KWPro.net

Mini Review: First thing, I wish I had this application (and an iPhone) back when I was in Japan. At one point when I was studying Japanese, I'd buy a ton of keyrings to review words I discovered on TV, heard or found in my practice books.  For one of my phones, I would put the words in the notepad application to review. But there wasn't any application (that I knew at the time) that could accomplish something like that.

Enter Japanese Flash.  It's the perfect little program for your iPhone (and hopefully in the near future for other mobile devices in Japan) while you're on the train, at a coffee shop taking a 1 hour break resting your feet, your smoke break, or dropping anchor to review your Japanese (and I'm certain people do at least one of these activities while casually studying :p)

Pros: LOTS of vocabulary.  In fact, I think it exposes a huge range and nicely categorizes it to fit whatever area you want to focus on.  For instance, if you want to concentrate on language proficiency, they have split up the words for that.  If you want to focus on casual expressions, they have that too.  And yes, I said expressions.  Besides raw kanji and hiragana, you get a plethora of expressions, even some dialects like Kansai-bin.  I haven't played with the full gamut of settings, but I can see quite a bit of this is useful. 

The setup is fairly easy.  Install, pick the area you want to study and start tapping through.  You get the romanjinized reading and all the variations of meanings for the quiz item.  I think they reserve a section for words that you want to study by providing an option to allow you to add to a custom set.  Haven't tried that yet though.

Cons: The random generator is not very good.  I found myself repeating words quite frequently despite having finished a word 2-3 taps previously, even for something as large as level 3.  I think what would be good here is to store words that you have already gone through and put them into a queue until you're done with a set (at least for ones you've gotten correct)

For some of the definitions, you get way too many.  In fact, for the little area provided, it can get a little hard to read when you get a word with a great number of definitions.  You have to slide to read the other parts. 

I like the fact that they provide some grammatical sections, especially particles.  However, a feature I would like to see are examples of using the particle.  The particle by itself doesn't seem very useful for studying grammar.  You really need a sample sentence to go along with the particle to see the context in order to correctly guess the meaning.  Either that or provide some multiple choice option that allows you to choose between particles.  Also, it would be awesome if the application could bifurcate the particles between different levels of Japanese for the purpose of the proficiency tests as well as frequency of usage.  That way, if there's an infrequent particle, I can avoid it and focus my attention on the core Japanese that's necessary to either pass the proficiency tests or carry on a useful conversation.

I think at this version most of the usage you'll see is from raw kanji memorization as well as any brute force expression memorization (my ESL credential teacher called this methodology "drill and kill").  It would be great to see a site that accompanies this technology which allows others to contribute sample sentences for these words and grammar that eventually would lead to more multiple choice tests as opposed to raw rote memorization.  This system could then feed into the application, giving it more context for words and grammar.  Obviously, I can dream here :)

Anyway, again I wish I had this application in Japan.  If you have a far commute, are trying to improve your Japanese, and have an iPhone, I definitely recommend purchasing this considering the cost of paper cards far outweighs the price and time you can save with this application.