Abstract

We report on the usability and usage patterns of a mobile system designed to help students learn Japanese kanji characters through a mnemonic-story method. Our data comes from two sources: (1) a usability questionnaire of kanji learners, and (2) from a series of two-week experiments where subjects used our mobile kanji learning system. We found that 21% of mobile device usage actually occurred in a mobile learning setting. We also found varied time-of-day usage patterns over a two-week period. We discovered that user behaviors while using the system – selection operations, story creation time and story length – were characterized by positively-skewed distributions that can be described by exponential and lognormal models. We found statistically significant correlations between certain user behaviors and certain self-reported user attitudes. These results empirically clarify and confirm the usability of our mobile story-based kanji learning system. Questionnaire data from a separate population of story-based kanji learners, who did not use our device, provides further insight into the study behaviors and requirements of story-based kanji learners.

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