wtf is katest?

katest is a small command-line tool for people learning Japanese who want to get faster at reading kana, the basic phonetic syllabaries (hiragana and katakana) that are foundational to written Japanese. It shows you random sequences of kana characters, and you type the corresponding romaji (English-letter versions of the sounds) as quickly as you can. The tool works by generating a string of kana characters, for example five to ten characters long, and waiting for you to type the answer. You can customize which characters appear, starting with just the core 50 kana or even a handful like "ka, ki, ku, ke, ko," then gradually expanding as you get more comfortable. There's an accuracy mode that shows stats after each round, and a "fast" mode that skips typing spaces between each character so it feels more like a typing-speed game. The author built this for personal use when learning Japanese, they found that flashcards helped initially, but then practicing rapid kana recognition with this tool got them to a point where they could read kana quickly. The tool runs in a terminal via command-line flags. One notable feature is a mode that requires you to mark whether each character is hiragana or katakana, which forces you to distinguish between the two syllabaries rather than just transliterating sounds. The README doesn't go into installation detail beyond the fact that it's written in Go and is a personal project shared by request. It's a focused, single-purpose utility rather than a comprehensive language-learning platform.