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Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.

139 points by chrisvasselli 11y ago

chrisvasselli 11y ago
Hey HN, creator of Nihongo here! I spent a long time studying Japanese vocabulary using Anki, Flashcards Deluxe, etc., but I found that studying using premade word lists never worked that well for me. Nihongo is built around studying the words you're encountering naturally through your own hobbies and interests. Flashcard packs are automatically generated from the words that you look up in the built-in dictionary. You can also copy and paste Japanese text into the app like song lyrics, textbook readings, videogame scripts, or books, and it will automatically find all the words contained in the text, and generate flashcards from them. I built Nihongo because it was the tool that I wanted and felt like was missing for studying Japanese. Hopefully it'll be useful for some of you too! I'd love to hear your feedback.
- Nadya 11y ago
  >You can also copy and paste Japanese text into the app like song lyrics, textbook readings, videogame scripts, or books, and it will automatically find all the words contained in the text, and generate flashcards from them. How would 「気に入らない」 be parsed for flashcards? An entry for 気 with it's most common meaning(s) and an entry for 入る with it's most common meaning(s)?
  - chrisvasselli 11y ago
    In this case, there's actually an entry in the dictionary for 「気に入る」, so it will figure out that this is a conjugation of that entry, and use 「気に入る」and its most common meaning as the flashcard. Many of these kinds of phrases exist in the dictionary (I'm using JMDict under the hood), but for those that don't, it would create two flashcards, one for each word. The flashcards are set by default to use the most common meaning, but if there are alternative meanings, you can choose to show those in addition, or instead of the most common meaning.
    - Nadya 11y ago
      * internet high five * Awesome. I couldn't think of how to phrase the problem. "Short phrases with meanings that don't match the individual words used being parsed as individual words instead of the short phrase" is kind of wordy and a little confusing.
      - chrisvasselli 11y ago
        Heheh, got it! Yeah, fortunately JMDict is a really mature project, and has got a ton of these kinds of things covered.
      - thaumasiotes 11y ago
        > "Short phrases with meanings that don't match the individual words used being parsed as individual words instead of the short phrase" is kind of wordy and a little confusing. These are called "idioms", or, if you want to be really technical for its own sake, "non-compositional phrases". But I note that, at least according to wikipedia, "idiom" is the technical term as well as the vernacular one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phraseme#Non-compositional_phrasemes:_Idioms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phraseme#Non-compositional_phr...
        Nadya 11y ago
        You know those times where you need to describe something but are forgetting the word so you call a "bridge" "an elevated structure built to allow crossing over bodies of water and roads"? That was one of those times... though I appreciate you calling me out on it. :)
    - MarkSweep 11y ago
      Which morphological analyzer are you using to do the deconjugation?
      - chrisvasselli 11y ago
        I actually ended up rolling my own. There are some tricky cases involved, and I wanted full control over it.
- Navarr 11y ago
  iOS only :< No planned Android support anywhere? No signup for android news subscription system or RSS if you don't want to setup a mail system? Sadface.
  - reustle 11y ago
    I'd love an email notification for android support as well!
- hkmurakami 11y ago
  Native speaker of both Japanese and English here. This looks quite nice and I've forwarded it to my friends who are learning Japanese. :) I was initially really skeptical when I saw the tagline about "learning from songs and games", because songs are grammatically broken and often nonsensical, while games/anime/manga often have brash speech that you stop using once you're past Junior High. But being able to learn off of your interests in a digitally integrated way is quite awesome (I remember meeting a South Korean guy in college whose Japanese was quite good just from learning form Anime/manga). Commonality is useful as well, since the language has changed dramatically in the last 100 years, particularly pre and post war. Kudos! :)
  - chrisvasselli 11y ago
    Yeah, it's hard to sum up the idea in 80 characters, but I like that idea of learning off of your interests. Thanks!
    - veidr 11y ago
      I work in Tokyo and speak okay Japanese, but sort of hit a plateau after college (partly due to knowing 'enough for daily life' and partly due to having to work and no longer having to go to Japanese class). So my study lists consist 100% of words and phrases I hear and don't understand when I am out at the Japanese semi-mandatory drinking-with-coworkers. I currently use Japanese.app, but am open to switching since it doesn't sync vocab lists hint hint :-). So I study off my actual experiences here in Japan. I too was instinctively skeptical of the "games, songs" bit. (Although, I notice that text is not actually on the website.) I think "learning off your interests" is better, too.
- veidr 11y ago
  Hi Chris, looks like an awesome start. Some quick suggestions and questions: 1. You should fully support romaji entry for looking things up. The mechanics of switching input methods on iOS are pretty terrible so it is really inconvenient to have to switch into Japanese input mode. I searched for "hana" but got only 花合わせ and 花を引く as matches -- because those have 'hana' in the English definition string. Searching for はな brought the two obvious matches (花 and 鼻) to the top, but I had to go back and cycle through several other input methods to get to Japanese input mode, which was annoying and took longer than the rest of looking up the word. Some other dictionaries do this, and even sites like Amazon Japan now do this for searches as well -- dealing with input methods is just a hassle in general. 2. The understanding of verb conjugation seems really awesome and jumping between things on a "learning tangent" works really well. 3. You have to sync vocab lists and spaced repetition drill status/progress to the cloud. It's just too useful not to do it -- you want to be able to do that in quick downtime moments from any device. Luckily there are many easy ways to do it nowadays. I don't blame you for shipping without that, though! ;-) All in all, great start!
  - chrisvasselli 11y ago
    Thanks for the feedback! 1. I actually just finished implementing romaji entry, and it will be coming in the next version update. Honestly, after implementing it, I can't believe how much time I've wasted switching input methods. =) 2. Thanks! 3. I know, I know! I really want to, but I spent a couple weeks diving into it and found it really buggy and hard to get right. I'm using Core Data under the hood to store this stuff. Any suggestions for tools I should look at to help with syncing?
    - veidr 11y ago
      > 1. I actually just finished implementing romaji entry Great! I didn't see a need to put it this bluntly in my initial comment, but having to manually switch input methods is enough of a deal-breaker for me that I was going to uninstall the app... but now I will leave it installed and wait for that update. ;-)
    - sharp11 11y ago
- KerrickStaley 11y ago
