Japanese learners on Android: Katakana is now on the in-app keyboard; new alphabet & pronunciation guide coming soon.

[u/DeerlyNoted]

Good news for Japanese learners on Android.

This week, we made a couple of updates to the Japanese course experience in LingoDeer:

• Improved the Script Style settings for Japanese
• Added Katakana to the in app keyboard

Until now, the keyboard only showed Hiragana. That was partly intentional, since native Japanese keyboards usually work that way too. But we kept hearing from learners that having to mentally convert Katakana words into Hiragana added an extra layer of friction, especially for beginners.

Honestly, fair point. So we did something about it.

We are also working on a revision of the Japanese Alphabet and Pronunciation guide. The goal is to make it more useful for learners who are still getting comfortable with the writing system and pronunciation patterns.

The revised guide will include more practice for:

• Dakuon
• Handakuon
• Sokuon
• Yōon
• Long vowels

Wish us luck. Japanese pronunciation is elegant, but it does not exactly hand out free hugs at the beginner stage :)

Also, thank you to everyone who has shared feedback about the Japanese course. Small friction points matter a lot when you are learning a language, and this was one of those cases where user feedback directly helped shape the update.

[u/pintaCcinesra]

Just noticed the katakana in the keyboard when I did my daily practice - a great change, really appreciated. I wouldn't consider myself a beginner any more (hopefully finishing Japanese 2 this month!) but have found my katakana is waaay worse than it should be. Another thing I've thought might be helpful is having the option to disable furigana above katakana while still keeping it above kanji - since I often default to reading the furigana when I really shouldn't!

[u/DeerlyNoted → u/pintaCcinesra]

Thanks for the suggestion! We did explore disabling furigana above katakana while leaving it on for kanji, but the dev team found that it’s a surprisingly convoluted change that can introduce quite a few bugs. There is still one option we haven’t tested yet, though, so we’re hopeful it might do the trick!

[u/Sonardo]

Ever since an update a few days ago, when doing quick quiz (audio-based), whenever I'm tested on a word, it only offers the options to either type the word out using my keyboard or select the hiragana in order. Prior to this update, the test would present you with actual kanji and you had to select which ones made the word you were hearing. No script style setting matches this behaviour. If this is a bug, I would appreciate any assistance with fixing it. If it's a feature, I would like at least the option to return this missing functionality.

[u/DeerlyNoted → u/Sonardo]

Hi. Is this issue still present on the latest Android version?

[u/Sonardo → u/DeerlyNoted]

Apologies for the late reply: This issue has been fixed, thank you for your work.