Why we exist
It started in a classroom in Tunis
From Tunis to Tokyo — من تونس إلى طوكيو
Yalla Nihongo began in a weekend Japanese class in Tunis. A room of Tunisian students, a teacher explaining in English, and the same frustration every Saturday: every app we studied with spoke only English.
Their memory tricks were built for English ears. Their explanations assumed a first language none of us had. And not one of them ever talked about the culture that made us fall for Japanese in the first place — the films, the food, the festivals we already loved before we could read a single character.
So we built the thing that was missing: a home for Japanese learning that teaches in English — the way your classroom does — explains in Arabic, so it actually clicks, and lives inside Japanese culture instead of pointing at it from the outside.
The method
Built on learning science, not habit-forming tricks
Everything below comes from research on how memory actually works — not from what keeps you scrolling. Open “the research behind this” under any block and judge the sources yourself.
Spaced repetition
Memory fades on a predictable curve. So instead of drilling a character twenty times today and never again, we bring it back just before you would have lost it — then stretch the gap a little further each time.
In the app: Reviews are scheduled by FSRS, an open-source algorithm, separately for every character and every direction you practise.
The research behind this
Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted & Rohrer (2006), “Distributed Practice in Verbal Recall Tasks: A Review and Quantitative Synthesis”, Psychological Bulletin — a synthesis of decades of experiments finding that spacing study reliably beats massing it.
Read the paperActive recall
Re-reading a kana chart feels productive and does almost nothing. Pulling a character out of your own memory — even when it takes a second and stings a little — is what builds the path back to it.
In the app: Every quiz, review and game asks you to produce the answer. Nothing here is a passive read-through.
The research behind this
Roediger & Karpicke (2006), “Test-Enhanced Learning: Taking Memory Tests Improves Long-Term Retention”, Psychological Science — the classic demonstration of the testing effect.
Read the paperPicture mnemonics in your language
A character sticks once it becomes an image. But the image only works if it is built in a language you actually think in. く is a bird’s open beak — منقار طائر.
In the app: All 107 hiragana ship with a memory image written in English and in Arabic — written for Arabic speakers from scratch, not translated from the English.
The research behind this
The keyword-mnemonic method for learning kana and characters; it is the same principle behind the Japan Foundation’s official “Hiragana Memory Hint” apps.
Japan Foundation — Memory HintLearning with your hands
Watching a character is not the same as making one. The motion of drawing it leaves a second trace in your memory, and it is often the one that survives.
In the app: Every lesson animates the stroke order first, then hands you the brush: trace the character yourself, scored gently — we celebrate the attempt, not the millimetres.
The research behind this
Longcamp, Zerbato-Poudou & Velay (2005), “The Influence of Writing Practice on Letter Recognition: A Comparison between Handwriting and Typing”, Acta Psychologica — learners trained by hand recognised letters more reliably than learners trained on a keyboard.
Read the paperSound, image and text together
Your mind files a word once as a sound and once as a picture. Give it both and you have built two roads to the same memory instead of one.
In the app: Each character arrives as a glyph you see, a sound you hear, a picture you imagine and a real word you can use.
The research behind this
Paivio’s dual-coding theory, and Mayer’s cognitive theory of multimedia learning: pairing words with pictures and speech beats words alone.
Mixed practice — harder, and better
Twenty か in a row feels smooth and fades fast. Shuffling characters and directions feels clumsier in the moment and lasts far longer. Difficulty in the right place is a feature.
In the app: Quizzes interleave character→sound, sound→character, listening and typing; reviews mix today’s row with everything you have learned before.
The research behind this
Robert Bjork’s work on “desirable difficulties” — conditions that slow learning down in the moment while improving what you keep.
Bjork Learning and Forgetting LabGames that bring you back — honestly
Motivation is a real ingredient, not a dirty word. The line we hold is simple: rewards that celebrate progress, never mechanics engineered to make you feel guilty for living your life.
In the app: XP, a daily goal ring, and streaks with one automatic free freeze each week when life gets in the way. No guilt screens. No ads, ever.
The research behind this
Shortt, Tilak, Kuznetcova, Martens & Akinkuolie (2023), “Gamification in Mobile-Assisted Language Learning: a Systematic Review of Duolingo Literature from Public Release of 2012 to Early 2020”, Computer Assisted Language Learning — eight years of evidence on what game mechanics do, and do not, achieve in language apps.
Read the reviewCulture as the context
Words stick when you meet them where they live: on a shop sign, in a bowl, at a festival, inside a story. Vocabulary without context is a list. With context it is a memory.
In the app: Culture cards, real Japanese games and the calendar of festivals sit beside the lessons — not in a bonus section you never open.
The research behind this
Krashen on comprehensible input: we acquire language most readily from meaningful messages we understand and care about.
Krashen’s papers
None of this is magic. It is simply why five focused minutes a day here will outrun an hour of staring at a kana chart.
نقطة قوّتك
The Arabic advantage
Here is something a global app will never tell you: Arabic hands you real advantages in Japanese. Not encouragement — actual mechanics that other learners have to be taught from zero.
