/Kana_Mind

I always had a desire to learn Japanese, mostly due to influence of the community I grew up in. Brazil has a huge Japanese immigrant community, and I lived for some years in a city that receive a big influx of Japanese immigrants. I had been learning the language on-and-off for a while, but evolving was always a struggle since any mastery on reading the two basic alphabets - the Katakana and the Hiragana - was lost after a while without regular practice.

That's when I had the idea of creating a piece of software that could serve not only as a teaching aid but as a knowledge reinforcement tool. An application that would teach symbol pairs to players by introducing them one by one over time, reinforcing them as needed, and testing memory retention with some clever algorithms based on actual research on learning retention and repetition.

This was an idea I kept around for years, and when I wanted to learn how to use Adobe AIR to create a mobile application, this concept was the perfect excuse. And thus Kana Mind was born.

There are many games that get you to test your Kana knowledge by matching it with their romaji equivalent: memory games, flash-card style games, dictionary games, and the alike. However, none of them seem to be as serious about teaching, testing and reinforcing memorization, nor as focused on the task of memorizing Kana, as I believe Kana Mind is.

As an experiment, the application was a success. It was released as a 100% free application both for Android and iOS, and while it's not a massive download giant, reviews are overwhelmingly positive, especially in regards to the teaching algorithm. Not bad for an application that never had any real marketing effort put behind it.