Tofugu

Instead of registering for another university class, Koichi convinced a professor to let him start a blog about the Japanese language and Japan. After graduating in 2008, he continued work on Tofugu while working at an education start-up. While there, Koichi developed his interest in teaching and how humans actually learn. He found there's a big difference between traditional teaching methods and what actually works well. At the end of 2009, the start-up laid off all of its staff. Koichi wrote TextFugu, an online Japanese textbook with a conversational style. There he was able to apply a lot of what he had learned, and with a source of income, Tofugu hired its first employee in 2010. In 2011,Viet Hoang joined as our first developer and helped co-found WaniKani, our application for learning kanji and vocabulary. Since then, we've slowly grown our team and capability to help others (and ourselves) learn. If you're like us, head on over to our Jobs page. We might be hiring!