What am I doing here?

I have spent a lot of time studying Japanese, which is another way of saying I have looked at a hell of a lot of Japanese character flashcards. Flashcards are inherently two-dimensional in that they have a back and a front. Japanese characters have many dimensions to them (the character itself, its meanings, its readings, and more). In other words, kanji and flash cards are not really compatible. It always bothered me that I could not easily isolate one aspect of a character for study. Why should I be forced to see the reading and the meaning for a kanji at the same time? I shouldn’t! Do I need a flash pyramid, or a flash cube? Or in the case of the dreaded 生, some kind of horrible eldritch flash icosahedron? That seems extremely impractical. For many years, I have lived with the terrible conundrum of having my beautiful, complex kanji forced into binary groupings by the oppressive, inflexible nature of flash cards. And if there’s one thing sane people can agree on, it’s that being forced into binary groupings SUCKS.

No more. I will use the power of computers to conjure multi-dimensional flashcards. And I will use this blog to talk about doing that.

I already whipped up a little prototype of this using React/Redux and some static flashcard data. Here’s what that looks like:

My deeper plan is to create an app that allows users to register/login, create their own decks and define their dimesions, create cards for those decks, and then go through them like in the video. I’ll consider that the MVP.

I plan to use the PERN stack in honor of The Chronicles of Pern, which I haven’t personally read but I think maybe my sister did. Postgres will be new for me. I mostly chose that because I wanted to use SQL and Heroku has free developer postgres servers and cheap small-scale ones, which seemed cool.

I reckon I’ll start by mapping the tables I need for decks/dimensions/cards, and then create an API to do the CRUD on those fellas.

To take a step back: this is the kind of flashcard app I’ve always wanted to use for studying Japanese, so I’m making it based on those desires. My initial thought was to design it specifically around Japanese, but I decided to make it more open-ended in hopes that multidimensional flashcards will prove useful to other fields of study, too.