Most Japanese learning apps drill vocabulary and reading. This one asks the learner to speak and to listen.
Japanese is one of the most popular foreign languages in Indonesian higher education, and one of the hardest to pick up. The gap between wanting to learn it and being able to hold a conversation is where most self-study efforts stall.
A team at Universitas Brawijaya looked at the apps students already use and found a pattern. Almost all of them train vocabulary, writing and reading. Almost none of them train pronunciation, even though pronunciation is fundamental to the language.
Hanasu adds listening and speaking exercises to a mobile learning application. A lesson screen pairs an illustration with text and two buttons: an ear for listening practice, a microphone for speaking. The learner hears the phrase, repeats it, and the app treats that spoken input as part of the lesson.
Text to speech carries the audio side, turning written material into something the learner can hear. That keeps the content pipeline simple: the team writes text, and the device speaks it, rather than recording every phrase by hand.
Development started from requirements gathered from students and lecturers, and the interface went through comparison testing to settle on controls that felt natural on a small screen. The application follows a client and server arrangement, with the mobile app on one side and a back end serving content on the other.
The evaluation was small and the authors describe the outcomes as preliminary. Their reading is that the listening and speaking approach is feasible for m-learning, and that it showed promising gains against conventional study methods. That is encouragement for a direction, not a finished result.
Komang Candra Brata, Adam Hendra Brata and Eko Prasetyo Lukman (2019). Hanasu: Interactive Japanese language m-learning application to support listening and speaking exercise. Proceedings of the 2019 3rd International Conference on Education and Multimedia Technology (ICEMT 2019), 311-315.
