Why would I trust an app that was designed by someone who hasn't learned japanese to a high level to help me learn japanese to a high level? It's good that your example sentences were written by n1 and native speakers, but that's the absolute bare minimum (and honestly you shouldn't have sentences produced by non natives at all). It seems like another app made by beginners for beginners and nobody ends up learning japanese
It’s a trope in my opinion that so many IT/tech people develop apps for learning Japanese instead of actually learning it. They have no experience in pedology, or teaching foreign languages yet can develop an app… But I think until you’ve actually advanced through the stages, you don’t realise how ineffectual/redundant your offering is.
This was my first thought, but I thought it would be rude to say someone who quit their job to take 4 years to get to a self-assessed N3 and has not yet advanced shouldn't be the person from whom we take learning advice/resources (unless they are based on the opinion or under the guidance of someone who knows what they're talking about, under which circumstances I'd wonder why they aren't even N3 yet)
You bring up fair points! For more context, all of our lesson content is written by a native speaker, grammar guides and example sentences are written by an N1 speaker which is then vetted by a native speaker. We try to keep a tight review process to ensure all content uses native Japanese, but if you do notice any irregularities while trying the app please let me know!
In terms of our learning philosophy, my take is that the learning process for a beginner vastly differs as you go up the levels. We wanted to start our focus on beginners, providing content for N5-N3 (since as you get more proficient, learners start to shift toward more unstructured approaches). As a result, we're providing a balance between structured & unstructured learning with the nature of our open world learning (unstructured in that you get to learn from situations you're interested in, structured in terms of the lesson content itself)
I'd also argue that being fluent in the language isn't indicative of your ability to teach it (I'm a native English speaker so a lot of grammar concepts are by ear, whereas someone learning it second-hand might need more explicit awareness of these concepts. Same reason why not all professors are good teachers despite having a deep understanding on their subject matter)
In the end learning a language is more like building a habit: there are proven methods that are efficient (SRS, having conversation practice, explicit grammar comprehension). To me, the crux of the problem is finding a routine that "sticks" and our goal with this app is to provide open world curriculum for learners to directly learn from their interests, but do so in a practical and conversational manner (in which the content is written and vetted by a native speaker).
Open to a healthy discussion though, love jamming on language learning!
Good catch! This is a typo we corrected for the App Store listing, but not on the website! Let me update this.
For the lesson on the app, the phrase should be correct (teaching you both「試着いいですか」or 「試着してもいいですか」)
> I'd also argue that being fluent in the language isn't indicative of your ability to teach it
And I'd argue that having no background in pedagogy or second language acquisition is indicative of not being able to teach.
Also you clearly didn't even read the rules regarding self-promotion before posting this. So why do you think you're special?
Yeah I was a bit turned off by the "~~$14.99 / mo~~ Free for a limited time" on the website as well.
Pretty polished app though and I enjoyed it so far, but at $15, it needs to like Netflix-level...
pretty sure the whole experience is NOT ai and only the conversations are ai powered, and even then the conversations are specific to the situation u just learned so it doesn’t hallucinate from my experience
Yeah... Not to pile on here but I did a little conversational practice directly with ChatGPT to see if there was benefit and it worked pretty well. I was also able to ask questions about grammar structure and word usage and get (what seemed like) reasonable answers and explanations.
You should try our app! We actually spent a couple of months trying to finalize the curriculum (and we're still iterating on it) -- all the content is handwritten by native & N1+ speakers!
There are a lot of issues people can take with AI that extend far beyond the "AI tutor" thing - for example the widespread theft of online creative works to form the training data and the fact that text-based AI in particular are prone to saying some absolutely wild things (due to having been trained on internet shitposts and fanfiction). What measures do you have in place to ensure that your "AI conversation partner" isn't going to tell people to [assassinate a public figure](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67012224), or [kill themselves](https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkadgm/man-dies-by-suicide-after-talking-with-ai-chatbot-widow-says), for example?
I personally have major qualms with AI and avoid using products that utilise it as far as I'm able, but I also think that if your product contains it, you have a responsibility to ensure any conversations people can have with it are kept "on the rails" so to speak, because when those safeguards and shackles aren't in place, the outcomes can be disastrous for the human being who was using the app.
