Golden Week, one of the most important holidays of the year in Japan, is just around the corner!

Our office will be closed for a portion of this time, so please expect some delay in response to support tickets during the holidays.

Here’s our schedule:

4/30 (Mon): Holiday
5/1 (Tue): Office open
5/2 (Wed): Office open
5/3 (Thu): Holiday
5/4 (Fri): Holiday

*Please note that our office will be closed on 5/5 (Sat) and 5/6 (Sun) as usual.

We ask for your patience during this week–your inquiries will get responded to.

Many thanks:)
iKnow! Team

Spending time learning words you already know, or that you’re not interested in studying, is a waste of time. We’ve always offered the ability to skip items on the course page or in the study app the first time you launched a course. But theses features required you to go over all the items in a course and decide what you wanted to study at once, which is not the most natural flow.

The more common use case is seeing an item in a session and wanting to remove it then. At that moment you’re likely to realize a word is too easy, or too hard, or just not useful for you to learn, and you don’t want to study it.

So we’ve just added this feature to iKnow! study sessions. On the study screen and correct answer screen, there’s a new “Remove” button in the upper right corner:

Removing an item will remove it from that course, so you won’t see it again. Previously we called this feature “skip”, but we’ve changed the name to “remove” to make the functionality more clear.

If you want to put items back into a course, you can do so in the course page in My Courses. Check the items in the course you want to put back and choose “Unremove items” from the drop-down actions.

Today we released the latest version of the iKnow! iPhone app, version 2.2.0.

The big news in this release is that you can now use the app in offline mode! The way this works is that you can download your study data beforehand and then study offline. When you go back online your learning data will synch up.

Other changes are:

* You can set weekly study target inside the app.
* You can now sort your Focus courses in the order of recommended study time.
* The Start button for a course turns orange when it is recommended for study.
* The Download button appears in a course when its data has not been downloaded yet.
* You can use numbers on an external keyboard for pinyin input for studying Chinese.

Get the app at the iTunes App Store!

And it’s much, much better!

Today’s a big update for us. First up is a new way of launching the study applications. Clicking the “study” button next to any course or on your home page launches the new study app start screen. On this screen you can access all our study apps: iKnow!, Skills Training (Listening and Speaking), and our newest app BrainSpeed!

BrainSpeed is a new fun game for getting exposure to lots of content in a short period of time. To get started, choose BrainSpeed on the left.

There are two modes you can play in: Challenge mode is the full game experience, while Practice mode is for cruising along with no pressure of failing. You can also choose which items to play with: all the items in a course, just items you’ve started, or just items you’ve mastered.

To keep your owl in the air and to advance to the end of a level, you have to answer questions correctly. You can use the up and down (or right and left) arrow keys to choose the right answer. If you make five mistakes, you’re done, or if you’re too slow and hit the ground, the game is also over.

There are a number of playful zones to fly through, and after you complete a session, you’ll receive an achievement badge with your score. (There are a total of 14 different achievement badges.) You can also check out a bunch of stats on your performance, such as your speed and accuracy.

You can use BrainSpeed for studying new courses, but we think it’s particularly good as a quick review tool for seeing a large volume of items in a short period of time. Try it out on one of your completed courses–in just one session you can get a quick refresh of every item you mastered. If you have a lot of completed courses, this game might be the best way to keep hold of all that hard-won knowledge!

BrainSpeed is not 100% compatible with custom courses yet (there are issues with overly long cues and responses etc), so please be patient on that front. We’ll resolve that problem soon.

On your Home page under the study calendar and achievement badges there’s a new block with your latest BrainSpeed result. And in your Report page you can see all your highest scores in the new BrainSpeed tab.

The final bit of good news is that BrainSpeed is free, so even if you’re not a Pro user, you can play it as much as you want. Have fun!

Today (February 2, 2012) we released a minor update to the iKnow! Android app, version 1.4.6. Here’s an overview of what’s new:

New Features

* You can now set the volume of sound effects separately from the master volume. (Sound effects level is set as a percentage of media volume.) Previously volume was connected to the phone’s volume, which created some inconveniences.

