About KanjiBox
KanjiBox is an iPhone application to help you study Japanese. It provides a set of simple, yet powerful, drill exercises to help you evaluate and improve your skills in specific aspects of Japanese studies: kanji, vocabulary, kana etc.
KanjiBox is particularly well suited for standardised test preparation (JLPT, Kanji Kentei, Ninja academy...) but works perfectly well as a standalone self-study tool.
This iPhone version is a port of the popular and free KanjiBox for Facebook application, although not all features of the original have been implemented yet.
What Makes KanjiBox Unique?
- KanjiBox is Smart: it records all your answers (good and bad) and uses a special adaptative algorithm to decide which questions to ask you next, in such a way as to optimize your learning curve.
- KanjiBox is Mean: choices are automatically selected to make guessing difficult. For example, kanji always come in pairs of closely (and often confusingly) similar characters.
- KanjiBox is Engaging: live bar charts showing your skills in each area provide you with an incentive to keep studying until you get the coveted "all green" bar for a given level (timed quiz mode and highscores are also coming very soon).
Current Features
- Study at your level: JLPT 4 to JLPT 1, and an extra "Sensei" level (with all 6,000 kanji and 20,000 words).
- Adaptative learning: focuses on your weak points.
- Live bar charts: displaying your current performances for each level in each mode, real-time.
- Kana mode (hiragana and katakana).
- Kanji mode (over 6,000 kanji):
- Optional display of pronunciation (onyomi, kunyomi) and English meaning.
- Special kanji-similarity algorithm, to make "intelligent guesses" more difficult (yes: this is mean, but so are the people who make the standardised tests you will take one day).
- Vocabulary mode (over 20,000 words):
- Configurable furigana (word reading) display.
Change log
1.0 β1 [January 2009]: Major stability and UI improvements. Addition of Quiz mode with Scores.
0.5.6 [November 2009]: improved speed and compatibility with latest iPhone OS versions.
0.5.1 [July 6h, 2009]: much bug fixin' and memory-leak plugin'.
0.5 β4 [July 1st, 2009]: couples small bug fixes, major speed improvements, moved Settings pane inside the app. Release Candidate 1.
0.5 β1 [June 23rd, 2009]: first beta release.
Known Issues
- On some of the higher levels, drill screen can take some time to load and will sometimes freeze a couple seconds mid-game. This is mostly due to hardware limitations and the size of the database. Hopefully this will improve over time as I keep adding optimisations into the code.
(Tentative) Roadmap
All upgrades until version 1.0 will be free for existing users.0.6 (December 09)
Improve speed and caching.(0.5.5)Improve vocab similarity heuristics.(0.5.3)
1.0 (currently beta-testing)
Single-user quiz mode.
1.x
- Word examples for kanji correction cards.
2.0
- Online scoreboard.
- Reading drill/quiz.
2.0
- Multi-user support (on same device).
- Support horizontal mode.
- Sentence samples for vocabulary mode.
- Sync with online application (Facebook, etc.).
- Customisable learning sets.