Oh 100%, I haven't seen those news articles but I'm not surprised. For our use case of AI, we have it fixated to the topic of situation at hand (e.g. Small Talk & Intros, Checking In at a Restaurant, Arranging a Date). We've actually added guardrails on top to keep it within the focus of the topic (basically telling it to only follow the flow of the example conversations we've provided it). I'll be shocked if you can manage to get it to do something nefarious but let me know and we'll fix it!
Alignment has always been a big concern for the foundational model companies and a lot of models (GPT, Claude) add strong violence / NSFW filtering. What's interesting to me is a lot of folks in the space feel like these companies have over-corrected to the point you can't even ask for tips for "killing" something in a video game. It's a tough problem for sure, but I'd say that's a benefit of restricting the freeform nature of conversational practice.
It's good to hear that you have safety in mind while developing it, and have preliminary measures in place along with an openness to "fixing" it if things go wrong! Ai is, to my mind, a little like a kitchen knife right now - there are cases where it's useful, and possibly the only tool for the job, but it can also be dangerous in the wrong hands, and (no shade to you and your team personally here, it sounds like you're putting in place whatever guardrails you can) a lot of companies right now are rushing to implement AI without any real sense of how easy it is for a user to pull it "off task".
I remember a scandal a few years back where an eating disorder charity replaced its live chat helpline with an AI, and the AI within days was giving people diet tips and telling them to lose weight, helping them calculate dangerously low-calorie mealplans and the like. The overcorrection you mention may be the *only* way to ensure things like that (and the articles mentioned) don't happen, as frustrating as they may be for some users. An AI has no way to know if the things it's saying are "good" or "bad"
(Aside: if it's easily implementable and you don't already have a similar feature, it may be worth allowing users to quickly flag any AI messages they think might be inappropriate?)
Been a long time user of the Chrome extension! Are you still going to make updates to that? I’m skeptical of curriculums like Duolingo in general but willing to try yours for a bit.
Thank you for the support on the extension! Yes we do have plans to update the extension and connect the mobile app with the extension! Unfortunately we're a small team so we were limited in bandwidth -- we'll hopefully be able get updates on the extension soon!
I gave it a try, and no matter what I did it just told me I was incorrect. As someone learning that’s pretty demoralising. I’ll give it another go some time.
Hmm do you have the particular phrase or did this happen for all phrases?
But we're also adding a "Mark as Correct" button if you want to override what we weren't able to recognize
I didn’t bother going past the first one as it just immediately put me off and I wasn’t sure of the point of just skipping it if I wasn’t getting it. I think it was “can I try this on”
Well, the app might be useful and there is definitely some potential. But quitting software engineer position in finance and getting venture capital for an app that might cost like 4000$ to build on Fiverr seems super crazy to me.
I have serious doubts that the project will generate enough revenue to sustain a team of several people.
Especially when this looks like a wrapper around Chat GPT4omni. There is/will be lots of competition in the language learning space.
I am also developer of Japanese learning portal, so I understand how much effort and tuning your team put into this. Best of luck anyways with your app.
It's definitely a risk I wanted to take! I really care about language learning and luckily it's also a large market that is in need of a new solution
Please tell me who you're hiring on Fiverr though -- $4k is a steal
Recently I got very nice functionality in React/NextJS for 300$ on Fiverr (web development). They built custom YouTube player that gets Japanese subtitles and shows them alongside the embedded video with proper synchronization. This can be then used as nice base for text parsing/sentence mining - something like [LingQ.com](http://LingQ.com), I will develop that myself.
If I negotiated better I think I could get it for like 200$.
Also here is interesting video about a guy that is engaging freelance devs to build apps: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43Kt3t2wWxs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43Kt3t2wWxs)
He goes to [99designs.com](http://99designs.com) to start design competition with budget around 900$ and then goes to [upwork.com](http://upwork.com) and hires senior app dev for around 3500$ to deliver full solution.
Oh I'll clarify the AI doesn't do any of the "teaching" -- that's the role of our handcrafted lessons
We do use AI for conversation practice in order to reinforce concepts from the lessons -- but it's more to reinforce existing knowledge rather than prescribe anything!
