3 Projects I Plan to Release This Year

Introduction

I plan to release 3 side projects to help people who are learning Japanese. They are mostly inspired by the my first project and the feedback I received.

What I have done so far

My original project helped language learners to extract text, look up words, and create sentence cards in Anki all in one app. It was OCR, dictionary, media recorder, script matcher, text hooker, and Anki integration all in one easy-to-use app.

This inspired me of many new ideas, but on the macro-level I begin thinking of apps that could reduce the friction of online learning.

The State of Language Learning

In the current state, language learners go through 3 stages.

Stage I: Curation: They look for content through recommendation lists or study guides. They may or may not be suitable for their level.

Stage II: Material: ​This is where they enjoy the content. It could be a movie on Netflix, a game on Steam, or simply a physical book.

Stage III: Tools: They download tools, dictionaries, and programs to facilitate learning through the material in Stage II.

Most stuff you would find belongs to either of these lists. There are some websites that do a pretty good job of having two of these elements, like bilingual manga, animelon, and Satori reader.

For my newer projects, I plan to include ALL of these stages and reduce friction as much as possible for newcomers.

Project I: Yuzu

This is an app for educators to easily turn native content into language learning material. An educator could take a book, a news article, or manga and add highlightable text to it with audio, translation, teacher's notes.

Highlightable text is super important in Japanese learning because it allows the user to look up words immediately with a popup dictionary instead of having to write unfamiliar Kanji or use image recognition software.

I also want to release a website with sample learning material curated by learner level tags such as WK level/JLPT level. The material will initially be public domain or CC content such as works of children literature.

Project II: Word List to Ank (web app)

Many language learners already have a list of words that they want to memorize. This converts them to premade Anki cards embedded with sentences and audio from anime/manga/TV shows. Users can also select the type of card they want for different studying purposes like listening purpose or optional recall (recalling the Japanese phrase when presented with the English definition).

Project III: Twitch Extension for Streamers Who Teach Japanese

There have been more Twitch streamers who are teaching Japanese as they play Japanese games. Streamers like Japanese Quest and Game Grammar are sharing how fun learning languages can be while playing games.

Although I admit that I've always be skeptical of how effective learning languages through games or through someone's stream can be, I can't deny that there a growing number of people who are interested in learning Japanese because of these streams.

For this project I plan to use Twitch's extension feature to let viewers interact with the stream content to learn Japanese or contribute. The most obvious feature would be to show the game text on the screen like subtitles so viewers can use popup dictionaries or look those words up while watching the stream, but with digital tools we should be able to do much more than that.

Quizes, adding words to a word list, bookmarking words, using an embedded dictionary are all things that come to mind.

But...what about games? Or something that we don't usually do in traditional classroom? Since we are not looking for effectiveness, digital tools should in theory pave way for more innovative ways to learn.

Perhaps Shiritori? Bingo? Not really related to the stream.

Memory cards? Not that fun for mature learners.

I went over the Internet and found this simple little game called Kanji Press.

Three things I like about this game.

• simplicity
• requires a certain degree of input from the user while not requiring any typing
• can work with vocabulary in the stream

I might experiment with this game or do something completely different.

Let me know if you have good ideas.