Mastering Japanese through Augmented Browsing

In this paper we present an extensible framework for Web-based language learning. At the client side we make extensive use of augmented browsing technology to accommodate various language education approaches with an emphasis on incidental language learning. Though our system architecture is designed in a generic and language-independent way, we built our first use cases for Japanese due to the inherent challenges in studying this complex language. Based on first valuable feedback from students and instructors we have concentrated our recent development efforts on three important extensions: contextual Japanese character training, visualization of Japanese sentence structures, and personal vocabulary lists.