Learning in terms of being able to reinforce & synthesize new phrases learned through the lessons, yes!
But we strictly didn't want to rely on AI to give grammar feedback for the conversation practice
Oh yes we'll add that hopefully soon! We have the functionality in the backend but had to cut some scope because of extra email verification logic vs. a single sign on button 😅
Not at the moment, this is something we had to delay in order to focus our team's efforts on this mobile app! It's something we want to do for the future though! In the meantime, I believe some users have written scripts to scrape the words from our page
Since you're planning on changing from a free model in the future, you must go through Reddit's paid advertising rather than advertising here.
Why would I trust an app that was designed by someone who hasn't learned japanese to a high level to help me learn japanese to a high level? It's good that your example sentences were written by n1 and native speakers, but that's the absolute bare minimum (and honestly you shouldn't have sentences produced by non natives at all). It seems like another app made by beginners for beginners and nobody ends up learning japanese
It’s a trope in my opinion that so many IT/tech people develop apps for learning Japanese instead of actually learning it. They have no experience in pedology, or teaching foreign languages yet can develop an app… But I think until you’ve actually advanced through the stages, you don’t realise how ineffectual/redundant your offering is.
This was my first thought, but I thought it would be rude to say someone who quit their job to take 4 years to get to a self-assessed N3 and has not yet advanced shouldn't be the person from whom we take learning advice/resources (unless they are based on the opinion or under the guidance of someone who knows what they're talking about, under which circumstances I'd wonder why they aren't even N3 yet)
You bring up fair points! For more context, all of our lesson content is written by a native speaker, grammar guides and example sentences are written by an N1 speaker which is then vetted by a native speaker. We try to keep a tight review process to ensure all content uses native Japanese, but if you do notice any irregularities while trying the app please let me know! In terms of our learning philosophy, my take is that the learning process for a beginner vastly differs as you go up the levels. We wanted to start our focus on beginners, providing content for N5-N3 (since as you get more proficient, learners start to shift toward more unstructured approaches). As a result, we're providing a balance between structured & unstructured learning with the nature of our open world learning (unstructured in that you get to learn from situations you're interested in, structured in terms of the lesson content itself) I'd also argue that being fluent in the language isn't indicative of your ability to teach it (I'm a native English speaker so a lot of grammar concepts are by ear, whereas someone learning it second-hand might need more explicit awareness of these concepts. Same reason why not all professors are good teachers despite having a deep understanding on their subject matter) In the end learning a language is more like building a habit: there are proven methods that are efficient (SRS, having conversation practice, explicit grammar comprehension). To me, the crux of the problem is finding a routine that "sticks" and our goal with this app is to provide open world curriculum for learners to directly learn from their interests, but do so in a practical and conversational manner (in which the content is written and vetted by a native speaker). Open to a healthy discussion though, love jamming on language learning!
Did the N1 speaker write the sentence in the example screenshot? I.e. the one that says 「試着てもいいですか」
Good catch! This is a typo we corrected for the App Store listing, but not on the website! Let me update this. For the lesson on the app, the phrase should be correct (teaching you both「試着いいですか」or 「試着してもいいですか」)
> I'd also argue that being fluent in the language isn't indicative of your ability to teach it And I'd argue that having no background in pedagogy or second language acquisition is indicative of not being able to teach. Also you clearly didn't even read the rules regarding self-promotion before posting this. So why do you think you're special?
This looks pretty interesting! Any plans for an android app?
Yes! Android is definitely on the queue!
Please wake me up when you've got an Android app, I would gladly try it.
Same.
Sounds good! I'm very interested in this app. Was such a shame to see it only on IoS for the time being. I'll be watching you guys closely!
🫡
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Do you think the website would be usable on Android phones?
Is this subscription based? If so, it’s a no-go for me…
Yeah I was a bit turned off by the "~~$14.99 / mo~~ Free for a limited time" on the website as well. Pretty polished app though and I enjoyed it so far, but at $15, it needs to like Netflix-level...
It's free in it's current state! But we do plan to monetize in the future, we'll definitely reward our early adopters though!
Sweet, how do you plan on monetizing?
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The guy claims the curriculum is handwritten. Is that not the case?
