Nihongo

I didn’t think I’d be making a Japanese learning app when I arrived in Japan. My husband had gotten a job teaching English at a Japanese high school, and I quit my full-time software engineering job to come along, figuring I’d finally give myself the time to start my life as an indie videogame developer.

It was a disaster. I had made small games in the past, and even published them, but trying to do it day-in, day-out made me realize that I didn’t actually enjoy designing games as much as I liked programming them. And it turns out, with modern game engines, the programming was a relatively small part of the process.

So I was alone every day in a new country, depressed, and failing at what I had believed for years was my passion.

Nihongo was a huge factor in pulling me out of that hole. It was something I desperately wanted for myself, it was something that felt meaningful to the world, and it kept me busy with plenty of interesting engineering and intellectual challenges. It turned out that I needed to sink into that hole first so that I could figure out what I was really passionate about.

When I first started living in Japan, I tried to solve the “get words I encounter in real life into my flashcards” problem with a hack. The Japanese dictionary app I was using had the ability to export a word list to CSV. The flashcard app I was using had an import functionality. Surely I could make this work somehow.

So, here was the setup: I’d build a list of words in the dictionary, and export them to a CSV file in my dropbox. My laptop, sitting open on a desk in my tiny Japanese apartment, would sync the new file down. A macOS folder action would be triggered by the new file, which would run a script that would convert the CSV file to the format expected by my flashcards app, and put it into a new folder in dropbox. I could then import that new file in my flashcard app, and study away. The effect actually worked pretty well — I could export the list from the dictionary, wait a minute or two, and then import the converted deck into my flashcards app.

I was sitting on the train one day, chatting with another foreigner friend and explaining this setup, when they mused that it would be great if there were a single app that would just do that for you. This was the lightbulb moment, where I realized that I could make that app. It would eventually become 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.