ZEH FERNANDO

Kana Mind

I always had a desire to learn Japanese, mostly due to the influence of the community I grew up in. Brazil has a huge Japanese immigrant community, and I spent some years in a city that received a big influx of Japanese immigrants. I had been learning the language on and off for a while, but making progress was always a struggle: whatever mastery I gained over the two basic alphabets - the Katakana and the Hiragana - faded after a while without regular practice.

That’s when I had the idea of creating a piece of software that could serve not only as a teaching aid, but also as a knowledge-reinforcement tool: an application that would teach symbol pairs by introducing them one by one over time, reinforcing them as needed, and testing memory retention with clever algorithms based on actual research into learning and repetition.

It was an idea I’d kept around for years, so when I wanted to learn how to use Adobe AIR to build a mobile application, the concept was the perfect excuse. And thus Kana Mind was born.

There are many games that test your Kana knowledge by matching each symbol to its romaji equivalent: memory games, flash-card-style games, dictionary games, and the like. However, none of them seem as serious about teaching, testing, and reinforcing memorization, nor as focused on the task of memorizing Kana, as I believe Kana Mind is.

As an experiment, it was a success. Released as a 100% free app for both Android and iOS, it’s no massive download hit, but reviews are overwhelmingly positive, especially in regard to the teaching algorithm. Not bad for something that never had any real marketing effort put behind it.