/Masumi

Multi-platform Japanese language study tool

Primary LanguageJavaOtherNOASSERTION

Masumi is a tool to help you study Japanese.  It is pre-pre-pre-alpha.
That means it does precisely nothing right now.  But I'm working on that.
If you want a tool to help you study Japanese right now, please
take a look at http://jldrill.rubyforge.org 

Masumi is the sucessor to JLDrill.  With JLDrill my idea was to create
an application that drills you on various aspects of Japanese.  This
was helpful, but as I continued to learn I realized the drilling is
not the best focus for language acquisition.  Instead I want to
focus on comprehensible input.

In language acquisition, the best thing is to immerse yourself in the
language.  As you encounter more and more natural sentences that
you can understand, you will acquire the language.  When you first
learned your native language, this is what happened.

But the problem is that learning on your own in this manner is very
difficult.  At the beginning, virtually all the Japanese you are
likely to encounter is not understandable.  Your parents took on
the role of patiently explaining everything that you encountered.
Eventually you acquired enough that you could start to learn on
your own.  But it took time.

Masumi is intented to be a type of electric companion that patiently
explains Japanese as you encounter it.  It will give you access to
a lot of resources to help you comprehend language that you encounter
on your computer.  Then it provides opportunity to review that
language.

But right now all you get is a window that opens and closes.  It
has an icon too, but it is the icon from JLDrill.  You've got to
start somewhere.

I am writing this in Java as I hope to be able to deploy Masumi
on anything that will run Java (including Android).  Ideally I
would like to deploy on iOS too, but it looks like that will require
a rewrite in Objective C.

The development strategy for Masumi is to concentrate on BDD.
The reason for this is that I am likely to have to write at least
2 UIs and also rewrite in Objective C.  So I need to have clear
requirements.