About Kimariji

Kimariji is an app for learning to read Japanese: hiragana, katakana, kanji and everyday words. It comes to Android first.

The name

In competitive karuta, kimariji (決まり字) are the first characters of a poem that tell you which card it is.

Example sentences are published Japanese–English pairs from Tatoeba and JEC Basic Sentence Data, shown as written there. A sentence that did not work as an example of the word being taught was replaced with another or left out. None has had an independent review by a native speaker; if one reads oddly, report it from its card.
The audio is text-to-speech, made in advance. It ships inside the app, so it plays offline.
The first 100 kanji and 100 starter words and the kana example words have meanings in English, Finnish, German and Spanish. Later meanings and the sentence translations are in English.
Kimariji teaches reading. Stroke order is shown, but there is no handwriting practice.
Where the app names a JLPT level, it follows commonly used study lists: the JLPT has published no official kanji list since 2010.
The eight certificates are the app's own, each earned in one of its tests. They are not JLPT results or any other official qualification.

Kanji strokes and parts: KanjiVG by Ulrich Apel, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Readings and meanings: KANJIDIC2 for kanji and JMdict for words, from the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Example sentences: the Tatoeba project, CC BY 2.0 FR, or CC0 1.0 where indicated. The app lists the Tatoeba contributors who wrote and translated them.
JEC Basic Sentence Data: Japanese Basic Sentence Data by Kurohashi-Kawahara Lab., Kyoto University; English Basic Sentence Data by NICT MASTAR Project, Multilingual Translation Lab. Pairs are copied unchanged under CC BY 3.0. Publisher and source.
The full list, with every licence, is in the app under Settings › Help & feedback › Sources & licences.

Kimariji is made by Creativille Oy, a small company in Finland. Questions and feedback: [email protected].