Vocabulary and reading fit neatly on a screen. Listening and speaking need a microphone, a voice, and a commitment to designing both.
Open a language app and you mostly see the same three activities. Flash cards for vocabulary, quizzes for grammar, and passages for reading. These are the parts of language learning that translate cleanly into taps and swipes.
Listening and speaking translate less cleanly. They need audio, a microphone, and a way to judge whether the learner said something close to the right thing. That is why a team at Universitas Brawijaya found the same gap across existing Japanese apps, and built Hanasu to fill it.
Pronunciation is not an add-on in Japanese. It is part of the foundation, and a learner who never speaks aloud carries a weakness no amount of vocabulary drilling fixes. Skipping it in software is a choice born of convenience, not pedagogy.
The team's answer leans on text to speech for the listening half, which turns written content into audio without a recording booth. The speaking half converts the learner's voice into a lesson interaction. Both moves reuse infrastructure that already exists rather than building a speech lab from scratch.
The broader point reaches past Japanese. Any skill that needs a voice runs into the same wall, and the apps that clear it will have an advantage that flash cards cannot copy. The work is unglamorous: microphones, feedback, and testing on real devices.
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.
