, for sure, but that’s not what people refer with light themes.
Astigmatism haver here. Dark themes usually have blurry letters
Wasn’t aware of that. Thanks for letting me know!
You rock! 🤘
I wish you lots of luck and hope you get lots of contributors. Will be sharing the link with people I know currently learning Japanese.
My roommate and I are both in the very early stages of learning Japanese and this is awesome!! Definitely gonna forward this around <3
I read “platformer” and was excited for a sucessor to Mario Teaches Typing."
But this is still pretty awesome.
