Three Cats Studio

Welcome.

Three Cats Studio makes small, carefully built software. The main product is JLS, a Japanese course from kana to upper-intermediate. Alongside it I publish open-source tools when a problem is too interesting to leave alone. By day I run IT, which mostly means keeping other people's systems working, so the things here are built to keep working too.

What the studio makes

JLS

live at jls.studio

A Japanese course from kana to upper-intermediate, for learners who want to keep going past the first year.

40 units of grammar, vocabulary, kanji, reading, and listening across four levels, Starter to Mastery, with spaced review underneath. The first 10 units are free; Full Access is a subscription.

The JLS home page: a Japanese course from kana to upper-intermediate, beside a real vocabulary card from Starter, Unit 4
Why
I moved to Japan and wanted to study the way a good textbook teaches, with grammar, vocabulary, kanji, and reading building on each other in a deliberate order. What I could not find was something that kept going past the first year, which is exactly when the plateau arrives.
What I built
The course and the application around it. I wrote the units, built the app, and run it, and I study with it every day. Audio is generated with VOICEVOX, so every example sentence has a voice you can listen to while you study.
How it is built
Next.js on Vercel, with Postgres and auth on Supabase. The stroke order and dictionary data is derived from open sources, so the derived data has to be republished under the upstream licenses. That part took the longest.
Use it:jls.studio Source:private

Three pieces of it are public, because the licenses ask for it. jls-strokes, stroke order, CC BY-SA 3.0 and OFL 1.1. jls-jmdict-lookup, word lookup from JMdict, CC BY-SA 4.0. jls-kanjidic2-lookup, kanji lookup from KANJIDIC2, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Alligator

live at alligator.chat, open source

Two-way live speech translation for conversations and online meetings. Say it out loud next to the word translator and you will hear where the name came from.

Runs in Chrome or Edge with nothing to install. MIT licensed.

Alligator showing a three-person English and Spanish conversation side by side, each line paired with its translation
What it does
It listens to the people in the room, or to a meeting in another browser tab, and shows what each person says next to its translation, as they say it. Speakers are told apart automatically, and a small pop-out window stays on top of Meet, Teams, or Zoom.
Private by design
There are no accounts, no database, no analytics, and no server of mine in the path. Audio goes from the browser straight to Soniox, and each session runs on a single-use key that expires in 60 seconds. Nothing is kept unless you save the transcript yourself.
How it is built
Static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with no dependencies, on the Soniox real-time API. Fonts and icons ship with the app, so the only other site the page talks to is Soniox.
Use it:alligator.chat Source:github.com/marcus-saito/alligator

Who's behind it

I came to technology building PCs as a kid, purely for fun. That's still why I build: like learning an instrument, it takes focus, and the sum of the hard work makes it worth it. These days I play guitar and bass with my two kids, usually louder than the neighbours would prefer.

The name: there are three cats in this house, a British Shorthair, a Scottish Fold, and an Exotic. They are everywhere, and they supervise everything.

Three Cats Studio is independent of my day job, and nothing here comes from it.

Say hello.

hello@threecats.studio linkedin.com/in/malansaito