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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 yo
by 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.