It has arrived! Nick, George, Maksym, I, and two of our fellow Oberlin grads have been working throughout the summer to arrive at this point. We’ve been making characters, putting together a dictionary, constructing lists, and weaving logic, and now we have it online for people to start trying out. To test it out, switch from Chinese to Japanese in your vocabulary options page.
We currently don’t have any textbooks up, but very soon we’ll have Genki I. This is Oberlin’s first year textbook, so we wanted to have that available first. We have more lined up and will be adding them in the near future, especially Genki II. Any particular text you want us to build? Tell us!
We’re calling this alpha to say it’s still in the preliminary stages. It can only be used to study kanji, not hiragana or katakana. It probably has some bugs still, and there are plenty of ways it can be improved and optimized. One of the main ways that will make it better, and Chinese as well, is reading/pinyin and definition practice, which we’ll be working on next. So until then, give it a try, and as always, tell us what you think and how we can improve it. We’ll be in beta before you know it.
A couple other pieces of news in terms of new prompt interface: if things get really long (which they do a lot more often in Japanese) the prompt will move down so there’s more space. We’ve added underlines to show which character you’re on. And also, when you use the phantom, it quickly goes through the stroke order animation. What do you guys think of that? Is it helpful or does it slow you down? We’d like some feedback on that in particular.
And now, time to get some Indian food in celebration!