* You can now skip items in offline mode (for one session only).

Bug Fixes

* Fixed an issue with the sound manager that caused the app to crash.

As always, you can grab the app here, and an iKnow! Pro account gives you unlimited use for both the Android and iPhone apps.

Hi everyone, this is Andrew Smith Lewis, one of Cerego’s founders.

Today I would like to announce that Eric Young, Cerego co-founder, and I are returning to Cerego in direct operational capacity. Eric will take over the position of CEO of Cerego Japan, in addition to his role as CEO of Cerego Global, and I, as Co-Founder and Executive Chairman, will help drive product innovation and guide strategy.

Paul Greenberg, the former Cerego Japan CEO, is taking a new position, President of Cerego Global, where he will be focusing primarily on strategic partnerships and corporate sales.

Eric and I have both been following the developments of the past year closely. We’ve been excited to see iKnow! grow and mature as a service, but we are also looking forward to pursuing the vision that we both share.

Our shared vision has several main components. First, we believe that some aspect of the iKnow! service should be for free. Second, we want to create a vibrant learning community, not just a powerful learning tool. Learning, especially language learning, is social in nature, so we are excited to bring back social aspects to the site. And finally, we believe that everyone should be able to customize the learning experience to suit their own needs and interests—there is no one-size-fits-all solution that works for everyone. So expect to see big changes at iKnow! in 2012 along those lines.

Many thanks for your continued support!

Best,
Andrew Smith Lewis

We are excited to announce the release of the iKnow! iPhone App version 2.1 which supports iPad fully.

Here’s the list of new features included in this version:

◆ iPad support added with landscape orientation

◆ Added transliterations to the recall screen for dictation quiz

◆ Added part of speech to recall screen for reverse spelling quiz

◆ Added sorting for library and completed courses in the options menu

We hope these changes will make your study experience on iPhone/iPad much smoother. We will continue to incorporate your suggestions and requests to make the app better. Stay tuned for future developments!

Yesterday we updated the algorithm that calculates when completed items come up for review. We discovered that in some circumstances review would be recommended way too far down the line (months or even years away), and we decided to fix this.

Because of this change, you might suddenly see more review items on your Home page than you had before, especially if you have completed a large number of courses.

We try to avoid making changes often that fundamentally affect the scheduling of items, but in this case we did extensive modeling and came to the conclusion that we could implement a better system. We believe the new model will lead to more efficient learning. Hence the change.

We made a slight modification to iKnow! today. For spell quizzes, you no longer have to type in any information which is contained within parentheses. For example, if you’re studying the English phrase “wake (someone) up”, previously you had to type “someone” every time, which was a nuisance. We are making this change primarily for users studying English, as hundreds (if not thousands) of our official items have non-essential information within parentheses.

But this change also allows you to structure your own content in more flexible ways. For example, if you wanted to add grammatical information, such as “(transitive verb)”, or any other information that makes an item less ambiguous, you can now do so without being forced to type out all that information in spell quizzes. If there is supplementary information which you want to practice typing, please put that information in brackets [ ] not parentheses ( ). Information contained within brackets will be tested on spell quizzes.

Good news for all of you who have been patiently waiting for the return of BrainSpeed–we have begun work on a much improved BrainSpeed that we hope to release early next year!

We know the decision to remove BrainSpeed was unpopular with many, and we apologize for keeping you waiting for such a long time, but with resource constraints we unfortunately haven’t been in a position to rebuild it yet.

Last week a new member joined the team, Stefan from Germany, and the first project he’s going to work on is building a new BrainSpeed. So please give him a warm welcome!

We’re going to take what was good about the original–a fast way to review lots of items–and improve on it with much better game play dynamics and more control. Our goal is to make an app that is more useful as a study tool and more fun as a game than the original. It’s definitely going to look completely different, but we’re excited about its evolution.