Web-application for Learning Japanese Characters

Learning foreign languages means memorizing a huge amount of new information, including grammar rules and exceptions, unobvious phonetics, and vocabulary. The informational technology can assist people in such a task, considering the person’s habits and balancing the workload. The Japanese language is universally considered one of the most difficult foreign languages, the hardest part being its unique writing system — kanji. A student has to learn more than two thousand characters before they are capable of reading native texts fluently. This paper presents the project named «Tekio» (jp. 適応, en. adaptation), which uses a spaced repetitions system in its task of helping people to study Japanese. The spaced repetition system calculates the intervals between subsequent reviews of learning material of the user depending on their progress, fully exploiting the potentials of their memory. The ability of choosing the preferable order of kanji and workload balancing system, which considers the student’s preferences and progress, are among the features of this program. Tekio is a modern web-application, built with the technologies optimized for highly interactive, modern websites (SPA, REST API, etc.), meaning that the application is not much behind desktop programs in interactivity, and is easily accessible from any device with a modern web-browser. Besides, a public, comprehensively documented API allows third-party developers for writing new applications on top of this system.