Think of Nihongo Lessons as the textbook to Nihongo’s dictionary. It’s an app for learning Japanese, specifically made for learners who are serious about becoming fluent, and want a guided set of content that will help them efficiently acquire vocabulary and grammar.
The project came about when Adam Shapiro of Japanese Level Up (Jalup) [1] announced last April that he was shutting Jalup down. As a fan of Adam’s work I was bummed to hear the news, but realized I actually might be one of the few people in the world in a position to keep his work alive. So I reached out, and we came up with a deal where I would sell Jalup content in my apps.
Originally it was envisioned as an add-on to Nihongo, but after starting to build this out it became clear that from a UX perspective it felt too bloated and tacked-on to just shove Jalup into Nihongo. Plus, given that Jalup is built around one-time content purchases, and Nihongo is a subscription, the purchases involved would feel convoluted, and people might be upset that they weren’t included in the Nihongo subscription.
So, I started building a separate app that would become Nihongo Lessons. From a technical perspective, Nihongo Lessons is actually just a different entry point into essentially the same app bundle as Nihongo. This gives me a lot of the infrastructure (sync, error reporting, screenshot generation, etc.) of Nihongo for free, and makes it easy to share UI, which I do a fair amount of (flashcards, tutorials, settings). Everything that actually changes behavior between the apps is stored in a single file as an “app variant” configuration, so if I decide to create another companion app in the future, it should be even easier.
It’s iPhone-only for now, but iPad will be coming soon. No plans for an Android release at the moment.
Download: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1640204242