My second app, Wakaba, a companion for learning Japanese
Learning Japanese one day at a time with quizzes, data, and a dictionary.
tl;dr: I’ve been (or trying) to learn Japanese, which somehow explains (or excuses) my lack of content here on the website.
That nerd in me, in an attempt to even consume more Pokémon content, randomly decided that I wanted to understand Japanese Pokémon cards, mostly because of how difficult it is to find English ones nowadays. But anyway, this isn’t about Pokémon cards, so please don't get me started. It’s about an iOS app I created to learn on the go. After my first adventure with RowSwift, I wanted to get back into Swift and iOS dev, and it led me to this app.
The app, Wakaba (Japanese for “young leaf”), started as a widget I used for months, showing today’s date in Japanese and a random kanji. Months later, once I knew my “Getsuyōbi” (Monday), I wanted to turn the app into something more useful, prettier, and worth sharing.
Wakaba has three major features: kanji, vocabulary, and quizzes. The first two are organized by JLPT level, with a taxonomy and open-source resources I found at https://www.tanos.co.uk/jlpt/and https://www.edrdg.org/edrdg/licence.html. Each kanji card includes its on’yomi and kun’yomi versions, plus an example of how it is used, and even cooler, it uses the device's text-to-speech functionality to pronounce it. I repeat, it is the device’s. The app is fully offline, so you don’t have to download anything, making it useful for a quick review before landing in Tokyo.
The vocabulary is further grouped by part of speech (e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.). Just like the kanji card, there’s a small speaker button to hear the pronunciation.
Then there’s the quiz area. Here you can test your knowledge against the app’s content. It offers written answers or multiple-choice questions, which I always seem to struggle with. But my favorite part is this section: the data. The app tracks your answers to each item and lets you quiz yourself. Another tab shows statistics on your progress and even lets you download it as a CSV.
You can find the app at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wakaba/id6800475141 and the website at https://www.wakaba.app/. It is fully free! No ads, no microtransactions, or any of that stuff. I also made it with iPad in mind, so it should feel like the iPhone version.
Go ahead and download it, enjoy it, and let me know if you spot any ugly bugs or weird translations. My Japanese isn't as good as I wanted it to be, hence the app :).
PS: This is the Pokémon card that fueled my Japanese journey.
