JA Sensei version 5.1.5 was released yesterday on Google Play. Several languages have been added (Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, and Turkish), and in-depth work on kanji has been done.

New kanji search tool

A new and much more intuitive tool has been implemented to make it easier for you to find kanji. In particular, it provides now an instant result. You can type a word in English, search by on/kun readings (in kana or romaji), or paste kanji directly into the search box to get a list. Advanced filters are also available: type for example “n4 s3” to get all the kanji of the JLPT N4 with 3 strokes.

The tool also allows you to perform radical searches. A table of radicals slides in at the bottom of your screen, and you can select one radical after another until you find the desired kanji. As you search, irrelevant radicals are hidden.

Work on quiz and kanji data

In-depth work was carried out on all kanji. A kanji can have several meanings, but very often it has only one or two main meanings. In order to optimize your learning time, these main meanings have been highlighted (they appear in bold in the kanji sheets). In addition, during the quizzes, it will no longer be necessary to know all the meanings, as the questions and answers will target the main meanings of each kanji. By knowing the main meaning of a kanji, you can very often understand the related meanings in a word, hence the choice to focus learning on these main meanings.

There is also currently a work in progress on improving and enriching the kanji meanings.

General work status

Since December, I have not been able to offer as many new features as I wished. Apart from the work on kanji, I was heavily involved in the JA Sensei translation project in order to respond to the requests of many users.

To do this, I needed to make several technical changes in JA Sensei, but also develop many tools to facilitate the organization of the documents, and the data integration/updates. Those tasks have are almost over, and it allows me now to integrate other languages quite easily from a technical point of view. So I’ll still spend time managing the content translation, but not developing other tools. I’ll therefore have more time to improve JA Sensei, and bring new features soon.

Translation project

Many people contacted me to take part in the translation of JA Sensei into other languages. I wanted to say THANK YOU to all of you. There are too many of you to list here, but I added your name in the credits page in JA Sensei (in the main menu, choose "About JA Sensei"). If your name is missing, let me know please.

I'm not integrating other languages for the time being as I want to focus on the ones already in place to bring more content instead. But don't worry if your language is not in the list yet, I'll add new ones a little later depending on the users' interest.

If you want to be part of the volunteer translation community, you can send me a message and tell me your JA username and your language. I'll not be available immediately because I need to finish other tasks first, but I'll recontact you as soon as possible to propose new translations.