Hey HN, it’s been 8 years since I posted on here about the launch of my Japanese dictionary app Nihongo [0] and I’m finally back with a new app: Nihongo Lessons!

Think of Nihongo Lessons as the textbook to Nihongo’s dictionary. It’s an app for learning Japanese, specifically made for learners who are serious about becoming fluent, and want a guided set of content that will help them efficiently acquire vocabulary and grammar.

The project came about when Adam Shapiro of Japanese Level Up (Jalup) [1] announced last April that he was shutting Jalup down. As a fan of Adam’s work I was bummed to hear the news, but realized I actually might be one of the few people in the world in a position to keep his work alive. So I reached out, and we came up with a deal where I would sell Jalup content in my apps.

Originally it was envisioned as an add-on to Nihongo, but after starting to build this out it became clear that from a UX perspective it felt too bloated and tacked-on to just shove Jalup into Nihongo. Plus, given that Jalup is built around one-time content purchases, and Nihongo is a subscription, the purchases involved would feel convoluted, and people might be upset that they weren’t included in the Nihongo subscription.

So, I started building a separate app that would become Nihongo Lessons. From a technical perspective, Nihongo Lessons is actually just a different entry point into essentially the same app bundle as Nihongo. This gives me a lot of the infrastructure (sync, error reporting, screenshot generation, etc.) of Nihongo for free, and makes it easy to share UI, which I do a fair amount of (flashcards, tutorials, settings). Everything that actually changes behavior between the apps is stored in a single file as an “app variant” configuration, so if I decide to create another companion app in the future, it should be even easier.

It’s iPhone-only for now, but iPad will be coming soon. No plans for an Android release at the moment.

Download: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1640204242

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10094326

[1]: https://japaneselevelup.com

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user:	killa_kyle
created:	October 29, 2015
karma:	30