What you already have
Vowel length already means something to you
Japanese separates おばさん (aunt) from おばあさん (grandmother) purely by holding a vowel longer. English speakers have to be convinced that length can change a word at all. You have been doing exactly this since childhood — it is المدّ, and your ear is already tuned to it.
Doubled consonants live in your mouth already
The small っ in にっき is a consonant held for a beat. For you that is الشدّة — the same gesture, a sound you produce without thinking. Most beginners spend weeks on this one.
The Japanese R is not your problem
ら り る れ ろ sit somewhere between an L and a tapped R — the sound English speakers struggle with for months. Arabic gives you a tapped R for free.
And where Arabic makes it harder, we say so
え and お
Arabic does not draw the same line between these vowels, so we drill them as a pair — side by side, until the difference is automatic rather than a guess.
ぱ and ば
The /p/ sound is not native to Arabic, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. It gets its own targeted practice instead of being left to sort itself out.
Every learner arrives with a different ear and a different mouth. We built for yours.
Culture
Deeply Japanese, proudly Tunisian
Culture is not decoration here. It is the curriculum.
Our games are real Japanese games
Karuta is the card game Japanese children learn their kana with — a reader calls a sound and hands fly at the cards. We turned it into a 60-second round you can play on the bus, with a link to the story behind it.
More of the playground, comingOn the way
Shiritori, the word-chain game every Japanese schoolyard plays, and fukuwarai, the New Year’s face game — both are on our build list, and both teach kana without ever feeling like study.
The Bunko — your reading shelfOn the way
A shelf that walks you from your first graded reader to your first real manga, one step at a time, so that “I read a page in Japanese” arrives sooner than you expect.
A calendar that comes to TunisiaOn the way
Hanami, Tanabata and tsukimi, marked and celebrated here — under orange blossoms instead of cherry blossoms, which is its own kind of beautiful.
A Tunisia ✕ Japan thread you will not find elsewhere
Our culture cards carry a strand no global app writes: JICA’s cooperation with Tunisia running back to the 1970s, the JLPT sat right here in Tunis at the Institut Bourguiba des Langues Vivantes, and TICAD8 — the Tokyo International Conference on African Development — hosted in Tunis in 2022.
Meet Fenn
Our mascot is a fennec fox wearing a hachimaki — Tunisia’s desert emblem in Japan’s headband. Foxes carry weight in both places: the fennec is ours, and the kitsune is Japan’s messenger and shapeshifter. Fenn is where the two meet, and he is the one cheering when your streak survives a hard week.
Why here
What makes this different
Not a comparison table. Just the five things we decided at the start and have not traded away.
Made by Tunisian learners, for Tunisian learners
We are not a global product with an Arabic setting bolted on. This was built by people sitting in the same class you are sitting in.
Teaches in English, explains in Arabic
English to match the classroom and the textbook your teacher uses. Arabic for the moment a concept has to actually land. French too, because that is how Tunisia thinks.
A community, not just an app
Learning a language alone is the hardest way to do it. We are building toward real meetups, study circles and events — the leaderboard is the smallest part of that, and it is opt-in.
Content you can trust
Our kana data is tested against the canonical Hepburn chart on every single build, cross-checked against a second independent library. If one reading were wrong, the build would fail and the release would stop. Our alphabet literally cannot ship with an error.
Free where it matters
The alphabet and your daily reviews are free, and they stay free. That is not an introductory offer.
Our word
Five commitments
Short enough to hold us to.
- The alphabet and core reviews stay free — forever.
- No ads inside the learning experience. Ever.
- Your data is never sold, to anyone.
- When paid features arrive, prices in dinars, through Tunisian payment gateways.
- Community events run at cost — we do not profit from bringing learners together.
Credits
Standing on other people’s work
Open data, open source and free official resources made this possible. Where a licence asks for attribution, this is it — and where it does not, gratitude is owed anyway.
- KanjiVG
Stroke-order data for every character, © Ulrich Apel, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.
- ts-fsrs
The open-source FSRS scheduler that decides when each card comes back.
- WanaKana
Open-source kana ↔ romaji conversion, and the second opinion our seed tests check against.
- Google Fonts
Zen Maru Gothic, Karla and Cairo — all under the SIL Open Font License.
- The Japan Foundation
Irodori, Marugoto and the Memory Hint apps are free, excellent, and the standard we measure ourselves against.
- JMdict / EDRDGAs our library grows
The dictionary project we will build vocabulary decks on, licensed CC BY-SA.
- TatoebaAs our library grows
Community example sentences, licensed CC BY, for when reading practice arrives.
The illustrations and mnemonics on this site were made for this project. Japan’s tradition of generous free illustration — Irasutoya above all — is the spirit we work in; wherever we use such work, it is within its own terms.
The full licence inventoryThe invitation
This platform gets better with every learner who joins — every event badge earned, every classmate who becomes someone else’s senpai. Your first lesson takes five minutes, and the alphabet is free.
يلّا — let’s go. 行くぞ！
Start free