This crossword is designed to drill Japanese vocab, and Hiragana writing.
English mode uses Hiragana clues, and the answers are in English. Hiragana
mode does the opposite.
The crossword uses a limited dictionary based on words I've learned in
Japanese class so far. I haven't been learning for very long, so there's
only about 500 words in it currently. I'll add more words as I learn them.
Although the dictionary includes borrowed words that would usually be
written in Katakana, I haven't figured out a clean way of mixing Hiragana
and Katakana in the UI, so for now all those words are simply written in
Hiragana. Katakana words that can't be written in Hiragana are just omitted.
I'm considering adding a pure Katakana mode to drill the Katakana alphabet,
rather than trying to mix them in the UI, since there aren't really enough
borrowed words in my dictionary to practice Katakana anyway.
In Hiragana mode, there's a Hiragana keyboard next to the crossword. The
blue buttons at the bottom toggle the ‶ and ° modifiers. Just above that are
the four small hiragana, ゃゅょっ, as well as ん. The small Hiragana take up a
full crossword cell, just like any other character, even though they're
arguably modifiers for other characters.
There are a few words in my dictionary where the Hiragana translation
involves modifying the end of the phrase, in addition to the single word
translation. In that case, the two chunks are separated by a ~ character.
For example, "never" is translated as "ぜんぜん~ません". The ~ character
occupies a single cell, just like any other character.
In English mode, some of the answers include spaces. You can type a space or
leave the cell empty. Some of the answers also include an apostrophe (eg
"o'clock"). This also just takes up a single crossword cell like any other
character.
Part of what I want to practice is tenses, so the
dictionary includes words like "のみませんでした", and in Hiragana mode this
has the clue "drink (past negative)". Since in English "drink" isn't
modified (instead "does" becomes "didn't"), I decided to ignore this in
English mode. So the English answer for the Hiragana clue "のみませんでした" is
simply "drink". In fact, anything in brackets in an English clue is removed
when that clue is used as an answer in English mode.