Why I Started Making Nihongo

I had just moved to Japan. After studying Japanese in high school and college, living in Japan felt like the experience I needed to solidify my Japanese and hopefully become fluent, achieving a life goal to become fluent in a second language.

I quickly found that just being surrounded by Japanese everyday wasn’t enough to actually retain what I was encountering. I don’t feel like I’m a natural at language learning, and have always used flashcards and spaced repetition software to drill words into my head. So I started making flashcards for the words I was seeing, to help me retain them better.

This quickly grew tedious. I was spending more time making flashcards than actually studying. So I fell back into studying from premade flashcard decks, to avoid the hassle. And there I was, living in Japan, and studying words that had nothing to do with what I was seeing in life, the same way I would at home.

I initially built Nihongo to solve this problem for myself, by making an app that would automatically create flashcards from the words I look up in the dictionary, or from text I paste into the app from Japanese websites, emails, etc., so I could study what I was encountering without the tedious process of creating flashcards. The rest flowed from there.