Been a while since I blogged. That’s because I’ve been working in the shadows of my cofounders for the past while, either implementing the site tweaks George fabricated with his UX testing, or making the html/javascript front end for Nick’s new practice page. But now it’s time for me to focus on my own current raison d’être: Japanese.
To start off, I just finished making and uploading the long awaited Tobira textbook list, so all you Oberlin third year Japanese students can get studying your latest kanji. With that one out of the way, JLPT is next on the agenda, mixed in with getting stuff done to help Nick get the new practice page completed and doing all sorts of Japanese stuff.
Japanese hasn’t gotten a whole lot of attention since we launched beta in the summer, because there’s a heck of a lot of competition with all the feature building, site tweaking and bug fixing we have to do. I’m now buckling down and getting everything done that needs to get done for the upcoming full launch of Japanese; gotta have a full product for that! Among the things I want to get done between then and now: more vocab lists, fully functional features (reminders, cram mode), stroke order and character tweaks, and Japanese versions of Chinese specific pages (stroke order page). And generally make sure Japanese has everything Chinese has, except for tone practice.
Also, we need that reading and definition practice. I’ve noticed in the beginner/intermediate levels at least, kanji learning is pushed back pretty hard, and so reading and definitions have that much more focus and importance. So we need to have that before full launch as well. I’m so looking forward to that; I even wrote the pseudo-code for converting romaji to kana so that readings can be inputted, even though it’s probably going to be weeks/months before Nick can hook it in. When it’s ready, I will never forget a word again, or at least, there will be a less than 5% chance I won’t be able to recall it at any given time.
Nick says he’s optimizing like bananas. I guess bananas are fairly optimized.