Planned Release Date: 2025

About This Game

Kanji Grinder is a spaced repetition flashcard system, purpose-built for Steam Deck. Designed for immersion learners who want a no-nonsense way to drill Kanji vocabulary recognition, it provides a brisk, pleasant way to get through your daily reviews so you can get back to your media immersion ASAP. Additionally, for those who enjoy quiz games or flexing their knowledge, plenty of challenges await!

Features:

- Over 20,000 hand-curated flashcards, covering over 2,000 kanji in all their major readings. Words are taught based on frequency order - but you're always taught the kanji version first, even if it's less common than the kana version! Every card in the deck teaches at least one kanji. There's enough vocabulary here to take you all the way to JLPT N1, and beyond!

- A novel spaced repetition algorithm that improves upon the usual methods by dynamically adapting to your success or struggles. No more fiddling with interval rates or ease factors - it all adjusts automatically over time to suit your skill level. 

- Over ten hours of hand-picked, hand-mastered music by Japanese indie composers, in a wide range of styles: Lo-fi, Jazz, Bossa, Metal, JRPG OST, Shibuya-kei, J-core, Lounge and more! No matter the day's vibe, there is plenty to listen to as you grind. 

- Fully voiced flashcards and interface: Listening to spoken Japanese is crucial to effective memory formation and language acquisition - so every single flashcard in Kanji Grinder has a sound clip of correct pronunciation. Plus, a native voice actress will cheer you on in the menus!

- A custom monolingual-style dictionary: Unlike the usual Japanese-English dictionaries that just give you a few English words with similar meanings, these dictionary entries will actually explain what the word truly means, and provide example sentences. Each entry is available in both Japanese and English, so you can use it as a "J-J" style monolingual dictionary when you're ready! Plus, articles are included explaining the nuances of famously-troublesome sets of similar words. 

- A deep ranking and achievement system: Work your way up from 10th-Kyu to Shodan, and from there, Ichidan and even Kaiden, with increasingly difficult certification exams that grow with your knowledge. There's always a next achievement right around the corner to work towards.

- Purpose-built for Steam Deck: Everything from the user interface to the control scheme and workflow were designed from the ground up to be played on Steam Deck, and the driving purpose of Kanji Grinder is to make SRS study feel like a video game. Developed on Linux, tested on Deck. Windows and desktop users welcome - it works great there, too. 

- Built-in immersion tracking: Keep track of all your immersion time - Anime, Manga, YouTube and whatever else you wish via the comprehensive time-tracking system. A pre-loaded, self-updating database of Anime and Manga titles makes tracking your watch-time and immersion level a breeze.

- Save your progress in the cloud: With full Steam Cloud support, you never have to worry about losing your progress again. Plus, built-in automatic backups allow you to rewind your save in the event of corruption or disaster.

- Advanced users welcome! Kanji Grinder is designed to keep everything streamlined, simple, and no-fuss. However, if you're an advanced user who has strong opinions on SRS algorithms, or many thousands of words you already know in another SRS system, Kanji Grinder has you covered! You will be able to quickly and easily use the in-game ranking exams to populate your deck with hundreds or thousands of words you already know, and can get under the hood to tweak SRS parameters if you really need to.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Dictionary entries and example sentences for Kanji Grinder's flashcards were generated with custom AI tooling, but have been checked by both a custom AI error-detection system and a human reviewer for correctness and accuracy. Voice clips of vocabulary word pronunciation were created via Amazon Polly, a high-accuracy AI-based text-to-speech system. All other voice clips are from human voice actors.

Kanji Grinder contains no AI-generated artistic assets.