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Probably 80% of Japanese students are more interested in making tools to study Japanese than actually studying Japanese. It’s a kind of yak shaving. I know this

Probably 80% of Japanese students are more interested in making tools to study Japanese than actually studying Japanese. It’s a kind of yak shaving. I know this applies to me. (Which is why my Nihongo is crap.) I’m not sure if this happens with other languages, East Asian or not.

wk_end 6y ago
Not totally surprising. It's a natural human impulse (maybe?) to want to build or improve your tools when working on something, especially when it feels like your tools are inadequate. And while there are good resources for learning Japanese, they're few and far between in my experience. And nothing, so far as I know, is completely comprehensive on its own. Personally, I've never gone ahead and made my own Japanese learning app or anything like that, but while studying I do pretty regularly think, "man, this would be so much better if it did X; I wish I had an app to do Y", etc., etc. Because of Western attitudes towards Japanese pop culture, a lot of people learning Japanese are...well, they're gonna be kinda nerdy, frankly. And that means they're more likely than average to have the sort of skills that allow them to build (software) tools to help them study. Throw in that learning Japanese, at least for Westerners, is a monumental task mostly driven by intellectual curiosity (rather than for, say, economic opportunities), it'll attract the sort of ambitious and intellectually curious people that'll actually endeavour to make their own tools, with the necessary skills to do it.
- luigi23 6y ago
  > Because of Western attitudes towards Japanese pop culture, a lot of people learning Japanese are...well, they're gonna be kinda nerdy, frankly. And that means they're more likely than average to have the sort of skills that allow them to build (software) tools to help them study. Whoa, you nailed it here. Never thought of it this way.
- Bigpet 6y ago
  > It's a natural human impulse I don't know about that. It certainly seems common amongst the programmer crowd. But I've found that there's plenty of people capable of doing the "5 hours of routine work" without ever thinking "If I spend like 4 hours engineering this weird hack, then I might get this done really fast" (and then of course ending up wasting days trying to get it to work)
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  > while studying I do pretty regularly think, "man, this would be so much better if it did X; I wish I had an app to do Y", etc., etc. This is more or less exactly why, despite having played with a lot of different tools, I always come back to Anki. The UI is irritatingly unpolished, and it's difficult to learn well, but it's also the only tool out there that's open and flexible enough that I can easily experiment with and tweak what I'm doing without disrupting my overall learning process overmuch. I've certainly nerdsniped myself a few times, especially when I'm trying to build something from the ground up because I'm currently toying with some other app. With Anki, though, most of my "app to do Y" ends up just being a Jupyter notebook that I hacked together in less than an hour.
totetsu 6y ago
What character decomposition database is this using.. Its not as straight forward as it might first seem to say what characters are made of what other ones. some projects I forked over the years: I modified this to use the missed reviews on kanjikoohi at the difficulty factor to define the optimal path to learn the parts of kanji. https://github.com/scriptin/topokanji https://github.com/scriptin/topokanji This one shows the parts in a sematic web type view. https://github.com/kanji-graph/kanji-graph https://github.com/kanji-graph/kanji-graph
- arata 6y ago
  > What character decomposition database is this using.. From the about page, it seems that it's using Wikimedia data: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Chinese_characters_decomposition https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Chinese_character... . To add to your comment, there's also RADKFILE/KRADFILE, which is used by a lot of Japanese dictionaries out there (including jisho.org), and also IDS (Ideographic Description Sequence) data: https://github.com/cjkvi/cjkvi-ids https://github.com/cjkvi/cjkvi-ids . The latter, I believe, is not meant for general lookup, but nonetheless can be quite informative, such as identifying semantic/phonetic components.
zaik 6y ago
This would also explain why most of those tools have limited usefulness for learning at an advanced level. Anki and Takoboto (for keeping track of words I want to learn) are really all I use right now.
whatastory 6y ago
Yeah, I saw the headline thinking this is just a feature every Japanese dictionary offers. Surely I must be mistaken, because there's no way yet another person remade this feature yet again. But no. It's literally one of the basic features of every kanji/hanzi dictionary.
kenoph 6y ago
Guilty too. I had this idea to improve the order in which I should study kanjis. Ended up with a neo4j instance with kanjis, kanji components (not just radicals), words, and how they are combined. Now I'm still using the same algorithm, but I do everything manually. It takes time but I found that the flashcard customization aspect makes the memorization easier.
christiansakai 6y ago
Except me. I don't like making tools, and I am a software engineer, ironically.
wibr 6y ago
I'm also guilty of this. Related to this thread, some years ago I made a puzzle game with Chinese characters where you get a bunch of components and try to combine them to as many characters as possible: http://www.jiong3.com/pinzi/ http://www.jiong3.com/pinzi/ It's not just yak shaving though, some programming skills can be really useful when dealing with vocab lists etc..

