For Japanese learners, I built two iOS apps that cater to the special needs of the language.
Manabi [0] is a flashcard app with the same algorithm as Anki but nicer UI.
Manabi Reader [1] collects a bunch of short-form reading materials, lets you tap words to look them up, and tap to add a flashcard. It tracks the individual words you read and charts your progress word by word and kanji by kanji. This app has gotten pretty popular so I have been improving it substantially.
That looks really interesting, I'll definitely give this a try. How did you decide on the reading materials to use? There's obviously so much to choose from, I'm wondering what criteria you might use.
The app is a (very heavily) dressed-up RSS reader. I maintain a list of reading sources and add them so long as they're not going to have overly sensitive material (eg someone suggested an anonymous blog with short and colorful posts from contributors reflecting on their lives, but some of the posts talk about self-harm) or be too niche. I'm most interested in feeds that get regularly updated with new content, or where they have a trove of existing content. Also always looking out for content that's good for absolute beginners.
Some RSS feeds require additional work in the app to transform their content to make them work nicely with the reader mode, so I also take that into account.
I will check these out!
I use Anki for Japanese right now - mainly because I found Anki decks for each chapter of Genki 1 which I am working through right now.
Would love any feedback! The Reader app is really unique - no other app provides that kind of kanji-by-kanji reading progress functionality (probably because it took a tremendous amount of work under the hood to get it right).
It's a native iOS app so I would have to start from scratch on Android. I do plan to port it to macOS via Catalyst sometime after the upcoming WWDC which will help some Android users.
I'll note that this is a big pain point for me: although Android users don't pay as much for apps, they help boost word-of-mouth marketing substantially. I see some similar but (tbh) subpar apps get more word-of-mouth online even in recommendations to iOS users just because of the huge signal boost from Android users.
Manabi [0] is a flashcard app with the same algorithm as Anki but nicer UI.
Manabi Reader [1] collects a bunch of short-form reading materials, lets you tap words to look them up, and tap to add a flashcard. It tracks the individual words you read and charts your progress word by word and kanji by kanji. This app has gotten pretty popular so I have been improving it substantially.
[0] https://manabi.io
[1] https://reader.manabi.io/