When we sat down to build this Japanese flash card site we knew immediately that it wouldn't be much use unless you could walk around with it in your pocket or shoulder bag. We built it in such a way that you can load up a set of cards in the morning and study all day long, but the process you had to go through to load up the offline version of the cards was a bit convoluted. Well, honestly, it was just one extra click, but still who wants to have to remember to check an offline button especially on an iPhone/iPod touch? The original offline version of this site, also couldn't save your new scores while you were offline. Read more...

This site is a web application, but we've recently set it up so that you can study offline even when you aren't connected to the Internet. That's all well and good, but don't your fingers get cramped up opening up Safari, typing in the URL for the site and then navigating to the module you want to use? 

Well, here's our contribution to preventing early onset arthritis. Just follow the instructions in this post and you'll end up with a nice shinny icon on your iPhone/iPod Touch Home Screen that will take you directly to the Japanese flash cards that you want to study, even if you are not online anymore. Read more...

Today we're releasing a very important feature to help you blast through all the kanji and vocabulary you need for the JLPT or just every day life in Japan. 

I, to be honest, love flash cards. I think they are a great tool for memorizing kanji, or vocabulary. I usually start out with all of my cards in one enormous pile then separate them into smaller piles that seem to be memorizable in one day each. Then I go to work one pile at a time; one card at a time. Every couple of days I go back and review all the piles I've seen so far. It's this last part that isn't so very wise.

As the days turn into weeks, that review pile becomes ginormous. Reviewing ALL the cards every few days quickly drains me of my will. There comes a day when I decide to take a break and suddenly it's weeks later and the cards are gathering dust along with my motivation. The funny thing is that a large percentage of the cards in the review pile don't really need to be reviewed. I've already memorized them, but separating them from the smaller percentage of cards that I don't know so well and DO need to review is a chore. Read more...

Finding specific kanji or vocabulary cards in the system is a cinch.

The basics:

• Separate kanji or vocabulary with spaces and/or commas.
• Searches in the kanji module are handled slightly differently from searches in the vocabulary module.

Kanji Searches

When searching for kanji just type, or paste the a phrase or individual kanji into the search field. The system will search the database for each unique kanji you specify. They don't need to be separated by spaces or commas, but if it makes you feel better, go ahead and put commas in between each one.

The system pulls each unique kanji out of your search query and ignores anything that is not kanji, e.g., numbers and alphabetical characters. You can, therefore, quickly create a deck of cards for the most interesting article you've read in today's newspaper. Read more...

This site has been written to be fast and light. Some sites that serve content in Japanese for a non-Japanese audience encode Japanese text as images before sending it down the pipe to your web browser. Unfortunately images are much heavier than text, so serving images rather than text increases their hosting costs and the amount of time you must wait for each page to load.

We serve our Japanese content to you as text, to decrease our costs and your wait time. There is one caveat. If you don't have a Japanese font installed on your computer you'll see garbled text rather than Japanese. OS X users don't have this problem as it ships with Osaka, but last time I checked Windows it didn't have a Japanese font installed by default. The solution is simple: download and install a Japanese font. Read more...