  Tangential shameless self-promotion: I built a tool for Chinese learners that can take starred entries from the Hanping Dictionary app (for Android) and import them into Anki. It's available at https://github.com/kerrickstaley/hsk_flashcards https://github.com/kerrickstaley/hsk_flashcards. File a bug if you have trouble running/using it. Obviously not as seamless as Nihongo :)
  - chrisvasselli 11y ago
    Before I built Nihongo, I used to use Imiwa as my Japanese dictionary, and Flashcards Deluxe for spaced repetition studying. I built this ridiculously convoluted setup where I would upload a list of words from Imiwa to dropbox, my laptop at home would detect a new file in my dropbox and run a script to convert the format to the one supported by Flashcards Deluxe, and then I'd open up Flashcards Deluxe and download the deck from dropbox. I told someone about this, and they said "man, wouldn't it be awesome if there were a Japanese app that could just do that automatically?" And thus, Nihongo was born. =) So KerrickStaley, wouldn't it be awesome if there were a Chinese app that could just do that automatically? =p
    - KerrickStaley 11y ago
      You're giving me ideas :P The problem is that I don't have time to build a monolithic app that serves as both a good Chinese dictionary and a good flashcard app; it's much easier to cobble together a system using existing software.
- xiaoma 11y ago
  >I built Nihongo because it was the tool that I wanted and felt like was missing for studying Japanese. Hopefully it'll be useful for some of you too! I'd love to hear your feedback. This alone made me download the app even though I haven't seriously studied Japanese since college. Have you written anywhere about your learning habits / methods?
  - chrisvasselli 11y ago
    I haven't, but I'd like to! I've been meaning to start a blog to discuss topics like that, but haven't found the time quite yet.
- wahnfrieden 11y ago
  Nice app, will definitely play with it soon! By auto-generating flashcards, what are you doing about showing accurate definitions/meanings for the cards? I couldn't tell from your page alone - are you just pulling down the list of senses from JMDict or something? That's always been my hesitation with auto-generating cards, the "meaning" side of the card tends not to be helpful.
  - chrisvasselli 11y ago
    By default, the backside of the card has the first "sense" from JMDict on it. This sense is supposed to represent the primary meaning of the word. You can also add/replace that with the other senses by editing the flashcard, or you can add your own notes to the back. I've found using the first sense works pretty well. Having the whole definition on the back is way too much for your brain to process, but the first sense is usually only a few words that encapsulate the meaning of the word pretty well.
    - Micaiah_Chang 11y ago
      I've been studying the language for a while, and recently made the switch to Japanese-Japanese dictionaries, after using EDICT for a long time. This has highlighted some reservations I have about it. The most available example (not the best) is 適当, where it can be interchangeably be used to mean "adequate" and "half-assed", sort of sarcastically. The definition being a mostly undifferentiated bag of words, without necessarily regard for nuance or typical use cases. Contrast this with the goo dictionary, which has a slightly better structure (http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/leaf/jn2/151064/m0u/%E9%81%A9%E5%BD%93/ http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/leaf/jn2/151064/m0u/%E9%81%A9%E5...) and the 類語 dictionary, that gives synonyms and situations where you would use one over another (http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/leaf/thsrs/2512/m0u/ http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/leaf/thsrs/2512/m0u/). I understand that there's probably no way to deal with this in a scaleable way that would be as easy to turn it into flash cards but it's kinda sad to see the gap between the two solutions. Apologies for not having a more constructive suggestion.
      - glandium 11y ago
- mikekchar 11y ago
  I'm also the author of a Japanese learning tool: https://github.com/mikekchar/jldrill https://github.com/mikekchar/jldrill I have some advice for you if you decide to use spaced repetition in your flashcards (not sure if you do already as I haven't had time to look in detail). JLDrill is mostly abandonware at the moment and is written in very poor Ruby ;-). I don't actually recommend that anyone use it. It was written for me. I think the pheonix branch will actually work on modern Ruby, but I was half way through trying a different scheduling idea, so it probably has considerable bugs. However, if you decide to do spaced repetition in your app, I would humbly suggest reading JLDrill's strategy on it: https://github.com/mikekchar/JLDrill/blob/master/web/src/Strategy.page https://github.com/mikekchar/JLDrill/blob/master/web/src/Str... Most tools (like Anki) use the SM2 algorithm, but I found that my strategy works considerably better (for me, anyway ;-) ) The latest version of JLDrill has an ability to "forget" items if you have neglected studying them for too long: https://github.com/mikekchar/JLDrill/blob/master/web/src/Usage.page#L512-L536 https://github.com/mikekchar/JLDrill/blob/master/web/src/Usa... Feel free to ping me if you have any questions.
  - chrisvasselli 11y ago
    Very interesting! Nihongo does use spaced repetition, and it looks like there are some similarities and some differences with JLDrill. Here's the overview: - When you select a deck, you study words 10 at a time in "learn" mode. -- In "learn" mode, you have to get the flashcard correct 3 times in a row, at which point they are "learned". - Every day, you'll be given a set of cards you've learned to "review". - These cards use a form of spaced repetition. In order to make spaced repetition more approachable, I don't use time intervals in the same way apps like Anki do. Instead, each card has a level, and as you progress through the levels, the interval at which they appear increases. Each level takes three steps to get through, each of which has its own interval. -- Level 1: 1 day, 2 days, 3 days. -- Level 2: 1 week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks -- Level 3: 1 month, 2 months, 3 months -- Level 4: 6 months, 9 months, 1 year -- Level 5: Never show again - If you mark a word wrong at Level 1, it drops down to Level 0, where it will keep showing up in that same session periodically until you've marked it correct enough to move it back to Level 1. - Getting through your daily set of review cards is encouraged as being the most important thing, adding new cards is secondary. - We don't want to discourage people from coming back, even if they got lazy and stopped studying for a month. So we never build up a huge pile of flashcards for people to review. Give it a try if you have a chance, and if you have any thoughts/suggestions I'd love to hear them!
- tomku 11y ago
  Really like the app, any plans to make an iPad/Universal version? Thanks!
  - chrisvasselli 11y ago
    Yep, I'm working on it right now! That's going to be the next big update. I'm aiming to release shortly after iOS 9 comes out, so September/October probably.
- elementalest 11y ago
  I would love to use this app! I have been doing something to similar effect for Anki except using web scraping/API of various japanese dictionary sites with python scripts. The whole thing is clunky and buggy and requires a fair amount of manual work (which i always intended to automate, but not had the time), so i would love to use an app that does this all well. Unfortunately being iOS only locks me out. I noticed at the bottom of the page it states it was built from the ground up for iOS. This tells me it could take a while (maybe never) to get a port to another OS.
