Legal notice

1. Who is behind Hanasuka

These details are published in compliance with Article 10 of Spanish Law 34/2002 of 11 July on information society services and electronic commerce (LSSI-CE). The email address given is the direct and effective means of contacting the owner, and also the channel through which complaints are handled.

If you'd rather not use email, there is a contact form on the public website, with a drop-down to say what it's about. It reaches the same place.

Write through the contact form

2. What this service is

Hanasuka is a web application for learning Japanese, focused on speaking and listening. It offers teaching material organised by level, comprehension quizzes, pronunciation exercises with speech recognition, writing practice and a spaced-repetition review system.

To use it you need to open an account. That's not a whim: progress is stored on the server linked to that account, and without knowing whose it is there is nothing to show and nowhere to save it.

Hanasuka is independent study material. It is not official preparation for the JLPT exam and it is not endorsed, sponsored or reviewed by the Japan Foundation or any examining body.

3. The terms of use are a separate document

What you can do with Hanasuka, what you can't, how an account is opened and closed and what would happen if there were ever paid plans are in their own document, "Terms of use". They go there because they are an agreement you accept, by ticking a box when creating the account, not a notice that is published.

That document, this legal notice and the privacy policy form a single agreement: none of them makes sense without the other two.

4. Intellectual property

The code, the design, the teaching texts, the diagrams and the Hanasuka brand belong to the owner, who reserves all rights except as stated below. You may use the content to study on your own; you may not reproduce it, distribute it, communicate it publicly or transform it without written permission.

Hanasuka incorporates third-party material under licence. These attributions are part of the terms of those licences and cannot be removed:

The CC BY-SA 4.0 licence of KANJIDIC2 extends to the derived dataset the application uses.

5. Liability

• The teaching content is prepared with the greatest care, but the owner does not guarantee that it is free of errors or that using it will lead to passing any exam.
• The breakdown of kanji by JLPT level is a reconstruction made by third parties: the Japan Foundation stopped publishing official lists in 2010. It may differ from the real exam, and the application itself says so.
• The service is offered as is and may suffer interruptions due to maintenance, hosting provider failure or force majeure.
• Speech recognition and speech synthesis are provided by your browser and your operating system. Their availability and quality do not depend on the owner.
• The owner is not responsible for the content of third-party sites that are linked to.
• Nothing above limits the rights that the law grants to consumers.

6. Third-party services

For sign-in with a Google account, Hanasuka loads Google's identity service (Google Identity Services) and shows its button, as its terms of use require. Use of that service is also governed by Google's terms and privacy policy.

You can also sign in with Apple (Sign in with Apple). In the iPhone, iPad and Mac apps the window is shown by the system itself; on the web, Hanasuka loads Apple's script (appleid.cdn-apple.com), which opens it separately. In both cases Apple is the one that verifies your identity, and use of that service is also governed by Apple's terms and privacy policy.

The contact form on the public website also uses Google's reCAPTCHA v3, an anti-spam service that analyses browser behaviour to tell a person from an automated program. It is the only page it loads on, and the form itself says so next to the links to Google's terms and privacy policy.

If you accept it in the cookie notice, Hanasuka's public website also loads Google Analytics, Google's audience measurement service, to find out how many people visit it, which pages are read and how people get to them. If you don't accept it, it isn't loaded, and the application never loads it. That service's advertising features are turned off, and its use is also governed by Google's terms and privacy policy.

If you turn on notifications, the Hanasuka server hands them to your own browser's notification service —Google for Chrome and Android, Mozilla for Firefox, Apple for Safari, Microsoft for Edge—, which is what delivers them to your device. They are encrypted with keys that only your browser holds: that service carries them but cannot read them. They are turned on and off in «Your account», device by device.

Apart from those services, Hanasuka loads nothing from third parties: the typeface is served from this same site and not from a CDN, and there is no advertising. If you don't use Google or Apple sign-in, don't write through the contact form, don't turn on notifications and don't accept visit measurement, your browser talks to no other domain on Hanasuka's behalf.

7. Changes

The owner may modify this legal notice to adapt it to changes in the law or in the service itself. The version in force is always the one published on this page, with its update date at the bottom. Substantial changes will be announced within the application.

8. Applicable law and complaints

This legal notice is governed by Spanish law.

If you have a complaint, write first to konnichiwa@hanasuka.com: it is the fastest route and the owner undertakes to reply. If it is not resolved and you are a consumer, you can go to your local Municipal Consumer Information Office (OMIC) or the Consumer Arbitration Board that applies to you.

For any court dispute, if you are a consumer the courts of your place of residence will have jurisdiction. In all other cases, the parties submit to the courts and tribunals of Terrassa.