Japanese in an app: The JALEA project, funded by Mitsubishi Corporation

JALEA ( "Your JApanese LEArning system") is an innovative and extensive project developed for tablets, PCs and Smartphones, that brings together previous research carried out at the Department of Asian and North African Studies on the development of IT tools to facilitate Japanese language learning.

The project was founded in 2008, when Marcella Mariotti (JALEA project leader) had the idea for the first Japanese grammar dictionary (BunpoHyDict) during her post-doc research funded by the Japan Association for the Promotion of Science at the International Christian University in Tokyo. She returned to Ca’ Foscari in 2010 as a researcher, and in 2011 started the first Japanese-Italian dictionary online along with systems analyst (and now a doctoral student in instructional design) Alessandro Mantelli, thanks to financing from the European Social Fund and the commitment of students and graduate volunteers of the Department of Asian and North African Studies (DSAAM). In 2012 with funding from this department of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Alessandro began the Edukanji project, an application for Italian speakers learning Kanji.

Thanks to € 28,000 of funding from Mitsubishi Corporation, the first hypermedia grammar dictionary has been realized, carried out by the research group formed of Dr. Marcella Mariotti (project leader), Dr. Alessandro Mantelli (system developer) and Dr. Giovanni Lapis (contents editor).

JALEA, as part of Corporate Social Responsibility, will be presented to the public on Tuesday, December 13th at 11am in Aula Baratto, during a conference held by Mr. Haruki HAYASHI, Executive Vice President, Regional CEO, Europe & Africa, Mitsubishi Corporation. Speakers: prof. Michele Bugliesi, rector of Ca’ Foscari University, Professor Tiziana Lippiello, vice-rector of Ca' Foscari University, prof. Paolo Calvetti, director of the Department of Asian and North African Studies.

The goal of this project is to build a programme that can handle at least three basic functions: a hypermedia grammar dictionary; Pop-up on texts with Italian translation and information on how to write kanji; 'authentic' Study materials, i.e. videos and pictures taken daily from Japan, with clickable subtitles related to grammatical and dictionary-based explanations.
The programme aims to be easy, efficient and pleasant to use, whilst being able to drive both autonomous and in-class learning of the Japanese language.
When work on the project is complete, JALEA will be accessible for free from the Ca' Foscari University website.