  - chrisvasselli 11y ago
    Yeah, unfortunately it's all built very iOS-specific. And since this is a side-project for me, I'm not sure I'll find the time to make an Android version anytime soon. If I ever have the time/resources, it's something I'd love to do!
- jbergens 11y ago
  Sounds great! Is the code open source? Do you plan versions for Androind and WinPhone? We would like the latter.
  - chrisvasselli 11y ago
    Sorry, it's all closed source right now. There are pieces of it I might release as open-source at some point though. As for Android and Windows, I just don't have the time unfortunately. This is a solo side-project for me. But if I ever find the time/resources, I'd love to port it to other platforms.
pavlov 11y ago
Looks lovely. Seems like even a starter-level student could benefit from this, with the flashcards and word commonality features.
Nadya 11y ago
>Our dictionary is made to find what you're looking for fast, with the words Japanese speakers actually use at the top of every search result. May I ask how this was factored? Also what if I want to use a certain dialect? Osaka might opt for a different word than Hokkaido. I assume standard Tokyo dialect? >Word Commonality Also interested in how you measure this. Frequency used in a newspaper? Is it part of the Jouyou kanji? How about age of speaker? "Common among younger generation" and "common among older generation" might be a better benchmark for commonality. >We'll even add furigana. Is it editable for instances when it is wrong? I don't have an iPhone to test, but I am very interested in helping others' learn Japanese and more importantly making sure they are learning correct information. I've seen few coded systems that weren't heavily curated provide accurate information. There's nearly always a "well...that's...actually wrong" somewhere in the dataset that things use. Not saying that's the case here - just that it is a possibility.
- chrisvasselli 11y ago
  Great questions! We include words from all different dialects, but standard Tokyo dialect will inevitably float to the top. I learned Japanese in Kansai, so I'm sensitive to this issue. =) As for how the commonality is determined, I use a combination of corpuses including newspapers, novels, literature/poetry, and spoken language. I actually initially had a feature that would tell you "this word is more common in novels", but it didn't work consistently well enough, so I ended up scrapping it. When we actually choose how to order the search results, we take into account a few more things - like if the search string is part of the primary meaning of the word, if it's a partial match of the meaning string or a full match, etc. In order to determine the relative importances of the various factors, we actually automatically optimized them against a huge set of vocabulary lists that a Japanese native, English fluent speaker made for Japanese students studying English. This gives us the best chance of picking the Japanese word that a Japanese native speaker would choose for a given English word. As for the furigana, since we're taking arbitrary user input, there are bound to be mistakes here or there, and that's the case with this app too. I don't have any plans to let people edit the furigana right now, but I am improving the parsing all the time.
  - 11y ago
newman314 11y ago
Does it leverage text to speech for pronouciation purposes?
- chrisvasselli 11y ago
  Not yet! But it's on my short list of features to add! Good to know there's interest.
arcameron 11y ago
Looks great! Any timeline on Android?
- sft 11y ago
  This
- chrisvasselli 11y ago
  Thanks! Unfortunately, I don't have any plans for Android right now. This is a solo side-project for me, so I just don't have the time. I'd love to at some point in the future though!
- greydius 11y ago
  Second vote for Android version.
ericmo 11y ago
@chrisvasselli: When I was a child, my parents tried to teach me Japanese as my first language, but we live in Brazil and that didn't work out, as soon as I got into school I dropped it and started to speak exclusively in Portuguese. Still I have some knowledge of "spoken Japanese", even though I don't know how to write the kanjis. That's why I found this clippings feature really great. I can read the pronunciation over the kanjis and deduce what it means by context, I've always missed that when trying to study Japanese, and if I can't deduce its meaning, it's also easier to lookup in the dictionary if I know its pronunciation (in the app it's probably just a click). Some people think that going through this trouble actually helps memorizing the kanjis, but for me it's just a time consuming task. Too bad I have no plans to buy an iPhone. No plans for an Android or a web version? Also, how did you get these texts to feed the clippings? By hand? Scraping?
- chrisvasselli 11y ago
  Nice, that's exactly what I'm going for! Part of my philosophy with the app was to make my studying of Japanese as efficient as it could possibly be. I tried to shave out all of the time spent doing tasks that don't contribute to my actual learning, like trying to draw kanji, count strokes, manually type out flashcards, etc. As for the clippings, those are all user-supplied. For example, I love classic JRPGs, and FFVI is my favorite. If you google around a bit, you can find the script for the Japanese version of FFVI. Import the script into Nihongo, and you can pre-study the words as you play along. You can also filter the flashcards down to just the words that show up more than once, so if you're not ready to study everything, you can just focus on the important words. It also works great if you want to study song lyrics, and I even used it to read Harry Potter in Japanese (thanks J.K. Rowling for putting out DRM-free books!) Unfortunately, I don't have any plans for Android or the web right now, since this is a solo side-project for me, and I just don't have the time. But I'd love to do it in the future!
archseer 11y ago
Sweet! Looks like a nice addition to WaniKani. I'm using WaniKani for my general studies, but automatic card generation based on my word lookup is definitely neat.
- chrisvasselli 11y ago
  Yeah, I think Nihongo makes a great compliment to WaniKani! Nihongo doesn't have lessons, and isn't really meant to teach you Japanese in the same way WaniKani is. I like to think of Nihongo as a great companion tool for however you're learning Japanese already, whether that be from a class, from living in Japan, reading books, or studying using other tools.
djent 11y ago
Unfortunately doesn't run on iOS 7 or below. Any chance you could support it? I'd love to use this app.
- chrisvasselli 11y ago
  The first couple versions of the app supported iOS 7, so when you try to download it, you should get a prompt to download the earlier version. Unfortunately, I don't have any plans to support iOS 7 going forward. =/
  - djent 11y ago
    The App Store doesn't present me with that option. I believe you need to have an older version already installed to be able to redownload it.
    - chrisvasselli 11y ago
      Ah, sorry, I didn't realize that! Unfortunately I make use of some of the features in iOS 8 in a way that would make it difficult to add support for iOS 7. If you ever get a new device compatible with iOS 8 I hope you'll check it out!
Blahah 11y ago
