App for learning how to write Japanese
I'm a long time lurker that recently quit my job to work on my own projects, a lot due to the inspiration from Hacker News. Now I have published my first serious project, an app for learning how to write Japanese characters. It's the app I always wanted but couldn't find when I was studying. It tries to be simple to use, you just start the quiz and go with the flow. There's no need to plan and manage your studies, and it uses spaced repetition for better retention. There's a promo page with more details up at http://www.kanjibyhand.com. It's only for Android so far. The free version includes…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
I'm a long time lurker that recently quit my job to work on my own projects, a lot due to the inspiration from Hacker News. Now I have published my first serious project, an app for learning how to write Japanese characters. It's the app I always wanted but couldn't find when I was studying. It tries to be simple to use, you just start the quiz and go with the flow. There's no need to plan and manage your studies, and it uses spaced repetition for better retention. There's a promo page with more details up at http://www.kanjibyhand.com. It's only for Android so far. The free version includes hiragana and katakana: https://market.android.com/details?id=se.tokotoko.android.kanabyhand The paid version includes (a lot of) kanji: https://market.android.com/details?id=se.tokotoko.android.kanjibyhand I'd be grateful for any comments or ideas for how to market this app!
Does the same job
all alternatives →- IMI'm making an open-source platform for learning JapaneseSep 2025 · kanadojo.com · ▲288
The idea is actually quite simple. As a Japanese learner and a coder, I've always wanted there to be an open-source, 100% free for learning Japanese, similar to Monkeytype in the typing community. Unfortunately, pretty much all language learning apps are closed-sourced and paid these days, and the ones that are free have unfortunately been abandoned. But of course, just creating yet another language learning app was not enough - there has to be a unique selling point. And then I thought to myself: why not make it crazy and do what no other language learning app ever did by adding a gazillion…

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Hi Everyone, I recently wanted to learn Japanese with duolingo but it kept giving me repetitive lessons. So I built an app that gives a variety of lessons from anime. You can try it out here:https://kanjieight.vercel.app/ Thanks everyone.
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Hi HN, Just wanted to share a tool i've been working on to help with my own study routine. It’s a browser extension called Lingoku. The idea is simple: we spend hours browsing the web in English every day. This tool replaces some of the english words with Japanese vocabulary based on your japanese level (Similar to Toucan, but with a better user experience). It’s basically an attempt to make the "i+1" method actually passive, you understand the sentence because it's mostly english, but you pick up Japanese words naturally from the context. It uses an LLM in the backend to make sure the…
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Hey HN, it’s been 8 years since I posted on here about the launch of my Japanese dictionary app Nihongo [0] and I’m finally back with a new app: Nihongo Lessons! Think of Nihongo Lessons as the textbook to Nihongo’s dictionary. It’s an app for learning Japanese, specifically made for learners who are serious about becoming fluent, and want a guided set of content that will help them efficiently acquire vocabulary and grammar. The project came about when Adam Shapiro of Japanese Level Up (Jalup) [1] announced last April that he was shutting Jalup down. As a fan of Adam’s work I was bummed to…
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More work this month
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A javascript library that allows easy manipulation of the favicon to include nice looking alert bubbles. This means that users can pin your site and still see when their attention is needed! It's been done before, but in my opinion not in a way aesthetically pleasing enough for production use. This library also falls back to the standard number in page title approach for browsers that do no support canvas / dynamic favicons. Thoughts welcome.
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