Jordi Salord

Who he is

Jordi Salord is an app developer. He makes his living writing software, and Hanasuka is what comes out when the craft meets what he enjoys: neither a commission nor a product, but the tool he himself would have needed.

Japan, first as a visitor

His relationship with the country doesn't fit into a week-long getaway. He has spent several months travelling around Japan: the central part from top to bottom and, much further north, Hokkaidō, which is almost another country within the country.

Everything else came from there, and in this order: first the urge to understand what he heard in the street, then studying the language seriously, and finally the habit of going back on long trips instead of short visits. The long ones are what give you time to get bored somewhere, which is exactly when you start to understand how it works.

住めば都 (sumeba miyako) — "wherever you live ends up being the capital". It's said of the habit of growing fond of any place you stay in for a while.

Why Hanasuka exists

Hanasuka was first written in Spanish, and learning Japanese from Spanish has a very practical problem: almost all the good material is in English, and what there is in Spanish either stops at greetings or assumes you can already read kana.

Hanasuka tries to be what was missing in between: grammar explained the way you'd explain something to a friend, phrases with the "when it's used" right beside them—which is what's really hard to find—and everything geared towards speaking and listening rather than passing an exam.

That's also where its rules come from, and they aren't a slogan but the way it's built:

• It's free, and it will stay that way.
• It carries no advertising and tracks no one across sites. Visits are measured with Google Analytics only if you accept it, and beyond that there are no requests to any other domain except two, counted and declared — if you choose to sign in with Google or Apple, and the contact form's anti-spam, which is Google's.
• What isn't its own is credited. The kanji readings and frequencies come from KANJIDIC2, and the breakdown by JLPT level is a third-party reconstruction, not an official document. This is stated inside the app, not hidden in the small print.