OP, this is wonderful. I'm a long time japanese learner and I wrote the iOS Anki app. Just looking through the website (unfortunately I don't have an iOS device on hand), you've got some killer features here that I've wanted for a long time. 'clippings' looks really excellent. I would go so far as to say this is a game-changer for me as it currently stands. If you took the same idea and went bigger, that would be awesome: I'm thinking an e-book reader. That is, load up a Japanese ePub and then have one-click access to a context-aware J->E dictionary lookup via your app. Then being able to generate cards from the book would be perfect. If I had to pick a missing feature (again just going from the description) it would be audiovisual context. This has been crucial to my learning - any plans to integrate it? Finally, I don't know if you're aware but there is precedent for 'clippings' in the tools that generate Anki apps from movie subtitles. They create cards that have a still from the movie, the audio clip, and the subtitles in Japanese and English. Yours is more universal, but I think something that combined features of both would be even more powerful (i.e. audio and images).
- chrisvasselli 11y ago
  I would LOVE to have integration with e-books, I think that could totally change the way I learn Japanese. Since over time the app learns what words you know and what words you don't, it could even suggest books for you that are around the right difficulty level. Wouldn't that be amazing? Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any place where you can purchase DRM-free e-books, so I think this would require working with Japanese book publishers. The one exception is the Harry Potter books, which are published DRM-free through their own website. I read the first two Harry Potter books using clippings to generate flashcards for each chapter as I went along, and it was incredibly helpful. The idea of audiovisual context is interesting. Could you tell me more about what you have in mind? I've thought about adding text-to-speech options on the dictionary entries and in flashcards. But something more complete, like what Rosetta Stone does, seems a lot harder, just from the perspective of acquiring rights to the images.
  - Blahah 11y ago
    Aozora Bunko (http://www.aozora.gr.jp/ http://www.aozora.gr.jp/) is the only legitimate source I know of for ebooks (and they are free). Long term it would be really great to get some Japanese publishers to commit to ebooks, but I know that historically they have been strongly, publicly resistant. The Wakaru app does allow ebooks reading with a dictionary, but I always found it clunky and I don't think it allows easily generating cards from a book, the dictionary was less useful than yours looks, and it doesn't learn your vocab over time. For audiovisual context, I'm really thinking of: - images to match vocab items (potentially auto-sourced from a Creative Commons licensed image search engine) - images from articles to match sentences from articles - sound clips to match text taken from audio captions - video clips OR audio clips + screenshots to match sentences from video subtitles Regarding image rights, I would say that there is a huge amount of stuff in the public domain or liberally licensed (e.g. on Mediawiki). But you could also allow the user to add their own images, where they take responsibility for making sure they have the rights.
it_learnses 11y ago
I have android :(
CoryG89 11y ago
Android version please!
dtouch3d 11y ago
Lately I've been thinking of learning Japanese just like I started learning English. After two years of basic English courses starting from third grade, I started to play videogames like Pokemon and watch movies with subtitles and my vocabulary and proper expression greatly increased. So I should begin studying elementary Japanese for a while and then start playing pokemon in Japanese and study as it seems fit. Good job OP! An Android version would be great!
deeteecee 11y ago
just curious, how do you mark a word as common? I often used jisho.org or classic.jisho.org (from wwwjdic) and from what i remember, a lot of those words marked as "common" were mostly definitely not.
- chrisvasselli 11y ago
  Yeah, I found the commonalities in WWWJDic/JMDict to be pretty problematic, so I came up with my own. I use a combination of corpuses including newspapers, novels, literature/poetry, and spoken language. Some of these have been hand-parsed by humans, and others I parse using the same parsing as clippings. I think the result is pretty good!
  - glandium 11y ago
    Commonality is a tricky thing. There are words that most native won't actually know, words they know but rarely use, words that used to be trendy but aren't anymore, etc. It's hard to know from "common", "uncommon", and "rare" in what kind of bucket a word or expression would enter, while "native won't actually know" is a very important distinction to make. Moreover, it's not clear which of "uncommon" and "rare" ranks above the other and below "common", both words being synonyms. To give an example, since I gave a try to your app (best I've found so far, by the way, but unfortunately doesn't match my own needs): 自問自答 is marked rare. 出勤 is marked uncommon. Now, looking at this and some other words, my guess is that uncommon is above rare. Fine. 自問自答 might be rare, but there's no Japanese I know (excluding small kids) that wouldn't understand it. (And, in fact, it stuck in my mind because I keep hearing it). So in your classification, there is no room to tell apart those words that most japanese won't know.
    - chrisvasselli 11y ago
      Thanks, it's useful to hear that the difference between "uncommon" and "rare" was unclear to you. I'll think about how to make that better. I definitely would love to have a distinction in the app for "this is a word that any educated Japanese person would know". I haven't found the dataset yet that can let me build that, unfortunately. I checked, and in the case of 自問自答, it actually doesn't appear even once in any of the corpuses I'm using. So it seems like we need some other source of data.
deciplex 11y ago
> Have you ever tried to use a word you looked up in the dictionary, only to find out that no one has ever heard of it? This is so great. EDICT has so many entries that Japanese speakers have either never heard of, or would never use, or even where the definition is archaic or just plain wrong. Maybe someday, this app will be available for Android :-)
amitlan 11y ago
'Clippings' looks really handy. Thanks!
PSeitz 11y ago
Could you shed some light on your algorithms (how you declare something as Common, Uncommon) and datasources (JMDict, tatoeba) ? Disclaimer: I am developing a free japanese dictionary for android
abustamam 11y ago
Is there anything like this in different languages? I think you could make a great language-learning platform with this idea.
- chrisvasselli 11y ago
  Not that I know of! I'd love to expand to other languages at some point. One of the tricks is that I think it's important for there to be a best-in-class dictionary attached to it. If users feel like they'd rather use a different dictionary, then you don't get their dictionary history as flashcards, and overall you create a crappy user experience for them if they have to switch back and forth all the time. Best-in-class dictionaries require someone deeply familiar with the language, and specifically the pitfalls of learning the language, to make. So I think to expand to other languages, I'd want to get passionate learners of the other languages involved as well. Definitely a long-term goal though.
  - abustamam 11y ago
    I'd be interested in helping out, if you decide to take this further. I'm a passionate learner of French and Arabic but I am not deeply familiar with either language yet. I do know some people who are native speakers though.
buster 11y ago
And now for Android please! Always looking for a good japanese learnign app.
yaiu 11y ago
I need this, but for Mandarin

