Nuku is a personal Japanese tutor, teaching you the two native Japanese writing systems, hiragana and katakana.

This application was written to aid students that want to learn Japanese and features both hiragana and katakana systems, all three main romanization systems and methods of selecting what to learn.

Hiragana & Katakana
Hiragana and katakana, or collectively kana, are two of the writing systems in Japanese, the third then being kanji. Kana are much more like our alphabet than kanji is though, as there are only about 70 unique characters - there are several thousand kanji.

Kana is the first thing a Japanese learns in school, and every word can be written using them. However, normally a mix of hiragana and kanji is used. Katakana is similar to hiragana but looks different. It is used instead of the latter, when writing foreign words, or for extra emphasis.

Romanization Systems
There are several methods of romanizing Japanese - that is, turning the Japanese into roman characters. The three main ones are Hepburn, Kunreisiki and Nihonsiki.

The official system is Kunreisiki. Another, Hepburn, was designed to romanize according to pronounciation, rather than a fixed table. Nihonsiki is similar to Kunreisiki.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Make binary universal
· Fix bug where Learning mode would ignore certain strings
· Fix bug where the percent field formatter would show the wrong floating point mark
· 'zu' now equals 'zu', whichever one was clicked ('su' with dakuten or 'tsu' with dakuten) - note that this allows incorrect clicks to be marked as correct, for the sole purpose of eliminating the counter-intuitive 'zu' error message