Chotto Nihongo · ちょっと日本語

What hooked me

I love languages, and I've been spending so much time in Japan. At some point I realised my Japanese was... fine. Fine gets you a coffee. It doesn't get you through a menu question, a changed train platform or a chat with the person next to you at the bar.

Every app starts the same way: spelling and sounds, hiragana, katakana, one character at a time. That's useful, but I needed functional Japanese, and I needed it fast. So I went looking at how polyglots and language teachers actually do it.

What I built

A practice app built around situations instead of alphabets. There's a 9-week route that goes from "a table for two" through ordering, cafés, paying, trains and hotels, ending with "your trip, rehearsed". Every week has a goal you'd actually need on the ground.

• a hands-free drill: hear the meaning, answer aloud before the model, then check (Pimsleur-style)
• sounds and pronunciation: biru is a building, biiru is a beer, and that difference matters
• a bedtime replay for calm review of phrases I already know
• twenty extra scenarios, plus role-play prompts for practising a conversation with Claude
• rescue phrases for when it all goes wrong

Mou ichido, yukkuri onegaishimasu. Once more, slowly, please. The most useful sentence in the whole app.

Why these techniques

Every exercise has a "Did you know?" card: the technique behind it, why it helps, and an honest rating of how strong the evidence is. Retrieval practice and spacing have strong research behind them. Shadowing and sentence mining are practitioner methods: polyglots swear by them, but they haven't been tested much. Pre-sleep review helps you keep what you've already learned. It won't teach you new Japanese while you sleep.

What I learned

Saying something, even one wrong word, beats staying silent. Most of the learning happens in the gap between what I tried to say and what the model says back.