139 points by chrisvasselli 11y ago

Hey HN, creator of Nihongo here! I spent a long time studying Japanese vocabulary using Anki, Flashcards Deluxe, etc., but I found that studying using premade word lists never worked that well for me. Nihongo is built around studying the words you're encountering naturally through your own hobbies and interests. Flashcard packs are automatically generated from the words that you look up in the built-in dictionary. You can also copy and paste Japanese text into the app like song lyrics, textbook readings, videogame scripts, or books, and it will automatically find all the words contained in the text, and generate flashcards from them. I built Nihongo because it was the tool that I wanted and felt like was missing for studying Japanese. Hopefully it'll be useful for some of you too! I'd love to hear your feedback.

Nadya 11y ago
>You can also copy and paste Japanese text into the app like song lyrics, textbook readings, videogame scripts, or books, and it will automatically find all the words contained in the text, and generate flashcards from them. How would 「気に入らない」 be parsed for flashcards? An entry for 気 with it's most common meaning(s) and an entry for 入る with it's most common meaning(s)?
- chrisvasselli 11y ago
  In this case, there's actually an entry in the dictionary for 「気に入る」, so it will figure out that this is a conjugation of that entry, and use 「気に入る」and its most common meaning as the flashcard. Many of these kinds of phrases exist in the dictionary (I'm using JMDict under the hood), but for those that don't, it would create two flashcards, one for each word. The flashcards are set by default to use the most common meaning, but if there are alternative meanings, you can choose to show those in addition, or instead of the most common meaning.
  - Nadya 11y ago
    * internet high five * Awesome. I couldn't think of how to phrase the problem. "Short phrases with meanings that don't match the individual words used being parsed as individual words instead of the short phrase" is kind of wordy and a little confusing.
    - chrisvasselli 11y ago
      Heheh, got it! Yeah, fortunately JMDict is a really mature project, and has got a ton of these kinds of things covered.
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      > "Short phrases with meanings that don't match the individual words used being parsed as individual words instead of the short phrase" is kind of wordy and a little confusing. These are called "idioms", or, if you want to be really technical for its own sake, "non-compositional phrases". But I note that, at least according to wikipedia, "idiom" is the technical term as well as the vernacular one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phraseme#Non-compositional_phrasemes:_Idioms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phraseme#Non-compositional_phr...
      - Nadya 11y ago
        You know those times where you need to describe something but are forgetting the word so you call a "bridge" "an elevated structure built to allow crossing over bodies of water and roads"? That was one of those times... though I appreciate you calling me out on it. :)
  - MarkSweep 11y ago
    Which morphological analyzer are you using to do the deconjugation?
    - chrisvasselli 11y ago
      I actually ended up rolling my own. There are some tricky cases involved, and I wanted full control over it.
Navarr 11y ago
iOS only :< No planned Android support anywhere? No signup for android news subscription system or RSS if you don't want to setup a mail system? Sadface.
- reustle 11y ago
  I'd love an email notification for android support as well!
hkmurakami 11y ago
Native speaker of both Japanese and English here. This looks quite nice and I've forwarded it to my friends who are learning Japanese. :) I was initially really skeptical when I saw the tagline about "learning from songs and games", because songs are grammatically broken and often nonsensical, while games/anime/manga often have brash speech that you stop using once you're past Junior High. But being able to learn off of your interests in a digitally integrated way is quite awesome (I remember meeting a South Korean guy in college whose Japanese was quite good just from learning form Anime/manga). Commonality is useful as well, since the language has changed dramatically in the last 100 years, particularly pre and post war. Kudos! :)
- chrisvasselli 11y ago
  Yeah, it's hard to sum up the idea in 80 characters, but I like that idea of learning off of your interests. Thanks!
  - veidr 11y ago
    I work in Tokyo and speak okay Japanese, but sort of hit a plateau after college (partly due to knowing 'enough for daily life' and partly due to having to work and no longer having to go to Japanese class). So my study lists consist 100% of words and phrases I hear and don't understand when I am out at the Japanese semi-mandatory drinking-with-coworkers. I currently use Japanese.app, but am open to switching since it doesn't sync vocab lists hint hint :-). So I study off my actual experiences here in Japan. I too was instinctively skeptical of the "games, songs" bit. (Although, I notice that text is not actually on the website.) I think "learning off your interests" is better, too.
veidr 11y ago
Hi Chris, looks like an awesome start. Some quick suggestions and questions: 1. You should fully support romaji entry for looking things up. The mechanics of switching input methods on iOS are pretty terrible so it is really inconvenient to have to switch into Japanese input mode. I searched for "hana" but got only 花合わせ and 花を引く as matches -- because those have 'hana' in the English definition string. Searching for はな brought the two obvious matches (花 and 鼻) to the top, but I had to go back and cycle through several other input methods to get to Japanese input mode, which was annoying and took longer than the rest of looking up the word. Some other dictionaries do this, and even sites like Amazon Japan now do this for searches as well -- dealing with input methods is just a hassle in general. 2. The understanding of verb conjugation seems really awesome and jumping between things on a "learning tangent" works really well. 3. You have to sync vocab lists and spaced repetition drill status/progress to the cloud. It's just too useful not to do it -- you want to be able to do that in quick downtime moments from any device. Luckily there are many easy ways to do it nowadays. I don't blame you for shipping without that, though! ;-) All in all, great start!
- chrisvasselli 11y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! 1. I actually just finished implementing romaji entry, and it will be coming in the next version update. Honestly, after implementing it, I can't believe how much time I've wasted switching input methods. =) 2. Thanks! 3. I know, I know! I really want to, but I spent a couple weeks diving into it and found it really buggy and hard to get right. I'm using Core Data under the hood to store this stuff. Any suggestions for tools I should look at to help with syncing?
  - veidr 11y ago
    > 1. I actually just finished implementing romaji entry Great! I didn't see a need to put it this bluntly in my initial comment, but having to manually switch input methods is enough of a deal-breaker for me that I was going to uninstall the app... but now I will leave it installed and wait for that update. ;-)
  - sharp11 11y ago
KerrickStaley 11y ago
Tangential shameless self-promotion: I built a tool for Chinese learners that can take starred entries from the Hanping Dictionary app (for Android) and import them into Anki. It's available at https://github.com/kerrickstaley/hsk_flashcards https://github.com/kerrickstaley/hsk_flashcards. File a bug if you have trouble running/using it. Obviously not as seamless as Nihongo :)
- chrisvasselli 11y ago
