Pitchi: Japanese Pitch accent application

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.featuredeploy.dev 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

Edit #2

Pitchi is now an iOS native mobile application! Check it out on the App Store!