About Tomodekki
The best Japanese learners alive today use eight to twelve tools at once. That stack is genuinely powerful. It is also hostile to anyone who just wants to learn the language.
A serious learner's setup usually looks something like this: Anki for vocabulary, a browser dictionary for reading, a separate app for kanji, another for grammar, a video player with dual subtitles, a frequency list, a textbook, and a Discord full of people explaining how to wire them together. Every one of those tools is good. The seams between them are where people quit.
Tomodekki is an attempt to make the integrated stack the default product, without throwing away the depth that the obsessives correctly insist on.
What we think
Start with a proper course
Most of what a beginner needs is the same for everybody, and somebody should have already worked out the order. So there's a path that runs from your first kana outward, and a kanji never shows up before the parts it's made of. Sitting on top of that are thirty themed packs - the konbini, trains, anime, keigo, the doctor's surgery - so the course can also be the Japanese you'd use this weekend.
Then let the rest of your life in
The course gets you most of the way. What makes it stick is the word you hit out in the wild - on a sign, in a subtitle, in a conversation you only half-followed. Most apps make you wait until you're home at a keyboard, and by then you've forgotten it. Tomodekki takes voice, camera or text wherever you happen to be and builds the card afterwards. That isn't a replacement for the curriculum; it's what stops the curriculum feeling like somebody else's.
You shouldn't have to see the AI
There's a model in here doing real work - sorting out readings, picking an example sentence that only leans on words you've already met. You shouldn't have to think about any of it. If a feature is only interesting because AI made it, it's not a feature, it's a demo.
Reviews shouldn't feel like admin
The scheduler decides almost everything about whether this works, and you should barely notice it's there. Answer honestly and it works out when to ask you again. No guilt-tripping, and no wall of four hundred cards waiting for you after a week off.
Tomodekki is in early access on iOS and Android. If you'd like a place in the first cohort, put your email in. If you'd rather ask something first, get in touch.