  Before I built Nihongo, I used to use Imiwa as my Japanese dictionary, and Flashcards Deluxe for spaced repetition studying. I built this ridiculously convoluted setup where I would upload a list of words from Imiwa to dropbox, my laptop at home would detect a new file in my dropbox and run a script to convert the format to the one supported by Flashcards Deluxe, and then I'd open up Flashcards Deluxe and download the deck from dropbox. I told someone about this, and they said "man, wouldn't it be awesome if there were a Japanese app that could just do that automatically?" And thus, Nihongo was born. =) So KerrickStaley, wouldn't it be awesome if there were a Chinese app that could just do that automatically? =p
  - KerrickStaley 11y ago
    You're giving me ideas :P The problem is that I don't have time to build a monolithic app that serves as both a good Chinese dictionary and a good flashcard app; it's much easier to cobble together a system using existing software.
xiaoma 11y ago
>I built Nihongo because it was the tool that I wanted and felt like was missing for studying Japanese. Hopefully it'll be useful for some of you too! I'd love to hear your feedback. This alone made me download the app even though I haven't seriously studied Japanese since college. Have you written anywhere about your learning habits / methods?
- chrisvasselli 11y ago
  I haven't, but I'd like to! I've been meaning to start a blog to discuss topics like that, but haven't found the time quite yet.
wahnfrieden 11y ago
Nice app, will definitely play with it soon! By auto-generating flashcards, what are you doing about showing accurate definitions/meanings for the cards? I couldn't tell from your page alone - are you just pulling down the list of senses from JMDict or something? That's always been my hesitation with auto-generating cards, the "meaning" side of the card tends not to be helpful.
- chrisvasselli 11y ago
  By default, the backside of the card has the first "sense" from JMDict on it. This sense is supposed to represent the primary meaning of the word. You can also add/replace that with the other senses by editing the flashcard, or you can add your own notes to the back. I've found using the first sense works pretty well. Having the whole definition on the back is way too much for your brain to process, but the first sense is usually only a few words that encapsulate the meaning of the word pretty well.
  - Micaiah_Chang 11y ago
    I've been studying the language for a while, and recently made the switch to Japanese-Japanese dictionaries, after using EDICT for a long time. This has highlighted some reservations I have about it. The most available example (not the best) is 適当, where it can be interchangeably be used to mean "adequate" and "half-assed", sort of sarcastically. The definition being a mostly undifferentiated bag of words, without necessarily regard for nuance or typical use cases. Contrast this with the goo dictionary, which has a slightly better structure (http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/leaf/jn2/151064/m0u/%E9%81%A9%E5%BD%93/ http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/leaf/jn2/151064/m0u/%E9%81%A9%E5...) and the 類語 dictionary, that gives synonyms and situations where you would use one over another (http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/leaf/thsrs/2512/m0u/ http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/leaf/thsrs/2512/m0u/). I understand that there's probably no way to deal with this in a scaleable way that would be as easy to turn it into flash cards but it's kinda sad to see the gap between the two solutions. Apologies for not having a more constructive suggestion.
    - glandium 11y ago
mikekchar 11y ago
I'm also the author of a Japanese learning tool: https://github.com/mikekchar/jldrill https://github.com/mikekchar/jldrill I have some advice for you if you decide to use spaced repetition in your flashcards (not sure if you do already as I haven't had time to look in detail). JLDrill is mostly abandonware at the moment and is written in very poor Ruby ;-). I don't actually recommend that anyone use it. It was written for me. I think the pheonix branch will actually work on modern Ruby, but I was half way through trying a different scheduling idea, so it probably has considerable bugs. However, if you decide to do spaced repetition in your app, I would humbly suggest reading JLDrill's strategy on it: https://github.com/mikekchar/JLDrill/blob/master/web/src/Strategy.page https://github.com/mikekchar/JLDrill/blob/master/web/src/Str... Most tools (like Anki) use the SM2 algorithm, but I found that my strategy works considerably better (for me, anyway ;-) ) The latest version of JLDrill has an ability to "forget" items if you have neglected studying them for too long: https://github.com/mikekchar/JLDrill/blob/master/web/src/Usage.page#L512-L536 https://github.com/mikekchar/JLDrill/blob/master/web/src/Usa... Feel free to ping me if you have any questions.
- chrisvasselli 11y ago
  Very interesting! Nihongo does use spaced repetition, and it looks like there are some similarities and some differences with JLDrill. Here's the overview: - When you select a deck, you study words 10 at a time in "learn" mode. -- In "learn" mode, you have to get the flashcard correct 3 times in a row, at which point they are "learned". - Every day, you'll be given a set of cards you've learned to "review". - These cards use a form of spaced repetition. In order to make spaced repetition more approachable, I don't use time intervals in the same way apps like Anki do. Instead, each card has a level, and as you progress through the levels, the interval at which they appear increases. Each level takes three steps to get through, each of which has its own interval. -- Level 1: 1 day, 2 days, 3 days. -- Level 2: 1 week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks -- Level 3: 1 month, 2 months, 3 months -- Level 4: 6 months, 9 months, 1 year -- Level 5: Never show again - If you mark a word wrong at Level 1, it drops down to Level 0, where it will keep showing up in that same session periodically until you've marked it correct enough to move it back to Level 1. - Getting through your daily set of review cards is encouraged as being the most important thing, adding new cards is secondary. - We don't want to discourage people from coming back, even if they got lazy and stopped studying for a month. So we never build up a huge pile of flashcards for people to review. Give it a try if you have a chance, and if you have any thoughts/suggestions I'd love to hear them!
tomku 11y ago
Really like the app, any plans to make an iPad/Universal version? Thanks!
- chrisvasselli 11y ago
  Yep, I'm working on it right now! That's going to be the next big update. I'm aiming to release shortly after iOS 9 comes out, so September/October probably.
elementalest 11y ago
I would love to use this app! I have been doing something to similar effect for Anki except using web scraping/API of various japanese dictionary sites with python scripts. The whole thing is clunky and buggy and requires a fair amount of manual work (which i always intended to automate, but not had the time), so i would love to use an app that does this all well. Unfortunately being iOS only locks me out. I noticed at the bottom of the page it states it was built from the ground up for iOS. This tells me it could take a while (maybe never) to get a port to another OS.
- chrisvasselli 11y ago
  Yeah, unfortunately it's all built very iOS-specific. And since this is a side-project for me, I'm not sure I'll find the time to make an Android version anytime soon. If I ever have the time/resources, it's something I'd love to do!
jbergens 11y ago
Sounds great! Is the code open source? Do you plan versions for Androind and WinPhone? We would like the latter.
- chrisvasselli 11y ago
  Sorry, it's all closed source right now. There are pieces of it I might release as open-source at some point though. As for Android and Windows, I just don't have the time unfortunately. This is a solo side-project for me. But if I ever find the time/resources, I'd love to port it to other platforms.

