Minimalist rapid-fire kana review tool

I’m not really planning to add features to this or enhance it in any significant way (mobile optimisation isn’t great, but it’s usable), but it exists now, so I figured I’d share it in case anyone finds it useful: http://angry4squigs.uguu.ca/

It’s exactly what it looks like and what it says in the footer: hiragana and katakana drills as quickly as you can type, with no polish whatsoever. It should only take a couple of minutes to go through the set each day, leaving only the characters you struggle with the most by the end of a week. It’s intentionally minimalist for people who like straight-forward pass/fail evaluations, but, as a result, it’s not very beginner-friendly, and there are far better tools readily available for people looking to learn kana from scratch (my sole reason for building it is filling in some gaps in katakana recognition).

All data is saved locally to your browser and the code is public-domain, so you can take it offline and feel free to repurpose it however you want, if it inspires you to build something fancier.

Its name comes from an ancient SWF video called Coin Bird and a friend who refers to Japanese as “squiggles”.

6 Likes

I just tried it, and I like it! Thank you!

1 Like

It sounds and works really well! (not that I need it)

One problem I noticed is that sometimes I’d accidentally double-tap enter, which would mark the next one as wrong. While it’s good being able to just hit enter if you don’t know the answer, it’d be useful to have something to detect double enters. I may be the only person that has this problem though. Aside from that, it’s great! I’ll definitely shove this in the face of kana learners I encounter, since it’s a dead simple way of getting practice.

2 Likes

I’ll get that taken care of before I head home today. It’s one of those super-obvious things that doesn’t stand out until someone says it.

Also, I’ll give it a means of displaying a list of all kana with their current times-correct scores and a reset function, but that might have to wait for tomorrow. (This is just a lunch-break project)

-edit-
The blank-entry thing has been implemented and the layout is a little more readable. It’s also a lot more usable on mobile.

1 Like

Updated with the ability to reset or remove individual items, wipe everything, and a few other minor enhancements, like a one-hour timeout after a mistake, instead of six.

I think this is about as feature-complete as it’ll get, but it should be enough for use as a post-studying review tool for anyone who just wants to drill to commit things to memory.

It’s still just a single file with no non-standard dependencies, though, so you can download it and do whatever you want.

1 Like

I like the design. Not a learning tool obviously, but exactly what I want out of a reviewing tool. Fast and responsive, gives you everything you need.

For some silly reason I still struggle with some katakana. I’ll give this a try for a week or so and see if it helps me improve.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.