Comment by fieldforceapp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fieldforceapp | Hacker News Reader

Good work... and from all of us Japanese language students, thanks! I wanted to amplify the comments from @politikus with some additional observations:

- market to children, or really to parents trying to teach their children Japanese (like me!) - market to young students, themselves, not their parents

The above two user groups may be mutually exclusive. In either way, I would highly recommend you translate your app into Japanese. It's your biggest market, no?

The SRS/SM-2 algorithm you're using might need some tweaking to support leaderboard & scoring like @politkus mentions -- thinking about kids, they love to compete. I would recommend moving more towards more gamification.

Harder to do on Android(1) than iOS, but I would recommend using IAP for additional lessons. With kids, the goal you're shooting for is to have the kids bug their parents to buy more levels (!) or the older kids to brag to their friends.

And finally, why not use Parse.com instead of SyncAdapter? It would give you both an easier path towards iOS as well as potentially a web based dashboard, etc?

Gambatte kudasai!

(1) My opinion only, of course, I'd like to learn more about in-app purchase options on Android.

Thanks for the comment!

Parse.com looks interesting, but I'm a bit worried about trusting someone else with the whole server side backend. And since I already implemented a backend using Django it's not really needed for now.

I'll definitely do a website where you can see more details about your progress. There a leaderboard seems like a good idea. For example showing the user with best progress this week etc could be fun.

A children's version sounds very interesting. For now it's really focused on adult or young students studying Japanese as a foreign language. I'm not sure how big the market is for children learning Japanese as a foreign language, maybe it's bigger than I think?

I know there are some kanji apps for native Japanese speakers as well, though I'm not sure if they're any good. Some things would need to be changed to sell this app in that market. For example, what should the questions be? Maybe from words written in hiragana only, with an example sentence for ambiguous words, to writing the word with kanji? There are some things to think about there.

In-app purchases is something I've thought about as well. There are IAP for Android as well, though I'm not so familiar with them. Personally, it seems a little shady to use IAP, especially marketed towards children. But on the other hand, since it's an educational app maybe parents would consider it ok?

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