The project
A flashcard app worth looking at.
Karuta started from a personal need: studying Japanese without giving up on a well-made app. What began as a project for one person became a place where anyone can pick up a ready-made deck, or build their own and leave it for somebody else. Today it is free on Android, and the decks can already be browsed from here.
The name
かるた
A word that arrived by sea.
In the sixteenth century Portuguese ships dock in Japan loaded with arquebuses, with missionaries, and with small things. Among the small things is a pack of playing cards.
Of everything those ships left behind, the word Japanese chose to keep was the lightest one: carta. It lost its Latin shape, bent to the sound of the new language, and became かるた.
Five hundred years on it is still there. A word survives for as long as somebody keeps running into it.
How it started
It began for personal use.
Karuta is written by one person: a computer science graduate with a full-time job, in the hours that are left.
It started for a simple reason. Flashcard apps all look like a spreadsheet, and the trouble is that they rarely offer anything beyond it: fiddly to fill in, slow to use, and with nothing worth looking at. Keeping up with Japanese every day needed something you would actually want to open.
For a while it was an app for one person. Then the decks began to be useful to somebody else: publishing arrived, then the community, and Karuta stopped being a private thing.
How it keeps going
Free means free.
The whole app is usable without paying anything, and there is no advertising making up for it.
No advertising
There is no ad network inside the app. The code to show you an advert simply is not there.
It asks for very little
Network and notifications. It asks for your photos only if you choose to put an image on a card, and you can say no.
The phone comes first
Cards and progress live on the device. The cloud is there to find them again, not to make them work.
Premium, if you like
The app stays free and complete. Premium lifts the ceiling on decks and cards, adds images, and supports the project: with no advertising, the people who keep it going are the people who use it.
App and site
The same Karuta, in two places.
You study from both: same account, same decks, same progress. What changes is the manner, and the time you can give it.
That is why the site is not the app shrunk into a window: it does the things that would be awkward on a phone.
On the phone
Five minutes in a queue, the evening review, the home-screen widgets. That is where the everyday studying happens, a piece at a time.
In the browser
Longer sessions and a real keyboard. And this is where you build: large decks, many cards at once, and catching a word while you are reading it somewhere else.
Contact
You can write.
Bug reports, ideas, or a deck you think is missing: it is good to hear them.