Making Japanese Study Tool

06/11/15

Today, I have finally made concrete steps towards making a Japanese study-tool. All I have done is forked Scotch.io's RESTful API tutorial GitHub repository and modified it to save kanji instead of bears (my fork is here).

This doesn't really give me a means to review content in any meaningful way, but thanks to the POSTMAN Chrome extension that the tutorial offers, I have a means of building a database of words and kanji that have been giving me trouble with very little craftsmanship on my end.

I made a good list of words during my half-hour study-session today using this API and this simple extension. It's not too useful in its current form, but it's better than what I had before, and it's easily something I can iterate and mutate into something better one small-but-significant step at a time.

It's also led to an amazing realization, Stephan. The site where I look up a lot of content, and whose capabilities I was going to leech off of (if I got their permission, mind-you), links to all the tools they use to build their search-results. They have kanji stroke-order, example sentences... most of the stuff I would want to build my Japanese-learning tool. All open-source projects.

Those jisho guys are classy folks, and I'm super excited.

First step, though, just have some flashcards that switch between kanji and hiragana. We can evolve it further from there.