Hello friends, fellow Japanese language learner here. I am working on building an intuitive Japanese conversational tutor with a few friends, called Nora.
It all started when a few of us realized that even though we had been studying Japanese for years (through apps, immersion, and self-study), we still had trouble saying even the most basic things. We had a “duh” moment when we realized that we were getting tons and tons of input practice and not a whole lot of output (speaking) practice. We looked around for other tools and apps in the market, and couldn’t find the right kind of solution.
We decided to build a premium conversation tutoring tool that removes all the annoying barriers to getting that speaking practice. With Nora, you don’t have to pay for or schedule something with an expensive human tutor, you don’t have to know someone in Japan, and you don’t have to have a spouse or friend to pester about practicing with you. You can practice speaking on your terms, awkwardness necessary.
Some of the coolest features of Nora:
• Bilingual mode: Nora can offer corrections and explanations in both Japanese and English.
• Free talk or roleplay: You can have any type of conversation with Nora in Japanese, or practice everyday topics like ordering at a restaurant, asking for directions, talking about school, and more.
• Formal and casual mode: Practice speaking keigo and tameguchi.
• Flow or strict modes: You can adjust to your desired amount of correction (whether you want to have a flowing conversation or be corrected on every mistake).
• No annoying onboarding – Nora understands your level of speaking quickly and adjusts to you.
We’ll also soon include gamification and community features to make Nora fun to use!
You all know better than anyone else that with Japanese, you basically need to upload a whole new operating system into your brain. When you start doing speaking practice, you discover the things you really need to work on… the “chinks in your armor”. We discovered that speaking practice helps us figure out what we need to do more of.
Anyway, I wanted to share Nora with this community, and also see if you guys have any feedback. We want to make this thing as awesome as possible for people who truly want to learn to speak Japanese, and co-create with learners who really care about having the best tool.
You can watch the demo and join the pre-release list here if you are interested: https://signup.hellonora.ai/
We are offering the pre-release for free for the first 100 people who sign up, and of course a mega discount for when the full release comes out.
Alsooo definitely not here to spam anyone, just want to get the word out about this project — I posted this initially in the weekly self-promo thread and it didn’t get taken down, and I’ve asked the mods permission to post and got a thumbs up!
by Account-Patient