We just released Misofluent, a social platform and tool for gaining confidence in composing in Japanese and building skillfully on top of the format for Japanese Student Language (JPSL) in the Japanese Complete (JPC) curriculum.
Meet Nina. Nina wants to learn Japanese and has successfully gone through the first four chapters and quizzes of the JPC curriculum.
She now wants to practice her ability to compose original thoughts using Japanese grammar structure. Misofluent is a tool that enables her to do so.
N1 ga N2 kara deru. N1 leaves from N2.
Madlibs for Mastering Japanese
Using our sentence formulae, one is able to create Japanese-sentences madlibs-style. In fact, many language learners and experts will tell you that learning a new Japanese grammar shape is akin to “learning a new formula.”
By fill-in-the-blank or by using an example noun that fits, one can submit compositions to have them checked by a qualified teacher.
A master of Japanese will then render the entire statement into native Japanese and also provide an audio reading of the statement. Pitch contour images are then generated for the audio provided using melodic spectrogram and all users can see these completed posts and “react” to them with hearts, thumbs-up, trophies, and the like.
The wave-contour shows the Rise and Fall in びょういん or “hospital”
Pitch Contour images help you perfect your Japanese intonation. Listen to the recording, look at the image, and practice repeating the audio as closely as possible to the original.
Users are notified in-platform when their compositions are “liked” and e-mail notifications are sent out when pitch-contour images and audio are added to compositions.
There is a lot of research in recent years suggesting that LLSN Language Learning Social Networks can boost learner effectiveness, although one paper does caution, “failure to contribute to learner accuracy” as a large potential problem in a LLSN. We get around this problem by making it so that only teachers and qualified language masters can approve posts and add the audio. This ensures a high level of quality in every post.
Name Divination: Get Your Japanese Name
Since it’s important to have a name on a social network, we added “name divination” to Misofluent. Take a quick 3-question quiz and your Japanese name shall be divined and applied to your Misofluent profile by an expert in the motions of the celestial houses.
Notifications
“Miso”
Misofluent has simple notifications to let you know when key events occur, as well as a count of unread notifications so you can see at-a-glance if anything is going on in the Misofluent realm.
Possible Future Plans
- Double-side the network so that Japanese natives can interact and provide audio recordings for Students of the Japanese Language.
- Allow users to record audio in-app.
- Have users “repeat after me” and grade their pronunciation recording according to the desired pitch-contour, e.g. the one in the associated image.
- Make the experience available to the general public with interest in learning and mastering Japanese, appreciating the Japanese Complete “sentence formula” style. You can sign up to be notified when this is available here: https://japanesecomplete.com/visual-composer
Boost when using Target-language SNS
Research suggests that there is a boost in learner confidence when using a social network with users and interactions featuring your target language of study. This intuitively makes sense, as immersion is an important aspect of not only picking up linguistic patterns, but also picking up more subtle interaction patterns. While a written medium is not the whole picture for language immersion, it is a huge step in the right direction, and we hope to extend our immersion language learning and community-powered-aspects of Japanese Complete moving forward.
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