pavlov 11y ago

Looks lovely. Seems like even a starter-level student could benefit from this, with the flashcards and word commonality features.

Nadya 11y ago

>Our dictionary is made to find what you're looking for fast, with the words Japanese speakers actually use at the top of every search result. May I ask how this was factored? Also what if I want to use a certain dialect? Osaka might opt for a different word than Hokkaido. I assume standard Tokyo dialect? >Word Commonality Also interested in how you measure this. Frequency used in a newspaper? Is it part of the Jouyou kanji? How about age of speaker? "Common among younger generation" and "common among older generation" might be a better benchmark for commonality. >We'll even add furigana. Is it editable for instances when it is wrong? I don't have an iPhone to test, but I am very interested in helping others' learn Japanese and more importantly making sure they are learning correct information. I've seen few coded systems that weren't heavily curated provide accurate information. There's nearly always a "well...that's...actually wrong" somewhere in the dataset that things use. Not saying that's the case here - just that it is a possibility.

chrisvasselli 11y ago
Great questions! We include words from all different dialects, but standard Tokyo dialect will inevitably float to the top. I learned Japanese in Kansai, so I'm sensitive to this issue. =) As for how the commonality is determined, I use a combination of corpuses including newspapers, novels, literature/poetry, and spoken language. I actually initially had a feature that would tell you "this word is more common in novels", but it didn't work consistently well enough, so I ended up scrapping it. When we actually choose how to order the search results, we take into account a few more things - like if the search string is part of the primary meaning of the word, if it's a partial match of the meaning string or a full match, etc. In order to determine the relative importances of the various factors, we actually automatically optimized them against a huge set of vocabulary lists that a Japanese native, English fluent speaker made for Japanese students studying English. This gives us the best chance of picking the Japanese word that a Japanese native speaker would choose for a given English word. As for the furigana, since we're taking arbitrary user input, there are bound to be mistakes here or there, and that's the case with this app too. I don't have any plans to let people edit the furigana right now, but I am improving the parsing all the time.
- 11y ago

newman314 11y ago

Does it leverage text to speech for pronouciation purposes?

chrisvasselli 11y ago
Not yet! But it's on my short list of features to add! Good to know there's interest.

arcameron 11y ago

Looks great! Any timeline on Android?

sft 11y ago
This
chrisvasselli 11y ago
Thanks! Unfortunately, I don't have any plans for Android right now. This is a solo side-project for me, so I just don't have the time. I'd love to at some point in the future though!
greydius 11y ago
Second vote for Android version.

ericmo 11y ago

@chrisvasselli: When I was a child, my parents tried to teach me Japanese as my first language, but we live in Brazil and that didn't work out, as soon as I got into school I dropped it and started to speak exclusively in Portuguese. Still I have some knowledge of "spoken Japanese", even though I don't know how to write the kanjis. That's why I found this clippings feature really great. I can read the pronunciation over the kanjis and deduce what it means by context, I've always missed that when trying to study Japanese, and if I can't deduce its meaning, it's also easier to lookup in the dictionary if I know its pronunciation (in the app it's probably just a click). Some people think that going through this trouble actually helps memorizing the kanjis, but for me it's just a time consuming task. Too bad I have no plans to buy an iPhone. No plans for an Android or a web version? Also, how did you get these texts to feed the clippings? By hand? Scraping?

chrisvasselli 11y ago
Nice, that's exactly what I'm going for! Part of my philosophy with the app was to make my studying of Japanese as efficient as it could possibly be. I tried to shave out all of the time spent doing tasks that don't contribute to my actual learning, like trying to draw kanji, count strokes, manually type out flashcards, etc. As for the clippings, those are all user-supplied. For example, I love classic JRPGs, and FFVI is my favorite. If you google around a bit, you can find the script for the Japanese version of FFVI. Import the script into Nihongo, and you can pre-study the words as you play along. You can also filter the flashcards down to just the words that show up more than once, so if you're not ready to study everything, you can just focus on the important words. It also works great if you want to study song lyrics, and I even used it to read Harry Potter in Japanese (thanks J.K. Rowling for putting out DRM-free books!) Unfortunately, I don't have any plans for Android or the web right now, since this is a solo side-project for me, and I just don't have the time. But I'd love to do it in the future!

archseer 11y ago

Sweet! Looks like a nice addition to WaniKani. I'm using WaniKani for my general studies, but automatic card generation based on my word lookup is definitely neat.

chrisvasselli 11y ago
Yeah, I think Nihongo makes a great compliment to WaniKani! Nihongo doesn't have lessons, and isn't really meant to teach you Japanese in the same way WaniKani is. I like to think of Nihongo as a great companion tool for however you're learning Japanese already, whether that be from a class, from living in Japan, reading books, or studying using other tools.

djent 11y ago

Unfortunately doesn't run on iOS 7 or below. Any chance you could support it? I'd love to use this app.

chrisvasselli 11y ago
The first couple versions of the app supported iOS 7, so when you try to download it, you should get a prompt to download the earlier version. Unfortunately, I don't have any plans to support iOS 7 going forward. =/
- djent 11y ago
  The App Store doesn't present me with that option. I believe you need to have an older version already installed to be able to redownload it.
  - chrisvasselli 11y ago
    Ah, sorry, I didn't realize that! Unfortunately I make use of some of the features in iOS 8 in a way that would make it difficult to add support for iOS 7. If you ever get a new device compatible with iOS 8 I hope you'll check it out!

