Typed Japanese

Typed Japanese takes one strong idea and executes it consistently: a Japanese sentence is a type, and the sentence is correct only if it compiles. That framing does real work. Instead of memorising that なら attaches to nouns and noun-like phrases, you see ConditionalPhrase<ヒンメル, "なら", そうした> and the annotation tells you exactly what is allowed in each slot. The interactive analyzer extends this — you take an example apart particle by particle, which is the closest thing to a debugger for grammar that a language course has produced. The structure is genuinely well thought out. 47 chapters are split into 20 elementary, 15 intermediate and 12 advanced, and the ordering is dependency-ordered rather than topic-alphabetical: you meet the て-form because a sentence needs it, not because it's chapter eleven. The intermediate band covers the parts most self-taught learners stall on — passive, causative, the three registers of keigo, giving and receiving verbs, appearance and hearsay — and the advanced band goes past most consumer courses into business keigo, the わけ family, and literary written style. Bilingual English and Simplified Chinese at equal depth is unusual and widens the audience considerably. Where it falls short is scope, not quality. Everything here is reading and writing. There is no audio, no listening drill, no speaking feedback, no community forum, and no mobile or offline version — you need a browser and an internet connection. The course also assumes you're comfortable with the idea of a type annotation; the pitch is that no coding experience is required, and that's true, but a learner who has never seen TypeScript will spend the first chapter learning a second notation alongside the Japanese. Use it as the structural spine of your study and get your listening and speaking elsewhere — a spaced-repetition deck plus a conversation tutor covers the gap cheaply. If you want a single app that does everything, this isn't it; if you want to finally understand why the particles go where they go, it is hard to beat, especially at the current price of nothing.