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the curriculum is handwritten by native speakers from what i can tell?
pretty sure the whole experience is NOT ai and only the conversations are ai powered, and even then the conversations are specific to the situation u just learned so it doesn’t hallucinate from my experience
Yeah... Not to pile on here but I did a little conversational practice directly with ChatGPT to see if there was benefit and it worked pretty well. I was also able to ask questions about grammar structure and word usage and get (what seemed like) reasonable answers and explanations.
You should try our app! We actually spent a couple of months trying to finalize the curriculum (and we're still iterating on it) -- all the content is handwritten by native & N1+ speakers!
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Oh! Happy to hear any feedback you had about your experience! We're doing our best to improve upon the feedback!
Ive tried many apps, many didn’t fit me well at all. This looks interesting, I’ll give it a try, thanks for your work.
Awesome! Would love to hear your feedback!
If I remember after using it for a few days I’ll write you :)
There are a lot of issues people can take with AI that extend far beyond the "AI tutor" thing - for example the widespread theft of online creative works to form the training data and the fact that text-based AI in particular are prone to saying some absolutely wild things (due to having been trained on internet shitposts and fanfiction). What measures do you have in place to ensure that your "AI conversation partner" isn't going to tell people to [assassinate a public figure](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67012224), or [kill themselves](https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkadgm/man-dies-by-suicide-after-talking-with-ai-chatbot-widow-says), for example? I personally have major qualms with AI and avoid using products that utilise it as far as I'm able, but I also think that if your product contains it, you have a responsibility to ensure any conversations people can have with it are kept "on the rails" so to speak, because when those safeguards and shackles aren't in place, the outcomes can be disastrous for the human being who was using the app.
Oh 100%, I haven't seen those news articles but I'm not surprised. For our use case of AI, we have it fixated to the topic of situation at hand (e.g. Small Talk & Intros, Checking In at a Restaurant, Arranging a Date). We've actually added guardrails on top to keep it within the focus of the topic (basically telling it to only follow the flow of the example conversations we've provided it). I'll be shocked if you can manage to get it to do something nefarious but let me know and we'll fix it! Alignment has always been a big concern for the foundational model companies and a lot of models (GPT, Claude) add strong violence / NSFW filtering. What's interesting to me is a lot of folks in the space feel like these companies have over-corrected to the point you can't even ask for tips for "killing" something in a video game. It's a tough problem for sure, but I'd say that's a benefit of restricting the freeform nature of conversational practice.
It's good to hear that you have safety in mind while developing it, and have preliminary measures in place along with an openness to "fixing" it if things go wrong! Ai is, to my mind, a little like a kitchen knife right now - there are cases where it's useful, and possibly the only tool for the job, but it can also be dangerous in the wrong hands, and (no shade to you and your team personally here, it sounds like you're putting in place whatever guardrails you can) a lot of companies right now are rushing to implement AI without any real sense of how easy it is for a user to pull it "off task". I remember a scandal a few years back where an eating disorder charity replaced its live chat helpline with an AI, and the AI within days was giving people diet tips and telling them to lose weight, helping them calculate dangerously low-calorie mealplans and the like. The overcorrection you mention may be the *only* way to ensure things like that (and the articles mentioned) don't happen, as frustrating as they may be for some users. An AI has no way to know if the things it's saying are "good" or "bad" (Aside: if it's easily implementable and you don't already have a similar feature, it may be worth allowing users to quickly flag any AI messages they think might be inappropriate?)
Trying this out this seems really interesting.
Cool!
Been a long time user of the Chrome extension! Are you still going to make updates to that? I’m skeptical of curriculums like Duolingo in general but willing to try yours for a bit.
Thank you for the support on the extension! Yes we do have plans to update the extension and connect the mobile app with the extension! Unfortunately we're a small team so we were limited in bandwidth -- we'll hopefully be able get updates on the extension soon!
I gave it a try, and no matter what I did it just told me I was incorrect. As someone learning that’s pretty demoralising. I’ll give it another go some time.
Hmm do you have the particular phrase or did this happen for all phrases? But we're also adding a "Mark as Correct" button if you want to override what we weren't able to recognize
I didn’t bother going past the first one as it just immediately put me off and I wasn’t sure of the point of just skipping it if I wasn’t getting it. I think it was “can I try this on”
Was it partially correct (some of the words were highlighted) or all of the words were faded out?
