Kanjilicious: A Japanese Language Learning Project on Kickstarter

My name is Saren. My son and I have been studying Japanese for a couple of years together. He is now in the 1st grade and just beginning to learn kanji. We've been brainstorming a new way to set up his flash cards and use games to extend the time we spend memorizing characters.

We recently collected our ideas into a project we call Kanjilicious. It's going to be a mobile app that is part flash card system and part casual game played with friends. We think it will really help students of all ages.

Our project is up on Kickstarter, so we have a video about it here: Kanjilicious: A Mobile Game for Learning Japanese Kanji

I wonder if you wouldn't mind taking a look? We'd love to know what you think? If you like it, we hope you wouldn't mind passing it along to your colleagues and students.

We appreciate the help. Please enjoy your summer vacation!

窶堙ｦ窶堙ｫ窶堋ｵ窶堋ｭ窶堋ｨﾅ?ﾃｨ窶堋｢窶堋ｵ窶堙懌?堋ｷﾂ。

Thanks,

Saren and Genji

m(_ _)m
Kanjilicious :: A Mobile Game for Learning Japanese Kanji and Kana

Your project is already in existence and is free.

It's called Anki and AnkiDroid.

Lol can't believe all those idiots who backed you in the app.

hiragana and grade 1 kanji is free LMAO what a rip off.

in Anki everything is free

Japanese - AnkiWeb

you remind me of this guy

gaijiN5; a game to teach Japanese by immersion, Mnemonics, SRS & more

The world not need another greedy "developer". You basically just make a app that's based on AnkiDroid with exactly same SM2 algorithm but with a different interface, and then charging Japanese learners $$$ to use decks that you download for free from Anki or other flashcard database. There already too many of you "developers" in the world trying to cash in the SRS boom.

Anki is a very good program. I have used it and I think it is very powerful. It benefits from a strong community and, as you say, is entirely free. That said, I'm not so sure I would recommend it to a kindergartner. It takes a measure of technical savvy to configure it to be most effective, and I'm not sure that the casual or beginner user has the patience to both configure the system and study the language.

It's still very early in the process, but I am not intending on supplanting Anki. I think my market would be very different.

Still, you have some very fair points and I respect your point of view.

Saren

For the record, Anki iOS does cost $24.99.

A general comment - it would be good to see a breakdown of what the budget is for, and more information on who other than you is involved. You mention a local development group and vendors for music, illustrations, etc, at the end, but I think most people would like to see more info. Also, if you have native Japanese speakers directly involved, particularly anyone with a teaching/education background, you should make that clear and up front as it is a big plus.

My concern on the education end, like most kanji learning programs I see, is that there may be an over-emphasis on English "meanings" for single kanji as well as "readings" out of context, rather than in words. e.g. for your example, 正, you list the kun-yomi as "ただ-" but it is not read such outside specific words such as 正しい so associating 正 = ただ is not particularly helpful. (In the video you also give 正 with ただ and then 見 with みる so it's also not consistent in whether or not you display okurigana).

It's a nice website. I'll give you that.

For ideas, you might want to look at the kanken games that were out for Nintendo DS some years ago. They were for native speakers, and not really aimed at children per se, but they were pretty solid, in my opinion.

That's a good suggestion, Mikawa. Actually there was one aimed at kids, "Kakitori-Kun" which I think just covered the 教育漢字 or some amount around that. Another 'competitor' in the Japanese language market would be these folks, who I remember have nice content but at least on the web version their interface is very clunky.
[MENTION=4386]saren[/MENTION] - it does look like you have the technical skills to pull off something really nice. I just would like to see someone in the English-language market do something which isn't just kanji flashcards, filled up with the same old info from kanjidic.

For example, in the kanji game I most enjoy fiddling around with, "Nazotte Oboeru", they have theme quizzes, getting enough right opens up new quizzes. Some of these quiz questions form little stories, others are just on a theme (names of sports, for example). In the Kanken DS series there's usually some sort of timed game where you have to read what kanji word is written on the side of a car before it drives away, or something similar.

The power of these programs imo is:
1) They quiz you on things that you need to actually read/write Japanese. Recognising how to read and write 正しい and 正直 is vastly more useful than just remembering "ただ-" and "ショウ"
2) Input of answers is always via handwriting recognition, no multiple choice.

The problem when people still early in the learning process themselves set out to teach others Japanese as well is that they don't know what it is they don't know. There's a hell of a lot more to it than just doing one-to-one swaps with dictionary entries or whatnot, especially in a language as context-driven as Japanese is, and with such a (seemingly) screwy writing system.

You end up with stuff like our recent "Learn Japanese from Scratch" poster who, despite knowing apparently next to nothing about Japanese himself, decided to start a YouTube channel to teach it to others. All full of zeal and convinced he'd be the ideal choice to teach others.....only to find out his Lesson 1 video was loaded with errors. Again, a case of not knowing what it is you don't know rising up and biting a fellow on the backside.

I swear I'll never understand why seemingly everybody who learns half a dozen words of Japanese and two or three kanji want to take it upon themselves to reinvent the wheel and start something to teach others what they have yet to learn themselves. What did people with such inclinations do prior to the advent of the internet?

all variations of the same old crap and can be easily accomplished by Anki. Depends on how much efforts the user puts in into deck.

But you buy Saren's Kanjilicious app, you are giving him the control over your deck and what content can you see and what you can not see. As he stated clearly in his campaign, he intents to charge you $$$ for every level of kanji except grade 1 and kana. Basically the kana and grade 1 kanji is used to "trap" the user into the his ecosystem than he can milk the users progressively with kanjis, vocabulary grammar decks etc. There is nothing original about it, there have been many people trying to make a profit that is something free for the last 10 years.

Thanks you guys. I am familiar with a few of the other apps you mentioned. I'll definitely need to check out some of the others.

I do not intend to just make this another basic flash card app, but rather something that takes full advantage of all the new smart phone features. There is a lot of inspiration coming from the DS games and a little from Anki. I think our long term focus is to build a variety of games that are outside of the ones you've seen before. The two additional ideas are closer to some of the popular, non-language based casuals games like Dots or Drop7.

In the end, it's a personal passion project and I will state rather frankly that I do hope to charge for some of the levels and games but the overall platform and ecosystem is still being thought through and we're always open to suggestions. The main goal is to give the community something new and interesting so we can all learn Japanese more effectively.

Saren

Time will tell.

Thanks,
Saren