KanaLearn Reviews and Details

Questions & Answers

1. Which are the primary technologies used for building KanaLearn?

   Spaced Repetition System, TextToSpeech

2. Who are some of the biggest customers of KanaLearn?

   People wanting to start learning Japanese.

3. What makes KanaLearn unique?

   Calm app that values users privacy and attention.

4. How would you describe the primary audience of KanaLearn?

   anyone who wishes to learn hiragana and katakana without being distracted by gamification.

5. Why should a person choose KanaLearn over its competitors?

   Lightweight and operates 100% on Your phone. no account. no tracking. no fees.

6. What's the story behind KanaLearn?

   My daughter and I are fans of Japanese culture — the films, the food, the design, the way the language looks on a page. At some point “we should really learn Japanese someday” turned into “let’s actually do it.” And anyone who’s started down that road knows the first real step: before grammar, before vocabulary, before anything, you learn the two kana scripts — hiragana and katakana. Ninety-two characters that unlock everything that comes after.

   So we needed a way to learn them together.

   It started with a jar

   We did the obvious, low-tech thing. We cut up little slips of paper, wrote a kana on each one, and dropped them in a jar. You pull a slip, you say the sound, you check yourself, you put it back. It was simple, it was tactile, and — most importantly — it was fun. Pulling slips out of a jar turned practice into a little game we could play side by side. Some of those slips are still folded up in that jar today.

   For the first handful of characters, it was perfect.

   Then the jar started to fill up. As the number of slips climbed from a few to a few dozen — and then toward a hundred across both scripts — the little game stopped keeping up with us. There was no sense of which characters we actually knew versus the ones we kept fumbling. The ones we’d already nailed came up just as often as the tricky ones. The look-alikes that genuinely trip up every beginner got no special attention. And there was no way to see how far we’d come. The jar was a wonderful start, but it couldn’t grow with us.

   Looking for the next step

   So we went looking. We tried printed flash-card decks. We looked at the spaced-repetition tools people swear by. We poked around the app stores. There’s a lot of genuinely good stuff out there, and we learned something from all of it.

   But nothing quite fit the way we wanted to learn — together, at our own pace, with the same easy, playful feel as the jar, but smart enough to keep up as the character count grew. We kept finding ourselves saying “this is close, but I wish it did this.”

   Eventually we ran out of “I wish it did this” and landed on a different thought: we could just build the thing we wanted. I’d been wanting to make an iOS app anyway. This was the perfect reason.

   What we kept from the jar — and what we added

   KanaLearn is, in a real sense, the jar rebuilt to grow with you.