Japanese Conjugation City 4+

Great concept. Room for refinements.

Tried out this app for this first time today and there is a lot that I really like about it.

Verb conjugation has always been the hardest thing for me to study in my quest for mastering Japanese because it’s not the kind of thing that you can just learn the rules and then easily apply. There are just too many verb types and verb forms that then connect to too many different verb endings/modifiers to keep things straight. It really requires a lot of drilling to internalize everything.

This app has great flexibility to create a ton of different tests to drill any specific conjugation you want to work on, while also allowing you to adjust other variables like: vocabulary level or lists used, # of questions, multiple choice or direct input, and characters shown (Japanese, hiragana, romaji, English meaning).

These functions are absolutely great, even if it means the user needs to take some time creating and refining test parameters.

The elements of the app that could use some refining are mainly to do with aesthetics. The font size is really hard for me to read, so I wish that was adjustable. Also, the multiple choice functionality is kind of useless because it seems to select conjugation forms from the list of actual correct conjugations for each verb. It would be far more useful to have incorrect conjugations that are close to the correct form rather than other correct forms of the verb that are clearly other meanings than the desired answer. However, this would obviously require a lot of additional programming and work, so I understand why it was done the way it was. But again, this means the multiple choice option for tests isn’t going to really be helpful.

In the end, this is a great app and I would be happy to pay far more than the asking price, especially if I could make the font bigger so I don’t have to squint so much.

Developer Response ,

Thank you so much for the valuable feedback and I'm glad you like the app! The font size scales with your device's font size. If you go to Settings -> Display & Brightness -> Text Size then you can increase the font size. In regards to the multiple choice part though, that is an interesting suggestion. You're correct in that it chooses 4 correct conjugations which makes it very easy to pick out the actual correct answer since they tend to look so different. I didn't think about adding slightly incorrect versions of the correct conjugation as choices though. I'm not 100% sure how i would go about doing that without it looking like gibberish, but that would definitely be a good addition to the app.

I hope that helps you with the font size issue and thanks again for the feedback! I'll try and make the multiple choice tests more useful in the future

Can you add this feature?

This application is very useful, as it is helping me in making significant advancements towards fluency.

Nonetheless, I would have liked a feature that allows us to select a specific verb or adjective and then receive related questions on it.

Could you incorporate such feature?

Many thanks!

Latest Version Crashes (FIXED)

EDIT: The new version fixed the crash and everything is back to normal

ORIGINAL REVIEW: The latest update makes this app crash at startup, making it completely unusable. There is no contact method on the website, so a review is the only way to get in touch with the developer.

Developer Response ,

There was a database issue when upgrading from versions prior to 1.2 to the latest update. I next version 1.3.1 will have the fix for it and should be out soon. I am terribly sorry for this inconvenience. I will also add a contact section to the website, however if you still have issues after 1.3.1 goes live please send me an email at dwilliamsl80@yahoo.com.