Hi, we built www.imawakatta.com, a site to help learn Japanese contextually. Stories and lessons, with audio, written by native speaker and teachers.

We are growing slowly, probably slower than other businesses here, but we’re treating it as a marathon - it’s something we’re passionate about and want to keep building and making better everyday.

Thanks for posting the question!

Yeah, its a hard balance.

My wife and I run a Japanese language learning site as a side project, but I work full time, and we have two kids. We’re not exactly rolling in time!

Our ultimate goal is to work on the side project full time, and I’m guessing that is the goal of most people here?

For now though, its all about chunking up the day as best as possible, we need to be present for our kids but once they’re asleep we chip away as much as we can on the site.

For us, it has to be a marathon, not a race. Perhaps its writing a lesson outline one night, the draft version the next night, and then final review the third night. Ditto from a coding perspective (my side of things), I create super small tasks in Trello, with checklists, and slowly work through them.

We do sacrifice other things, we don’t head out as much but the reality with kids is we weren’t heading out that much anyway. Obviously everyone needs downtime, and we do have that, but in a lot of ways the project is our downtime because we’re passionate about it.

Hey mate,

I just wanted to say, awesome job. As good as Duolingo is, it tends to be a “jack of all trades, master of none”, and hopefully this encourages teams, schools, businesses to create their own courses and curriculum.

We were in a similar boat, so we started a site focused just on Japanese.

From a business perspective, the Wikaro product looks really neat. I’ve worked a lot of e-learning / online learning jobs and the tech can feel so antiquated (eg “SCORM” shudders)

Good luck with the launch and roll out. If you ever want to talk shop, feel free to ping me! Always love talking to other educators.

We’re building our project without leveraging AI.

It’s a site (and app) to learn Japanese, all of our Japanese teachers are 100% real people (and real teachers).

As a developer, I’m not 100% sure which way all the AI usage is heading. Even for blogging, there is a temptation to churn out automated content for “SEO”, but if everyone is creating AI generated blog content, is there any value there? Will Google and other search engines start to down rank AI generated content?