皆さん、こんにちは！
You might’ve seen my posts a while back for the chrome extension we released, allowing you to help you learn Japanese through the subtitles of your favorite shows (https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/znjmdk/update_made_a_chrome_extension_to_make_it_easier/)
Taking our learnings from the Chrome Extension, we wanted to focus our efforts on building a full curriculum experience rather than a supplementary tool that our extension fulfills. A couple of months of development later, I’d love to announce the Iago’s mobile app — focusing on speaking practically through an open-world curriculum that you get to build on the fly!
Our curriculum consists of a handful of situations that you can choose from in any order (e.g. Ordering Food, Famous Lines from Anime, Small Talk & Intros). Each situation consists of a lesson, reading comprehension & speaking practice, and finally output practice through an dynamic conversation with an AI. Over time, you end up learning the grammar pertaining to your level as they appear throughout each situation
Disclaimer: AI is only used for the conversation portion in a strongly guided manner, everything else is handcrafted by native and N1+ Japanese speakers
Website 🔗: https://getiago.com
App Store 📱: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/iago-speak-japanese/id6471793412
Shilling aside, I used to work as a software engineer at Robinhood and started my Japanese learning journey during Covid in 2020. I quit my job in 2022 to pursue Iago full-time and so far we’ve been able to raise some venture money to hire a couple more folks on the team and commit to building out this mobile app.
During my time building in the space, I realized I’ve actually progressed slower while building Japanese learning tools than the actual studying 🥲 (though this might be the fact that getting to N3 takes longer than getting to N4/N5). I’m probably about N3, I love game design, making fun and interactive user interfaces, and love learning things in general!
Feel free to ask me anything!
Some interesting things I’ve noticed building in this space:
- AI
- Most folks here detest any product that has the word AI in it
- I think it's a valid take given every company is trying to sell the "AI Tutor" narrative treating AI like a silver bullet (most of these freeform convo practice apps don't teach imho)
- However, I do see valuable aspects of AI: we're able to finally digitalize 1:1 conversation practice! While it's not always native-sounding, it's usually enough for a new learner to get their convo reps in without needing to find a study partner
- Pitch Accent?!?
- When I first started building the extension, learners REALLY wanted to get their pitch accent correct from the start (it was also very sought-after feature for the Iago Extension)
- Now it seems to have settled, and I agree that it’s not the utmost important thing to learn in relation to just speaking as a whole (the more important part to me is being able to synthesize your response on the fly cause typing / writing gives you a lot more time to think)
by learnwithiago