Six Months Building Context Japanese: Five Things I've Learnt

It's about six months since Context Japanese went live, so seems a good moment to pause and give an update. Here are five things I have learnt.

1. My concept has been validated

I'd define the concept as the provision of varied and fresh content that is adjusted to a range of learner levels that can maintain a regular reading habit will appeal to learners. Users have found the site organically online, signed up for accounts, and returned to use the site. The most encouraging sign isn't the number of users—it's that some of them came back. I had set myself the goal of having returning users within one year. Now I can add a number to that to adjust the goal. I would like to have a regular user base of 100 by the one year mark. I believe this is an achievable goal with some more proactive promotion and distribution of the site.

2. Topic sourcing is more challenging than article generation

One area of the app that is key to making the premise work is topic sourcing. I have found that using news APIs to source content is not the best method. News APIs are built for a different purpose. I can imagine they are excellent tools for sourcing information and articles on a particular topic. For example, if you want to track all the latest information in the agriculture industry in the United States, then a news API would be a good tool. For my purpose, sourcing a variety of content on a range of topics, they prove less useful. For this reason I have moved towards using rss feeds for the topic sourcing ahead of APIs. Doing this I am able to be more selective about the sites being used to source topics. The range is more limited, but this can be broadened over time with some investment in researching good feeds.

3. Lower level simplification seems harder (but is it?)

Grading lower level articles seem harder, however, it is possible that it is just a case of being able to see the areas that need to be improved more easily. I believe Context Japanese is a good tool for beginners. However, it is the intermediate plateau (which a motivated beginner can enter quite quickly) where I believe the main target audience for this product are. The main job of Context Japanese is to help learners move beyond the intermediate plateau and towards confident, independent reading. I believe that more work will be needed on the higher levels to make this a reality. I am not ready for that yet but am looking forward to the challenge still to come.

4. Hiragana v Kanji at the lower levels is a challenge

One unique challenge with Japanese is the alphabets. As a Japanese learner myself, I am aware of how intimidating kanji can be, but I am also aware of how confusing a wall of hiragana is. Japanese is quite unique in this sense (are there other languages that mix alphabets like this!?). Kanji are the most difficult of the three alphabets used, but if the text only uses one of the simpler phonetic alphabets, it can be really challenging to understand the meaning because it is difficult to parse where one word ends and another one begins. I believe beginners must get exposed to simple Kanji early and begin reading with these as they will do at higher levels or they will likely become disillusioned quickly. I have had differing experiences with the three AI providers I am using, with some more likely than others to throw out the hiragana wall. There are some articles still creeping through at N5 level like this and I have a few ideas about how to fix this.

5. Renaming the project changed how I think about it

Context Japanese is now the third and I think final name for the product. Yomu Yomu was cute, but I don't think it really embodied what the product is aiming to do. I prefer Context because it also guides my thinking about the future product roadmap while capturing the essence of how language is acquired through the app. The next function release I have in mind will really feed into this idea and compound the learning possible using the product.

Looking forward

So here we are. There are some interesting challenges ahead. The levelling, topic selection and ensuring a variety of content for all tastes, optimisation for traversing the plateau to name a few. I will explore all of these further in coming months. If I finish with one question from the areas I have outlined that I will look at next, it would be on the subject of topic v level? Which is more important for a learner trying to learn a language? Would you rather have a topic you weren't interested in, perfectly levelled for you to learn from? Or a topic you really were interested in that was either too difficult or too easy for you? Which would you prefer? Something to think about.