Introducing Pitchi, the web application to check the pitch accent of Japanese words!
Why?
After I moved to Japan, I started to study the language more seriously. And it was at this point that I realized that no matter how hard I tried, something was always missing to sound like a native speaker. So I came across the channel of Dogen, a YouTuber who, in addition to producing hilarious skits, is also an excellent teacher of "Pitch accent.”
The inspiration came in particularly after this video:
In order to always have a tool at hand that would allow me to know what the correct pitch accent of a word is, I decided to create Pitchi (from Japanese ピッチ).
How to use
The usage is pretty straightforward: go to https://pitchi.app and insert the word you are looking for
The insertion can be made in all the different ways;
- Romaji
- かな
- 漢字
After that, just press Enter and all the possible words you were looking for will pop up.
Architecture
The application is build with the following stack:
- Frontend: NuxtJS
- Backend:
- Dictionary parser and generation: Python
- Cloud Functions: NodeJS
In order to retrieve all the different inputs, I’m using the WanaKana (https://wanakana.com/) library in JS and the dictionary is parsed from Sanseido Super Daijirin.
Edit #1
After releasing the first version I asked a couple of friends for feedback, and indeed a pretty important feature was missing.
With the first update, also translations are now available to check to which word the pitch accent is referring to