Kanapuro is focused on assisting Japanese students in mastering the alphabet through fun, focused learning activities. Try out the alpha version now at www.twinsparks.com/kanapuro/index.html.
Memorizing the Japanese “alphabets” is one of the first steps in most paths to becoming a Japanese language speaker. It takes many, many hours of repetition to drill each character into your mind so that you can read and write it with ease.
For years, students have generally used flashcards to practice recognition, and repeated drawing to master writing. Kanapuro attempts to improve on this process in two ways:
- Targeted Learning: Flashcards tend to be random, and so you will often repeat characters you have already mastered. Kanapuro uses a complex algorithm to determine which characters will be the most useful for you to work on – whether it’s reinforcing the newest characters or reviewing characters we’ve looked at in the past.
- Enjoyable mini-games instead of rote repetition: Rather than hours of just repeating flashcards, Kanapuro offers a multitude of options to keep learning more fresh and interesting. Each game offers a unique challenge that encourages learning but forces your brain to work in a new way – similar to cross training. This will actually speed up the learning process – so you’ll learn faster and have fun while learning.
For the writing mini-games, Kanapuro is just a simple whiteboard to practice on – but you can still take advantage of the targeted learning system so you are directed towards characters you need the most practice on.
Over the next few posts, I’ll introduce a few of the mini-games and activities in Kanapuro to assist the learning process. Until then, ganbatte mina!