What the arcade knows about you

Every game feeds the same record: which characters you have met, how often you got them, how quickly, and — when you miss — which character you typed instead. It never leaves your device, and it is what turns twenty-five arcade games into one study system.

Four states, not two

Right and wrong is too blunt for reading. A character you answer in two and a half seconds is not learned — you worked it out. So each character sits in one of four states: not met yet, shaky (you are getting it wrong), right but slow, and fluent (right, and inside about a second). The progress grid paints all of them at once, so the thing to practise is obvious at a glance rather than a matter of guessing.

The music

Every game has its own chiptune loop — a square-wave lead with a second square a third above it, a triangle bass and a noise channel for percussion, which is the four-voice shape the machines of that era had. Each is written for its game: a march under the formation shooter, something restless under the maze chase, something slow and unhurried under the memory games.

The tunes are original. They are written in the style of the period, because a style belongs to nobody, but none of them quotes a melody from any other game. The music sits well under the sound effects, steps back automatically whenever a character is spoken aloud, and can be turned off on its own from the settings without silencing the rest.

Every fifth level is a review

Levels one to fifty teach characters one at a time, and every fifth level puts them back together: whole words, built only from the characters you have already met. Nothing new appears — if the word is on screen, you have been taught every character in it. A character you can name on its own and a character you can read inside a word are two different skills, and the second is the one that matters for reading. Meeting words only at level fifty-one made that a wall; now it is a step you take ten times on the way there.

Review levels give you more time per item and never stack more than a few on screen, because a word takes longer to type than a character. Languages already taught as words — French, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, Dutch — skip them.

The games steer themselves

About a third of the characters any game puts in front of you are now chosen by weakness rather than at random: shaky ones come round about three times as often as unmet ones, and fluent ones come round half as often. You do not have to choose a study list — play whatever game you like and it leans toward what you are getting wrong.

The pairs you mix up

When you miss, the arcade records what you typed instead. That builds a list of the pairs you personally confuse — ざ for ぜ, ก for ถ — which is where adult learners actually get stuck: not on characters they have never seen, but on pairs they cannot separate at speed. There is a drill for exactly those pairs, and it is usually the most useful five minutes on the site.

Listen and type

Every game shows a character and asks you to type it. The listening drill does it the other way: the character is spoken and never shown, and you type what you heard. It is the skill reading practice usually leaves out, and it is the same set of characters you are already working on.

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