Hex Kanji

A fun way to tackle learning the most difficult of the Japanese writing systems.

Hex Kanji was a long-lived passion project designed to make an intimidating task more fun and accessible.

While this app never reached a marketable conclusion the journey was rife with learning opportunities and insights into different areas of game development, marketing, viability and monetisation. It also went through many iterations as my personal progress with the Japanese language changed my view on how best to approach teaching it.

a hand holding a phone with the home screen for the game 'Hex Kanji' displayed on it.
the three steps to remembering used in Hex Kanji: draw, shoot and combine.
the different parts of the dictionary included in Hex Kanji.
the first completed version of Hex Kanji. It, much like its successor, is modelled around spaced repetition and a gradual building upon knowledge in an interactive and immersive environment. Which certainly entertaining, the lack of complete control in the ‘bubble pop’ game interfered with the learning algorithm - did the user get the incorrect answer because they don’t know it, or because they are a bad shot? This prompted me to simplify the mechanic in the revised version. In the revised version I leaned towards writing the characters (judged by a neural network) as I found this the most effective way of memorising them. I also wanted to focus more on ‘jukugo’ , putting characters together to make ‘compound words’ as this area is vastly overlooked in the Japanese learning app sphere.