I know this might not be much of interest to you, but I want to provide some context for why I am developing this app.
In university, I have been through a student exchange program in Japan for about 10 months. During this time, I have encountered many difficulties in finding good materials to study from and also practice what I've learned. I would find myself constantly using different textbooks for studying kanji, grammar and vocabulary, then proceed to add all this information into Anki decks and practice them using my phone. For kanji, I was also using KanjiStudy but it had a lot of information that was unnecessary for the level I was at. At some point, I realized that I was spending way too much time on organizing the information I need to study and practice.
At the time, I was planning to take the JLPT N3 exam but I was overwhelmed with other exams at university and I had no more time to waste on bascially integrating information together from too many sources. Because of that, I had to quit my Japanese classes, go on my own to study what I needed for the exam and ended up passing.
I was pretty frustrated with the amount of time required to learn Japanese because there was no reliable source of information/app that has everything I need put together.
So I decided to take this challenge into my own hands and provide the most extensive and customizable Japanese learning experience for both you and myself.
JC is aiming to become the most comprehensive, customizable and efficient platform for learning Japanese.
JC will offer you the posibility to study, practice and track your progress through customizable lists of study elements and excercises.
We will dive through the features components of the app in the following sections.
Study Elements
Study elements are the elements that you will be able to study inside the applciation. They consist of:
Radicals - all radicals found in JLPT Kanji
Kanji - 2220 kanji for N5 to N1
Words - over 7000 words that can be formed with the offered Kanji
Grammar - TBA
For all of the above, you can track your progress, generate excercises tailored to your liking and customize them.
Example:
Let's say today you have learned about the kanji 日 and you want to practice it. JC will allow you to generate exercises for this study element that consists of meanings, readings and examples. More details will be introduced in the Exercises section. Same applies to the other elements mentioned above, but the exercises will differ based on what can be studied about them.
Excercises
Exercises can be generated and customized based on your preferences. They will be available for all the study elements and can be studied in two ways:
Flashcards
A forgiving environment where you can test yourself in a fast way for grasping the necessary knowledge about the element
Actions
This mode of studying allows you to choose wheter you prefer to select the correct answer or write it in Japanese. In both cases, your action will affect your account performance unless you specifically disable tracking.
We decided 3 different types of exercises are necessary to achieve proficiency for each element. Those are:
Meanings
You will practice the meanings of each element
Readings
You will practice the readings of each element
Recognitions
Since the study elements can have multiple meanings and are written differently based on context, we are tailoring this type of excercises toward understanding the study element in a provided context.
I found myself struggling when studying specific kanji and words because the exercises I was doing were using a context that was not relatable to the level I was at. Therefore, exercises will start easy become increasingly more difficult as your level improves based on the progress made within our app.
Moreover, if you ever find yourself in a situation where you feel like the exercises are more difficult than they should be, or you believe there might be information omitted, we empower you to fully customize them at your liking.
Study Sets
Manually doing exercises for each individual element simply doesn't work. Therefore, you will be able to create study sets that combine multiple types of elements. This fits very well if you are already taking lessons of Japanese and you want to practice what you have recently learned. Since we designed this with lessons in mind, you can also combine multiple sets together, share them or look for some that have been already made by oher users.
Another feature of sets is the posibility of generating presets for them. Let's say you created the set of elements you want to study, but you are only interested in the meanings of them. You can easily generate presets that can be customized to your liking.
User authentication and account progression
You will be able to register through email credentials or other authentication providers such as Google.
Our goal is to prepare you for JLPT. Each study element can be found at different JLPT levels. Your performance will be tracked based on JLPT level and exercise types. You will be able to generate reports so you can better understand where you are lacking (specific types of study elements, JLPT level, readings and so on)
Leaderboards & rewards - TBA
Educational support - TBA