While browsing the Kanji Koohi forum, I read a post by user Deign who claimed to have created a new app for learning Japanese. Skeptical, I gave his app a shot and was very impressed. It’s better than Anki!
His app is called Mainingu. It is still in the early stages of development, but you quickly start to understand the brilliance of it.
Each lesson (or deck) is broken down by difficulty and title of an anime or Japanese drama. Now, this is important. The reason why it’s broken down by drama is because the cards you will see all have a short clip where one of the characters says a sentence or a word. You are presented with partial text and a blank to fill in.
After hearing your favorite character or actor say their line, you have to use your ears to figure out what word they said. Then you can show the answer and choose “again”, “got it”, or “easy”. Like Anki or other modern flash card programs, you will be shown more often clips/words that you found to be more difficult.
There are so many resources for reading and writing Japanese, but the oral comprehension space is sorely lacking. Thankfully, there are developers out their who are thinking of new ways to incorporate video and audio into educational apps. If you feel like you need to work on your listening skills in Japanese, I highly recommend that you give this app a try.
If you don’t understand the sentences in the Mainingu app, check out my list of beginner Japanese resources and intermediate Japanese resources.