Mobile Assisted Japanese Language Learning: Study and Proposal
MALL; japanese language; systematic review; app; application.
Japanese is a language with writing, vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation quite different from western languages, e.g. it contains three alphabets (with two syllabic alphabets and the third one logographic), contains vocabulary, orthography and phonology built upon different nations and has a lot of grammatical elements which are different from English. Therefore, students need a variety of materials to support the study of the language. . Many apps become available in virtual stores with the intent of helping students learn and review Asian languages, including Japanese. However, little has been investigated about the contents of applications for studying Japanese. The present study proposes a systematic review of applications focused on the Japanese language, based in a proposed framework for qualitative and quantitative review of language learning software. An individual evaluation is executed for each component of the language (i.e. alphabet, vocabulary, grammar and listening comprehension), aiming to study the applications considering specific criteria for each component of the Japanese language. Next, since there are applications with contents and order of contents designed specifically for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), a systematic review of applications designed for training for the test is executed. In this qualification, in order to validate the proposed study, we present a systematic review of applications designed for teaching hiragana and katakana - part of the Japanese alphabet. Research findings include details of the main features of applications in the current scenario, a classification and comparison of the best applications between the Android and iOS mobile platforms, and a study of features that do not usually appear in current applications but are very important for helping study Japanese nonetheless.