Sakuryo App Blog

Sakuryo App Blog

Initial Ideas Must Haves for the App

What Sakuryo can do for Me

I like data and I love to see visually my progress in Learning Japanese. I want a way to see where I am at and feel good about my progress. I also want to see very clearly, opportunities for improvement.

To do this, I need Sakuryo to keep data on the relationship I have with the Japanese I know and do not know. Whether it be grammar, kanji readings or writings, vocab, whole sentence mining, or pronunciation I will need to track this relationship.

In order to track each part of my Japanese proficiency I need enough features and activities to generate the data in each category, and of course each activity needs to aid in my learning.

If I can create activities and interactive pages to practice, learn, better understand all aspects of Japanese and create a clear and detailed picture of my Japanese progress, at this point, I would consider that a success.

Breaking down each part of the Learning

A quick list of features/tools that I want

Learning Features that will create data

  1. Writing practice for characters

    • SRS style review would be best
    • Create decks automatically from Vocab decks

  2. SRS review of vocab/sentences

    • Must be compatible with Anki importing and exporting
    • Possible offline Review (if possbile with just browser caching??) and syncing

  3. Quick review for vocab

    • Sometimes I finish my SRS vocab and don’t want to take on the extra review load (just a few extra words each day really piles up quickly over time) but I still feel like mindlessly reviewing and looking at new words without the weird stress Anki gives me sometimes

  4. Sentence Mining tools

    • I want to define a whole article of words with hover popups for each word
    • Be able to easily move sentences/words/characters to the other tools decks/sets for review
    • Highlight potential words that I am likely to not know and recommend some for review
      • Say there are 30 words I don’t know in the article, pull the top 5 words by how common they are in the Japanese language to add to a deck

  5. Japanese word data sets to learn from media and the ability to make your own

    • Extract the words from Anime/Manga/Movies/Books Etc., order by how common they are and recommend a study set
    • Choose from many pieces of media at one time that you have interest in and create a super study set that has the most optimal words to study to best understand all the media (ADHD mode forget one book at a time)
    • Good heat maps to help improve data quality, maybe if released to multiple users, if many people skip or leave out a word/phrase to learn, identify these fast for correction

  6. A catalog/dictionary for looking up words that is aware of what you know and remembers what you search

    • Must be at least as good as any dictionary I use now; I must want to use it

Features to show what I know and explore

  1. JLPT Coverage

    • I want to know around what JLPT level I might be

  2. Show how round my kanji knowledge is

    • Show words I know that I probably can’t write, kanji I can write but can’t read, or kanji I know but have not studied the most common words made with these kanji and so on… with the goal being to identify and remove gaps between kanji reading, writing and vocab made with Kanji

  3. Charts, Maps, Graphs… every metric even slightly interesting around the vocab I know

  4. Show all my learning overtime, again Charts, Maps, Graphs

  5. Social features (with caution)

    • I want to avoid some competitiveness and if I add features to compare yourself to other people I am afraid it will encourage pointless cheating
    • BUT… I kinda want an iframe like badge you can embed in other sites to show off your progress

Loose Ideas to research / Think are cool!