Issei was a mobile app project written in React Native, with a GraphQL API, Express server backend and Postgres DB. I worked on Issei during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, from March 2020 until about June 2020. The engineering team at my job had our hours cut to 3 days a week, which meant I had a lot of extra time, which I used to work almost full time on this project.
At the time, I had just come back from Japan - a trip that I spent 6 months studying Japanese for, for 3 hours or more every day. I came up with the idea for the app during those 6 months. I realised how much more efficient my study method had been compared to Duolingo or Japanese classes at school. I'd become passably conversational in Japanese in just half a year. I'd learned more in that time than I did in 6 years of Japanese classes at school. Inspired in part by Matt Vs Japan, I wanted to make an app that promoted context-based learning, with a focus on input.
The leading theory on language acquisition is that the speed at which you learn or "acquire" language is based mainly on how many hours of "input" you receive. In other words, how much time you spend reading, listening, and watching content in your target language. My app attempts to guide people into that way of learning.
The app is highly context-based. Often, people learning Japanese will rote learn characters without learning what words they're used in. I did this too, but I noticed how much faster I picked up kanji when I saw them used in real words. The app implements this way of thinking - when it teaches you kana, it actually teaches you words as well. When it teaches you vocab, it teaches you grammar as well.
At the end of the major quarantine in June, I realised I didn't have the Japanese ability to continue writing lessons. I was still learning, and it didn't make sense for me to be writing lessons as if I was a native speaker, so I put the project on hold. I may come back to it one day, but for now it exists as a relic and snapshot of my programming abilities at the time.
Features
- Full hiragana and katakana courses
- Spoken audio when typing out answers
- Type Japanese characters with an English keyboard
- Complete user/login system, tracks your progress
- Simple spaced repetition algorithm
- Uses emoji as well as English to explain meaning of words
