What is Kanji Study?

Kanji Study is an app developed by Chase Colburn, it’s an Android and soon to be IOS app, it provides students of Japanese with an interactive, intelligent and fun way to study the language on their own, as the cost of teachers may be expensive, Kanji Study offers a more pivoting and beneficial learning tool you should definetely keep in your arsenal.

Now many of you know about my ancestral ancient thing-a-ma-jigs of Japanese relatives, but how about yourselves many of you may come from another place in the world and that’s completely understandable, but today we’re going to be talking about something fresh! Not only am I relaunching this site, I will be designing a new section Called Reviewing the app: Now how this works is I will get into touch with pretty awesome developers to talk about the apps they’ve made, I will get all their opinions and knowledge out there as well as some secret news~~ Shh! It’s secret- about some upcoming features or things the developers are working on! They’ve allowed me to say so much, but let’s give credit where it’s due now!

Kanji Study is Developed by Chase Colburn!

 Now I’ve only met Chase today and I have to say I’m glad to have made his aquintance, he’s an earnest man, trying to make a living, but also pours his passion into helping so many out there learn a new Language, which we all know is extremely tough! He’s extremely responsive and I asked him about what he felt about people benefiting from his app and any new features on the way and he said:

The beauty of Android is how easy it is to deploy quickly. Because of this, I release features as I write them and I have done several releases just this week so I am not too far into new features yet. That being said, I have a HUGE roadmap with some pretty ambitious goals. Some of them include full localizations

He has said more about his features, but I feel if I placed his whole sentence he wrote to me, others may take his ideas, so Chase I’ll save you the heartbreak my man! I will say this though, he has something extra to make the app, a ton more interactive and enjoyable. He also shows that he’s a quality developer he takes time and caution into what he draws out, he just doesn’t want to release features to keep people busy, but he wants to indulge them in a fun and extremely creative method in learning something as difficult as Japanese Kanji.

His inspirations for the app come from this piece he wrote as well as his trials overcoming the problems showcased.

Not really sure what else I could say. I studied kanji myself using White Rabbit Press flashcards and how I studied was a huge inspiration for the app. I am also incredibly thankful for the amazing work of the KanjiVG project (they provide SVG renderings of all the kanji). Without them, all the best features wouldn’t exist.

The app itself is not meant to hand hold you through learning kanji but instead break down the daunting task of learning 2000+ kanji into self managable chucks. I try to make self assessment and organization quick and easy and offer intelligent ways to drill and study. I have put a ridiculous amount of hours into this but I am glad to see it starting to grow.

With numbers in downloads reaching to the 100,000s, this app has to be a good thing am I right? He also holds a wonderful rating in which I encourage users to rate highly if they enjoyed the experience given by Chase and his Kanji Study app. If any negative feedback you have towards the app, he reccomends it would be best to notify him through the app via email which would be under settings.

What makes this app great though?

• UI Design, it looks clean and fulfilling
• Kanji Flashcard Scheme
• Ability to draw Kana and Kanji you’ve learned
• Able to test yourself via adaptive quizzes that you can customize to your need
• Able to track and tell how much time you’ve spent learning
• Ability to Study over 6000+ Kanji (Paid, but worth it)
• Custom formats/groups for reading and studying (Paid)

Here are some images so you can see what it looks like before downloading the app which is FREE by the way, if you want more features you should support the developer it’ll be a tool of worth in your awesome arsenal.

(Images from Google Play Store, Kanji Study App)

Things to Know about the Developer

While making a app is tough managing your personal life is tougher, with bills to pay to marriage man marriage… Anyways onward here’s a cool interesting quote said by Chase himself.

I work on this app nearly every night after the kids go to bed. As long as I keep at it, I make progress. I try to take care of technical debt as early as possible so that I can always focus on new features. If you notice, the app does not have much for tutorials. This saves me time 😛

So he works hard, keep up the good work! Knowing about the technical complications a developer can face, I assure that anyone who wants to learn and benefit from a Japanese study session induced with creativity, that they should hence forth and buy this man a damn beer! Please buy the app if you enjoy it and it would benefit you! At the end of the day we’re still all students!

Chase also plans on debuting an IOS app as I mentioned before soon! So stay tuned any iPhone/ipad users would be happy to see a fully updated app soon.

it might be worth mentioning that I plan to make an iOS version (in fact, there is already an iOS version that I wrote many years ago but it is nothing like the Android app I am working on now). That was a much smaller project and I don’t advertise it.

One last note is that Chase also loves that he was able to design and say what he wanted because he developed it on his own, hard work paid off for sure! A last quote from chase:

I definitely capitalize on the fact that it is just me and not a company. I like that I can say “I” and not “we” and I can put in whatever text I want. I am also glad that Google let’s me do almost whatever (Apple would reject an app with a beer donation option).

So GO AHEAD AND DOWNLOAD THE KANJI STUDY APP! Do you need an even bigger header?

Go Download Kanji Study – Click here! 

This app is a go to and I highly reccommend it.

I’ve been Ginto and I’m OoUT!

Last modified: November 3, 2016