Blahah 11y ago

OP, this is wonderful. I'm a long time japanese learner and I wrote the iOS Anki app. Just looking through the website (unfortunately I don't have an iOS device on hand), you've got some killer features here that I've wanted for a long time. 'clippings' looks really excellent. I would go so far as to say this is a game-changer for me as it currently stands. If you took the same idea and went bigger, that would be awesome: I'm thinking an e-book reader. That is, load up a Japanese ePub and then have one-click access to a context-aware J->E dictionary lookup via your app. Then being able to generate cards from the book would be perfect. If I had to pick a missing feature (again just going from the description) it would be audiovisual context. This has been crucial to my learning - any plans to integrate it? Finally, I don't know if you're aware but there is precedent for 'clippings' in the tools that generate Anki apps from movie subtitles. They create cards that have a still from the movie, the audio clip, and the subtitles in Japanese and English. Yours is more universal, but I think something that combined features of both would be even more powerful (i.e. audio and images).

chrisvasselli 11y ago
I would LOVE to have integration with e-books, I think that could totally change the way I learn Japanese. Since over time the app learns what words you know and what words you don't, it could even suggest books for you that are around the right difficulty level. Wouldn't that be amazing? Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any place where you can purchase DRM-free e-books, so I think this would require working with Japanese book publishers. The one exception is the Harry Potter books, which are published DRM-free through their own website. I read the first two Harry Potter books using clippings to generate flashcards for each chapter as I went along, and it was incredibly helpful. The idea of audiovisual context is interesting. Could you tell me more about what you have in mind? I've thought about adding text-to-speech options on the dictionary entries and in flashcards. But something more complete, like what Rosetta Stone does, seems a lot harder, just from the perspective of acquiring rights to the images.
- Blahah 11y ago
  Aozora Bunko (http://www.aozora.gr.jp/ http://www.aozora.gr.jp/) is the only legitimate source I know of for ebooks (and they are free). Long term it would be really great to get some Japanese publishers to commit to ebooks, but I know that historically they have been strongly, publicly resistant. The Wakaru app does allow ebooks reading with a dictionary, but I always found it clunky and I don't think it allows easily generating cards from a book, the dictionary was less useful than yours looks, and it doesn't learn your vocab over time. For audiovisual context, I'm really thinking of: - images to match vocab items (potentially auto-sourced from a Creative Commons licensed image search engine) - images from articles to match sentences from articles - sound clips to match text taken from audio captions - video clips OR audio clips + screenshots to match sentences from video subtitles Regarding image rights, I would say that there is a huge amount of stuff in the public domain or liberally licensed (e.g. on Mediawiki). But you could also allow the user to add their own images, where they take responsibility for making sure they have the rights.

it_learnses 11y ago

I have android :(

CoryG89 11y ago

Android version please!

dtouch3d 11y ago

Lately I've been thinking of learning Japanese just like I started learning English. After two years of basic English courses starting from third grade, I started to play videogames like Pokemon and watch movies with subtitles and my vocabulary and proper expression greatly increased. So I should begin studying elementary Japanese for a while and then start playing pokemon in Japanese and study as it seems fit. Good job OP! An Android version would be great!

deeteecee 11y ago

just curious, how do you mark a word as common? I often used jisho.org or classic.jisho.org (from wwwjdic) and from what i remember, a lot of those words marked as "common" were mostly definitely not.

chrisvasselli 11y ago
Yeah, I found the commonalities in WWWJDic/JMDict to be pretty problematic, so I came up with my own. I use a combination of corpuses including newspapers, novels, literature/poetry, and spoken language. Some of these have been hand-parsed by humans, and others I parse using the same parsing as clippings. I think the result is pretty good!
- glandium 11y ago
  Commonality is a tricky thing. There are words that most native won't actually know, words they know but rarely use, words that used to be trendy but aren't anymore, etc. It's hard to know from "common", "uncommon", and "rare" in what kind of bucket a word or expression would enter, while "native won't actually know" is a very important distinction to make. Moreover, it's not clear which of "uncommon" and "rare" ranks above the other and below "common", both words being synonyms. To give an example, since I gave a try to your app (best I've found so far, by the way, but unfortunately doesn't match my own needs): 自問自答 is marked rare. 出勤 is marked uncommon. Now, looking at this and some other words, my guess is that uncommon is above rare. Fine. 自問自答 might be rare, but there's no Japanese I know (excluding small kids) that wouldn't understand it. (And, in fact, it stuck in my mind because I keep hearing it). So in your classification, there is no room to tell apart those words that most japanese won't know.
  - chrisvasselli 11y ago
    Thanks, it's useful to hear that the difference between "uncommon" and "rare" was unclear to you. I'll think about how to make that better. I definitely would love to have a distinction in the app for "this is a word that any educated Japanese person would know". I haven't found the dataset yet that can let me build that, unfortunately. I checked, and in the case of 自問自答, it actually doesn't appear even once in any of the corpuses I'm using. So it seems like we need some other source of data.

deciplex 11y ago

> Have you ever tried to use a word you looked up in the dictionary, only to find out that no one has ever heard of it? This is so great. EDICT has so many entries that Japanese speakers have either never heard of, or would never use, or even where the definition is archaic or just plain wrong. Maybe someday, this app will be available for Android :-)

amitlan 11y ago

'Clippings' looks really handy. Thanks!

PSeitz 11y ago

Could you shed some light on your algorithms (how you declare something as Common, Uncommon) and datasources (JMDict, tatoeba) ? Disclaimer: I am developing a free japanese dictionary for android

abustamam 11y ago

Is there anything like this in different languages? I think you could make a great language-learning platform with this idea.

chrisvasselli 11y ago
Not that I know of! I'd love to expand to other languages at some point. One of the tricks is that I think it's important for there to be a best-in-class dictionary attached to it. If users feel like they'd rather use a different dictionary, then you don't get their dictionary history as flashcards, and overall you create a crappy user experience for them if they have to switch back and forth all the time. Best-in-class dictionaries require someone deeply familiar with the language, and specifically the pitfalls of learning the language, to make. So I think to expand to other languages, I'd want to get passionate learners of the other languages involved as well. Definitely a long-term goal though.
- abustamam 11y ago
  I'd be interested in helping out, if you decide to take this further. I'm a passionate learner of French and Arabic but I am not deeply familiar with either language yet. I do know some people who are native speakers though.

buster 11y ago

And now for Android please! Always looking for a good japanese learnign app.

yaiu 11y ago

I need this, but for Mandarin