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Onomatope: Japanese Mimetics

Manga and anime vocabulary

App Store →iOSFree app with an in-app purchase

Japanese onomatopoeia are not arbitrary. 濁点 makes a thing bigger, heavier and less pleasant – understand that and you can guess a word you have never seen.

What it looks like

ころころ or ごろごろ?
The difference is two dots, not two separate words
The sentence always says why
Something small and light does not roll like a boulder
The pair sits next to its pair
Voicing, shape, and what it gets confused with
You can see what the sound carries
清音, 濁音, 半濁音: and the shape of the word
Not an average: a direction
You put ごろごろ where ころころ belongs, but not the reverse

Description from the store

Three hundred onomatopoeia are not a list to memorize. They are a system where the sound
carries the meaning – and that is what this app teaches.

Something small and light rolls ころころ. Something big and heavy rolls ごろごろ. The
difference is two dots, not two separate words. さらさら is smooth, ざらざら is rough.
ぱらぱら is light, ばらばら is scattered. Understand what 濁点 does and you can guess a word
you have never met – no dictionary gives you that.

FOUR THINGS, MEASURED SEPARATELY

Fit in a sentence. Which of four similar sounds this sentence asks for. The sentence always
says why – something small and light does not roll the way a boulder does.

Meaning. What the word says on its own. Always from the sound to the meaning, never the other
way round: without a sentence, four similar sounds have no single answer.

Shape and attachment. AっBり is sudden and finished, ABAB keeps going. And how the word enters
the sentence: 〜と, 〜する, 〜だ・の.

Sound rule. What 濁点 does to a word. Measured only on material that is not on the review
schedule, so it tells you whether you can guess a word you have never seen.

THE PAIR, NOT THE AVERAGE

The app does not say "ごろごろ 44%". It says: you put ごろごろ where ころころ belongs – but not
the other way round. With these words the direction of the mistake is the whole information,
and an average hides it.

SIX LEVELS, NOT JLPT

Body and how you feel. Voicing: the pairs. Feelings and people. The 〜っ〜り shapes. The world:
weather, food, textures. Attachment and sounds. A rule and a theme in turn – every batch of
words is followed by a level teaching the rule that governs them all. You hear ぺこぺこ on your
first day in Japan and it is on no N5 list – so the levels are practical, not exam-shaped.
The first two are free in full.

WHAT COMES BACK, AND WHAT DOES NOT

Words come back on a schedule, because they are facts and facts fade: nothing in the sound of
ぐっすり tells you it is about sleep rather than mud. Rules do not come back that way – 濁点
works whether you were reminded of it or not. A rule is not forgotten, it is left unused, and
that shows up in your mistakes rather than on a calendar.

SENTENCES, WITH AI

The Sentences tab takes a line from a manga, an anime or subtitles – typed or scanned from a
photo – and tells you which onomatopoeia it has and what they mean right there. It works the
other way too: describe a sound or a feeling and get the word that fits best, plus a few
others with how they differ. Words from this app open their page, and you can add the line to
a word as an example. Some requests each month are free; more come with a subscription: PLN
9.99 monthly or PLN 79.99 yearly, auto-renewing, cancellable in your Apple ID settings. Levels
and exercises do not depend on it.

WHAT IS NOT HERE

No keyboard input in the exercises: we measure the choice between four sounds, not your thumb.
No question about whether a word is written ドキドキ or どきどき – manga writes everything in
katakana, so that question has two right answers. No accounts, no ads. Learning works offline;
only the Sentences tab talks to our server, sending just the text.

ONE PURCHASE

Levels 1 and 2 are free in full – not out of generosity but because a free version should be
shorter, not pretend. The other levels are a single purchase, with nothing to renew.

TERMS

Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
Privacy Policy: https://jd-japanese.pl/onomatope/1.6/en/privacy.html

The description above is the same text that stands on the App Store product page – it comes from the same file.

App Store →iOSFree app with an in-app purchase

Common questions

What does Onomatope teach?

Three hundred onomatopoeia are not a list to memorize. They are a system where the sound
carries the meaning – and that is what this app teaches.

Something small and light rolls ころころ. Something big and heavy rolls ごろごろ. The
difference is two dots, not two separate words. さらさら is smooth, ざらざら is rough.
ぱらぱら is light, ばらばら is scattered. Understand what 濁点 does and you can guess a word
you have never met – no dictionary gives you that.

What does Onomatope cost?

Levels 1 and 2 are free in full – not out of generosity but because a free version should be
shorter, not pretend. The other levels are a single purchase, with nothing to renew.

What does this app not do?

No keyboard input in the exercises: we measure the choice between four sounds, not your thumb.
No question about whether a word is written ドキドキ or どきどき – manga writes everything in
katakana, so that question has two right answers. No accounts, no ads. Learning works offline;
only the Sentences tab talks to our server, sending just the text.

Learning Japanese

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