Oppa

A little bit of news about the project :

• I've chosen to niche in Korean language instead of Japanese because even if there is less learners, there is also way less competition. It'll be easier to integrate Japanese language afterwards
• I have a working auth/ account parameters system that works
• I've learned that most Korean learners wants to learn it because they want to consume Kpop / Kdramas
• Korean language is on the rise lately

Oppa is a scratching my own itch product. Being an absolute fan of the Japanese culture, I have tried many times to learn the language in the last few years. While some methods have worked
better than others, I think I've identified the 2 problems that kept me from continuing :
- lack of motivation
- no fun

I think I've found a way to address both these problems.

---

The lack of motivation problem might be the hardest to address for the simple reason that it mostly depends on one sake, and can't really be bought. Even if It's unpleasant you need to study your lesson, you need to go exercise to the gym, and whether you do it or not mostly depends on yourself, and will only impact yourself.

This does not apply when social pressure comes into place. You just can't not come when there is a presentation with your team, when your kid need to be taken off school, etc. A way to address this problem is to add social pressure to the equation.

@JibranK did it for the workout routine, he developed an app that warns you when your friend has done some workout, thus keeping you motivated to continue. It peaked as number 1 in the App Store a week after launch.
Check this, It's great :
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/im-20-years-old-and-launched-an-app-that-went-1-on-the-app-store-ama-df035a69fd

I strongly believe that we can't achieve anything by our own. So why does language learning have to be done alone?
The idea here is to be warned when your friend has studied, for how long, and that he waits for you to pass the test so that you can both succeed and go to the next lesson. Thus, making it a completely social app.

---

Now, how can we make the language learning process fun?
Some people found learning a new language fun, but I didn't. I learned English for more than 10 years using school classes, movies in English, etc. But Japanese were quite different since I've studied it during confinement, so I couldn't really take classes.

The best way to learn a language is to accumulate a lot of vocabulary. So my strategy was to learn by heart the core 6000, which are the top 6000 most used words in the Japanese language. Then I'll be concerned about grammar, accent, etc.
It worked quite well, I was able to understand some phrases from Japanese animes by recognizing words. But oh boy was the process was long and unpleasant !
I first used free Anki decks, but quickly used the app IKnowJP! Which kinda works the same. It was mostly random words in day-to-day uninteresting phrases, with a royalty-free image.

So how can I make this better? What if instead of boring phrases, I could make some of the Japanese culture that I know? I've already said that I'm a big fan of animes and many people want to understand them directly without reading subtitles.
So the words will be taught directly by anime characters. It's quite interesting from a marketing perspective too because animes are most popular, and I can just make a pack on the most popular anime of the moment.

Here's the idea right now. It would probably change a lot in the future so stay tuned if you're interested.