I wish somebody would do this

[Taurus]

I haven't heard of this, but some Patron Saint of Nihongo could easily make an excellent reading application that contains a commonly used word for every reading of every daily use character, contained in or accompanied by one or more example sentences, with an anki-style review system. With this as a base, it could be extended to become the easiest, fastest, and most organised way to learn to read Japanese ever. It's quite an obvious idea, but feel free to steal it and implement it (preferably as desktop and iPhone versions that can be synced ), if you can be bothered. I'll pay up to $10 for it in the iTunes Store

I thought this post was pretty timely because I've been thinking a lot lately about the way all of the Japanese-learning software I've tried is really bad, and when I read the above I was just about to post about what I think would make the perfect language-learning programme.

See, I play games for a living and as a hobby, and it seems to me that the one thing that games do really, really well, is to hook you in and not let you go. They're experts at providing you with meaningless, trivial tasks that somehow occupy your every waking thought. I was up till 4am this morning playing Ryu ga Gotoku and all I was doing was wandering around trying to find coin-locker keys on the floor and trying to woo a hostess girl by choosing the right dialogue choices. I would *love* to see a game modelled on Brain Training on the DS - the way it really incentivises you to beat your performance every day.

What I'd really like to see is a programme that, again, uses spaced repetition flashcards like Anki as the base. But on top of just these flashcards, the programme would contain a load of different materials in Japanese, which you could select by media format (writing, manga, video, music, or whatever) or by category (eg. sports, culture, history etc.) And as you watch or read these materials, if there's any words or phrases you don't understand you can just select them and import them straight into the flashcards. And these would be supplemented by various mini-game drills, along the line of Brain Training. So one drill might be just a vocabulary test, but each day you'd be aiming to the previous day's score. Or there might be a drill that involves arithmetic but in Japanese.

I think this combination - of spaced repetition software, reading material that interests you, and trying to beat your score every day - would be a killer app.

The closest thing I've seen to these are the mini-games in My Japanese Coach but they were all in romaji, and I didn't think any of them really helped you learn anything. And LinQ which allows you to select text that you want to learn, but I don't really like the interface and trying to find materials is really difficult.

So yeah, what Japanese-learning resource would you really like to see?

[wccrawford]

I'd settle for a good Anki deck that had word and sentence cards. Make sure the word card appears before the sentence it's used it, and make sure to start with easy words and work up to hard ones.

The problem with both our selections is that it takes someone who is good at Japanese to compile a decent set. (With yours, there's the added artistry of making a story, etc.)