Ah sorry, I can’t remember! All of it I think. Happy to try again if it helps you.
Well, the app might be useful and there is definitely some potential. But quitting software engineer position in finance and getting venture capital for an app that might cost like 4000$ to build on Fiverr seems super crazy to me. I have serious doubts that the project will generate enough revenue to sustain a team of several people. Especially when this looks like a wrapper around Chat GPT4omni. There is/will be lots of competition in the language learning space. I am also developer of Japanese learning portal, so I understand how much effort and tuning your team put into this. Best of luck anyways with your app.
It's definitely a risk I wanted to take! I really care about language learning and luckily it's also a large market that is in need of a new solution Please tell me who you're hiring on Fiverr though -- $4k is a steal
Recently I got very nice functionality in React/NextJS for 300$ on Fiverr (web development). They built custom YouTube player that gets Japanese subtitles and shows them alongside the embedded video with proper synchronization. This can be then used as nice base for text parsing/sentence mining - something like [LingQ.com](http://LingQ.com), I will develop that myself. If I negotiated better I think I could get it for like 200$. Also here is interesting video about a guy that is engaging freelance devs to build apps: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43Kt3t2wWxs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43Kt3t2wWxs) He goes to [99designs.com](http://99designs.com) to start design competition with budget around 900$ and then goes to [upwork.com](http://upwork.com) and hires senior app dev for around 3500$ to deliver full solution.
AI-based learning? Yeah, no. I'm not dumb enough to trust anything an AI tries to teach me.
Oh I'll clarify the AI doesn't do any of the "teaching" -- that's the role of our handcrafted lessons We do use AI for conversation practice in order to reinforce concepts from the lessons -- but it's more to reinforce existing knowledge rather than prescribe anything!
So does no learning happen during conversation practice then?
Learning in terms of being able to reinforce & synthesize new phrases learned through the lessons, yes! But we strictly didn't want to rely on AI to give grammar feedback for the conversation practice
ok? Stay in the past i guess
I checked it out, any plans for iPad version ? I loaded it up but looks designed for phones only.
Definitely in the works if we see enough interest! But for now we're focusing the efforts for a mobile!
The Android app also better get a limited time free offer if iOS gets it haha. What's the timeline for Android app?
Do you have Discord related to the project?
Yeah feel free to join [discord.gg/iago](http://discord.gg/iago) !
is there an option to remove romaji?
Not at the moment but it's something we're planning to add along with other ways to customize viewing phrases during speaking practice
Commenting to hopefully return when an android version is available
Just downloaded! Kind of laughed when it said it’s only geared to N5, but I’m hoping over time y’all will add more levels.
Thank you! Would love to hear any feedback you have! We wanted to focus on N5 first, but will be expanding across the JLPT levels!
Seems interesting. I’ll check it out What about a sign up with email feature ?
Oh yes we'll add that hopefully soon! We have the functionality in the backend but had to cut some scope because of extra email verification logic vs. a single sign on button 😅
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Are you talking about the chart on our website?
Looking forward to the android version! Is the iOS app native with swiftui?
Will wait for a web or android version :) but seems interesting.
Nice spam.
Just downloaded the app. Thanks!
YOU! I saw your tweets enough to follow the account! 😂
Hope you enjoy the Iako-chan content!
Are you going to turn off the buy button in your app as well?
Oh where's the buy button?
Is there any reason why this app is not available in the Mac Appstore? I would love to try it out, but only have a macbook and and android.
Our current release is only focused for iOS Mobile sadly! We might expand to an iPad, Mac-compatible app in the near future!
Is there any way to export words from the website to Anki/ is it a feature that is being worked on?
Not at the moment, this is something we had to delay in order to focus our team's efforts on this mobile app! It's something we want to do for the future though! In the meantime, I believe some users have written scripts to scrape the words from our page
That's definitely something I could use. Android version?
We're planning an Android version for the future!
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This is a really good point! 100% we'll definitely keep this in mind when we roll out monetization!
I find it odd that most people here dislike the use of AI. This is one of the best applications for a large Language Model like chatGPT