MemoCrow
Japanese vocabulary that sticks, powered by FSRS
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MemoCrow - Japanese vocabulary that sticks, powered by FSRS

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Not another Japanese course. MemoCrow does one thing well: vocabulary. Capture any word you meet in one tap from a 200,000-entry dictionary or with the OCR scanner, then let FSRS, the most advanced spaced repetition algorithm, make sure it sticks for good.

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Maker
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Hi Product Hunt! 👋 'm Clément, a solo developer, and I've spent the past two years building MemoCrow. First, what MemoCrow is not: it's not another Duolingo-style app that walks you through its own curriculum. Those are fine for day one, but if you're seriously learning Japanese (classes, textbooks, anime, manga, living in Japan), your real bottleneck is different: the thousands of words you encounter every day, and actually retaining them. Every tool I tried for that had the same flaw: adding words was so tedious that I stopped doing it. So I built the one I needed. In MemoCrow, you type a word (or scan a page with OCR) and everything reading, kanji, meaning is pulled from a 200,000-entry dictionary and scheduled for review instantly. The scheduling uses FSRS, a modern spaced repetition algorithm that adapts to your actual memory instead of fixed intervals like classic Anki. What's inside: • One-tap word capture + OCR scanner • 70 curated lists (JLPT levels, counters, keigo, onomatopoeia…) • Daily 5-minute workouts mixing flashcards, quizzes and sentence practice • Stroke-by-stroke writing practice for hiragana, katakana and kanji • Streaks, stats and a review forecast MemoCrow doesn't replace your teacher, your textbook or your immersion — it makes sure the vocabulary you meet there actually sticks. The free tier has no time limit. For the PH community, the promo code PRODUCTHUNT unlocks 1 week of MemoCrow Plus — I'd love your feedback, especially from fellow Japanese learners. Ask me anything, I'll be here all day!

Love how focused this is on vocab and the FSRS integration sounds great. One idea though: it would be really helpful to have example sentences or short audio pronunciations pulled in automatically with each new word, so I can hear and see how it's actually used instead of just memorizing the meaning in isolation.

Maker

 You're reading my mind! Audio is already in: every word gets pronunciation automatically with the correct pitch accent, which most tools skip and is a big deal for sounding natural.

And example sentences are literally what I'm building right now ! words shown and practiced in real sentences instead of memorized in isolation, for exactly the reason you describe. It's my top priority post-launch, so this kind of feedback is perfectly timed. Thanks!

the one-tap capture from the OCR scanner is a really smart touch, feels like they actually thought about the friction of pulling words out of anything you're reading instead of making you retype them.

Maker

 Thank you, that means a lot ! friction is exactly the hill I chose to die on 😄 The whole app started from the observation that I'd stop adding words the moment it took more than a few seconds. Retyping kanji you can't read yet is the worst chicken-and-egg problem in Japanese learning, so the scanner had to be a first-class feature, not an afterthought.

Out of curiosity: what do you mostly read in Japanese? Manga, novels, subtitles? It helps me prioritize what the OCR should handle best next.