wk_end 6y ago

Not totally surprising. It's a natural human impulse (maybe?) to want to build or improve your tools when working on something, especially when it feels like your tools are inadequate. And while there are good resources for learning Japanese, they're few and far between in my experience. And nothing, so far as I know, is completely comprehensive on its own. Personally, I've never gone ahead and made my own Japanese learning app or anything like that, but while studying I do pretty regularly think, "man, this would be so much better if it did X; I wish I had an app to do Y", etc., etc. Because of Western attitudes towards Japanese pop culture, a lot of people learning Japanese are...well, they're gonna be kinda nerdy, frankly. And that means they're more likely than average to have the sort of skills that allow them to build (software) tools to help them study. Throw in that learning Japanese, at least for Westerners, is a monumental task mostly driven by intellectual curiosity (rather than for, say, economic opportunities), it'll attract the sort of ambitious and intellectually curious people that'll actually endeavour to make their own tools, with the necessary skills to do it.

luigi23 6y ago
> Because of Western attitudes towards Japanese pop culture, a lot of people learning Japanese are...well, they're gonna be kinda nerdy, frankly. And that means they're more likely than average to have the sort of skills that allow them to build (software) tools to help them study. Whoa, you nailed it here. Never thought of it this way.
Bigpet 6y ago
> It's a natural human impulse I don't know about that. It certainly seems common amongst the programmer crowd. But I've found that there's plenty of people capable of doing the "5 hours of routine work" without ever thinking "If I spend like 4 hours engineering this weird hack, then I might get this done really fast" (and then of course ending up wasting days trying to get it to work)
mumblemumble 6y ago
> while studying I do pretty regularly think, "man, this would be so much better if it did X; I wish I had an app to do Y", etc., etc. This is more or less exactly why, despite having played with a lot of different tools, I always come back to Anki. The UI is irritatingly unpolished, and it's difficult to learn well, but it's also the only tool out there that's open and flexible enough that I can easily experiment with and tweak what I'm doing without disrupting my overall learning process overmuch. I've certainly nerdsniped myself a few times, especially when I'm trying to build something from the ground up because I'm currently toying with some other app. With Anki, though, most of my "app to do Y" ends up just being a Jupyter notebook that I hacked together in less than an hour.

totetsu 6y ago

What character decomposition database is this using.. Its not as straight forward as it might first seem to say what characters are made of what other ones. some projects I forked over the years: I modified this to use the missed reviews on kanjikoohi at the difficulty factor to define the optimal path to learn the parts of kanji. https://github.com/scriptin/topokanji https://github.com/scriptin/topokanji This one shows the parts in a sematic web type view. https://github.com/kanji-graph/kanji-graph https://github.com/kanji-graph/kanji-graph

arata 6y ago
> What character decomposition database is this using.. From the about page, it seems that it's using Wikimedia data: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Chinese_characters_decomposition https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Chinese_character... . To add to your comment, there's also RADKFILE/KRADFILE, which is used by a lot of Japanese dictionaries out there (including jisho.org), and also IDS (Ideographic Description Sequence) data: https://github.com/cjkvi/cjkvi-ids https://github.com/cjkvi/cjkvi-ids . The latter, I believe, is not meant for general lookup, but nonetheless can be quite informative, such as identifying semantic/phonetic components.

zaik 6y ago

This would also explain why most of those tools have limited usefulness for learning at an advanced level. Anki and Takoboto (for keeping track of words I want to learn) are really all I use right now.

whatastory 6y ago

Yeah, I saw the headline thinking this is just a feature every Japanese dictionary offers. Surely I must be mistaken, because there's no way yet another person remade this feature yet again. But no. It's literally one of the basic features of every kanji/hanzi dictionary.

kenoph 6y ago

Guilty too. I had this idea to improve the order in which I should study kanjis. Ended up with a neo4j instance with kanjis, kanji components (not just radicals), words, and how they are combined. Now I'm still using the same algorithm, but I do everything manually. It takes time but I found that the flashcard customization aspect makes the memorization easier.

christiansakai 6y ago

Except me. I don't like making tools, and I am a software engineer, ironically.

wibr 6y ago

I'm also guilty of this. Related to this thread, some years ago I made a puzzle game with Chinese characters where you get a bunch of components and try to combine them to as many characters as possible: http://www.jiong3.com/pinzi/ http://www.jiong3.com/pinzi/ It's not just yak shaving though, some programming skills can be really useful when dealing with vocab lists etc..