JALEA: manga and ‘pop’ music to learn Japanese with an App

JALEA (JApanese LEArning system) is an innovative hypermedia project for tablets, computers and smartphones based on research at Ca’ Foscari to facilitate Japanese learning.

Thanks to the app and the website jalea.unive.it, anyone will be able to discover Japanese language, from children at elementary school to language enthusiasts of any age who are passionate about Japanese culture. For the first year, currently experimented, the system will only be accessible to Ca’ Foscari students who will help improving it with their feedbacks.

With JALEA, users can navigate through original multimedia materials - photos and videos: from manga to Tokyo public transportation information, from pop singers’ videos with subtitles and transcriptions in Latin characters, translations and grammatical explanations.

500 web pages with explanations, audio, videos and images will be available. Future development include a JALEA-Business version and a Ca' Foscari J-Corpus, offering the 1,300 Ca’ Foscari students in Japanese language digital books and class materials for interactive autonomous research.

The project carried out by the Japanese language professor Marcella Mariotti (project leader), and by PhD candidates Alessandro Mantelli (system developer) and Giovanni Lapis (contents editor), was possible thanks to the financial support of the Mitsubishi Corporation, the most important business corporation in Japan and Ca’ Foscari strategic partner for placement and the design of the professional Master’s programme in Global Business Japan.

“The great innovation of this App is its very concept  – explained Marcella Mariotti. - Since our identity expresses itself through ‘linguistic acts’ and long-term acquisition of knowledge requires enjoyment to stimulate learning, JALEA allows its users to choose their own programs with their timing and highlights without being caged in a pre-established program with its levels of difficulty. You can learn how to say ‘hi’ for instance without studying adjectives, genders or plurals for instance.
That is why JALEA uses hypermedia links in its offer thanks to new technologies using grammatica TAGs or automatic analysis.
You can choose among several programs: from a video or an image, using transcriptions and a dictionary to check autonomously one’s mistakes or not, selecting the options from the index or using the ‘search’ option or following the traditional guided program under the ‘intro’ item”.

JALEA was presented at the encounter held in English on Friday December 1st at 10.30am at the Auditorium S. Margherita in the presence of Ca’ Foscari rector, Michele Bugliesi, and of Mitsubishi Corporation Executive Vice President, Regional CEO, Europe & Africa, Haruki Hayashi.

Find the PROGRAMME of the event.

Federica Scotellaro