iKanji touch sneak peek 2

iKanji touch is taking a bit longer to finish than I anticipated but I can assure you it will be worth the wait! I’ve been hard at work adding some cool new features based on requests and feedback I’ve had about iKanji on the Mac. In particular a lot of people have asked me to add a spaced repetition teaching system. I’m pleased to announce that iKanji touch has this feature, based on the Leitner System. Kanji move between five groups which are tested at decreasing frequencies if you keep getting them right or at increased frequency if you get them wrong. iKanji touch gives you at-a-glance learning progress for each kanji and for sets of kanji. To make browsing and learning more efficient each grade and JLPT level is subdivided into sets of 20 kanji. Also new in iKanji touch will be kanji groupings for GCSE and A level Japanese for British students.

As well as the usual meaning, reading and writing tests iKanji touch has a compound test where you have to pick the missing kanji from a word which contains multiple kanji or kana. This will help test your ability to use kanji readings and meanings together as well as help you learn common words (and some less common ones as shown in this daft example I managed to pick at random!).

Hopefully as you can see iKanji touch has a really polished interface. I’m spending a lot of time sweating over the details. Speaking of the interface, I’d like to introduce Tsutsune, the little fox. He’s the application’s mascot who will offer you words of wisdom or deride you if you do badly! (He’s a bit of a cheeky fellow actually). Here he’s saying thanks for your hardwork. He has a tendency to end his sentences with ‘tsu’ for some reason. Crazy critter!

I hope to have iKanji touch finished fairly soon, I don’t want to give any firm dates as I’m now fairly famously bad at missing my own deadlines! Watch this space as they say.