Hello! From the creator of the [Telegram] WaniKani Unofficial Bot comes another completely free application that will empower your WaniKani and Japanese study journey.
Tangochou is an extremely versatile tool to help you learn and memorize Japanese radicals, kanji and vocabulary. Fundamentally it is a flashcard application but aimed at Japanese, this makes it more powerful than something more generic like Anki.
Now let’s go through some FAQs.
Why? Also, why another flashcards app?!
The answer is yes. I wasn’t really feeling Anki and most of the other alternatives that I tried felt incomplete or wanted money. So well, I decided to do it myself.
Is it free?
Yes, and it will be forever.
Donations are welcome if you like the application and feel generous of course, you can do so with PayPal.
Why should I use your application instead of something like Anki?
Well, there are multiple reasons.
- Anki will only ask you if you remember something or not, Tangochou will ask you to answer with the correct meaning and reading just like WaniKani does, which I feel is best for memory, also you are less tempted to fake your answers since you either get it right or wrong.
- You have to create everything from scratch or use premade decks with Anki, Tangochou supports multiple data sources including WaniKani to create reliable decks on a whim, of course you can also import premade decks on Tangochou.
- Anki is very generic so it doesn’t support the concept of subjects, something that Tangochou does very well and with several advanced features.
These are just the most obvious ones that come to my mind, but there are probably more.
Which data sources are supported?
All sources are credited and listed in the Data Sources page of Tangochou, in short these are the data sources:
- ichi.moe
- Jisho
- Jotoba
- WaniKani
How does the Text to Speech feature work?
There was a point in time during development where I didn’t have pronunciation audios for some subjects, finding them in the web was too much work so I decided to implement some kind of TTS.
You can setup the Google Cloud Text-to-Speech API and generate an API key to always have high quality pronunciation audios for your subjects meanings and readings.
Once that is done it should work out of the box, you can also pre-generate the pronunciation audios for all subjects in a deck to avoid lag in your first run.
How good is the SRS?
Well, I’ll be honest, the algorithm is rudimental at best but it works.
You can find a more in-depth explanation in the About page of Tangochou.
Is this project open source?
No, not at the moment, I might decide to disclose some of the code in the future.
Is it safe to use?
Yes, this application is 99% client-side, this means that all of your data resides only on your machine and nothing is ever saved on our servers.
No analytics tools are used and there are no advertisements.
What does it look like?
Feedback
Any kind of feedback is appreciated, feel free to suggest new features and report bugs.
If you don’t like something don’t be afraid to tell so, just remember to be polite about it, negative feedback is good if done well.
How to use it?
Tangochou is hosted on Vercel and you can reach it from https://tangochou.dariosechi.it
Thanks for reading and hope you like this project!
