A dōjō for a keyboard.
打鍵道について dakendō ni tsuite
Self-taught Japanese learners tend to end up in the same place: able to recognise a few hundred words and produce almost none of them. TypeWondo is a drill for the second half of that problem. It is shaped as a game because nobody willingly does a thousand repetitions of something joyless, and the repetitions are what actually work.
utsu · to strike, to type
What we are building
A Japanese typing game in which every keystroke is a piece of the language. You type konnichiha and こんにちは appears. You type nihongo and pick 日本語 out of the candidate list ahead of 二本後. After a few hundred rounds the script stops looking like decoration and starts behaving like writing you can produce on demand.
The typing-tutor genre is about forty years old and has almost nothing to say about Japanese. The language-app genre is enormous and rarely asks you to produce a character from memory. TypeWondo works in the gap between them, applying the mechanical rigour of a typing trainer to a writing system that happens to reward it.
It runs in a browser. It starts without an account. It needs no Japanese keyboard, no downloaded IME and no subscription before the first drill. Those constraints were fixed at the start, and everything else has to fit inside them.
dō · the way
Where the name comes from
Taekwondo is Korean. The name borrows from it deliberately.
태권도, written 跆拳道 in hanja, is the way of the foot and the fist. It is one of a handful of martial arts that people worldwide can name without being asked twice, and TypeWondo takes the shape of its name from it because most people hear "a discipline you practise" in the word before they hear anything else.
What the Korean, Japanese and Chinese traditions share is the final character. 道 is do, dō and dào respectively, and in all three it marks a practice you keep walking rather than a subject you complete. Japanese labels its own arts with it constantly: 剣道 the way of the sword, 柔道 the gentle way, 書道 the way of writing, 茶道 the way of tea.
Ours is 打鍵道, dakendō, built from 打鍵 (a keystroke) and 道 (the way). Both halves are ordinary Japanese, so the word reads to a Japanese speaker roughly the way "keyboard-do" would read to an English one, which is the intended effect.
Korean sits on the roadmap rather than in the branding alone. 한국어 is the language after Japanese, running on the same grading structure. Japanese ships first because three scripts and several thousand characters make it the harder engineering problem, and solving the hard one first makes Hangul straightforward.
If a Korean speaker reads the name as careless borrowing, we would rather hear that than not. The contact page is one click away.
shu · keep the form
守破離, the three stages we design around
Shu-ha-ri is how Japanese arts describe the path from imitation to independence. It also describes how a learning tool should hand over control, so each stage below gets less room than the one before it.
守 · SHU, keep
Follow the form exactly. At white and yellow belt you get the romaji, the kana and the order, and the only task is reproducing them. No customisation, no shortcuts, no choosing your own word list. Beginners make faster progress inside one fixed groove than inside a menu of options.
破 · HA, break
Depart from the form. From green belt the supports come away. Furigana fades, prompts shorten, and the drill starts choosing material from your own error history rather than a fixed syllabus.
離 · RI, leave
Leave the form behind. At dan level the dōjō stops teaching and starts measuring. Success here looks like no longer needing TypeWondo.
hi · refuse
What we will not do
Published here so that breaking any of it later is awkward.
No streak guilt 連続記録
Skipping a day costs you nothing, and no cartoon character will express disappointment about it. Missed practice is ordinary, and spaced repetition works better when the spacing is genuine rather than punished.
No flattering numbers 虚偽の進捗
If your accuracy on ツ falls, the number falls with it. A progress bar that only travels upward gives you nothing to act on, and it hides exactly the information you need in order to improve.
The basics stay free 基礎は無料
Kana drills, kanji drills and belt grading remain free and playable without an account. Somebody teaching themselves Japanese at 1am should not meet a paywall standing between them and hiragana.
We do not sell you 個人情報
No selling or renting of personal information, and no advertising network sitting on top of your practice data. Our Privacy Policy sets out what that commits us to in legal terms.
Romaji comes off 補助輪
Romaji is a support, and every drill is designed to withdraw it. A learner still reading romaji at green belt means the design has failed, and that is our problem to fix rather than theirs.
dare · who
Who this is for
The absolute beginner
You have watched enough subtitled Japanese to want the real thing and no idea where to start. Start at 十級. Twenty minutes a day across a fortnight and you will read hiragana properly, rather than recognising a dozen characters and guessing at the rest.
The stalled intermediate
You finished a beginner app, you recognise a lot and produce embarrassingly little, and kanji has turned into a wall. Typing is one way through it, because every repetition demands production rather than a tap.
The JLPT candidate
You have a test date and a vocabulary list that will not stick. Drills map to N5 through N1, and typing a word out is a harder rehearsal than reading a flashcard and deciding you knew it.
The typist adding a second script
You already type fast in English and want the same fluency in Japanese input. Skip ahead. The grading takes your first result seriously and places you where it belongs, rather than making you retype the あ row to prove a point.
ima · now
What exists today
This site is a foundation stone rather than a finished building, and saying so costs less than implying otherwise.
BUILT
The grading design完了 KANRYŌ
The brand, this site, and the design of the grading system: belts, accuracy floors and the shu-ha-ri progression above.
IN PROGRESS
The input engine進行中 SHINKŌCHŪ
Romaji to kana conversion. Getting nn, shi and si, doubled consonants, small kana and long vowels to resolve the way a native IME resolves them.
NEXT
The kana halls次に TSUGI NI
Kata drills for hiragana and katakana, grading from 十級 to 六級, progress kept in your own browser.
LATER
Kanji, then Korean後で ATO DE
Kanji with fading furigana, JLPT vocabulary, kumite races, optional accounts, and then 한국어, the Korean dōjō.
Have a view on any of this?
Corrections are the most useful mail we get, particularly from native speakers. The slip on the contact page takes about a minute to fill in.