Nihongo

I've been working on this update for over 8 months, and I'm super proud of how it turned out. Most Japanese dictionaries present kanji as a compilation of individual elements with their own specific meanings. This is actually a common misunderstanding of how kanji work. The truth is, each element can contribute a different thing to the kanji — a specific meaning, a broad category, or a pronunciation. Understanding the true contribution of each element can unlock a richer understanding of every character, helping learners to remember them easier, learn new characters faster, and even guess at rough meaning and pronunciations for characters they’ve never seen before. This information has always been available, but until now it required the use of an etymological dictionary and knowledge of a verbose and esoteric set of terminology like “ideogram” and “phonosemantic compound”. As far as I know, Nihongo is the first Japanese dictionary to compile this information into a user-friendly, learner-focused presentation that unlocks the learning potential of this content (without requiring a degree in linguistics). The data for this release mostly comes from Wiktionary, but I used other sources as well when Wiktionary was lacking, and used a good amount of my own judgment to choose between multiple etymologies when there were multiple possibilities out there. The truth is, nobody knows the true history of these characters for sure, so I chose to err on the side of etymologies that provide the most useful and memorable story for learners. Happy to answer any questions!

Congrats on the launch! The story and meaning behind the elements, and combined meanings are what make Chinese characters so fascinating. Love how you incorporate that into the dictionary, thanks!

Congrats on the launch! It is an amazing app for learning Chinese and Japanese, similar to the method of learning English roots. I think this will be very helpful for language learners! BTW, does the app have a testing feature?