14 ms·

The Japanese learning space feels so crowded. Most are marketed towards beginners, which makes sense when you see statistics (most folks give up). The top tie

by diob 4y ago

The Japanese learning space feels so crowded. Most are marketed towards beginners, which makes sense when you see statistics (most folks give up). The top tier tools I recommend anyone are Wanikani and Bunpro. Beyond that, reading! I tried a site dedicated to it, but realized that I'm too much of a picky reader to do anything but read things I find interesting. So I read japanese and english books side by side now. I wish there was a better way, but tools crafted for intermediate folks just don't have a market given the small subset who gets there.

chrisvasselli 4y ago
Yeah, I'm trying to fill that gap a bit here. My app Nihongo was the app I built for myself when I was getting to the advanced level, and wanted to focus on learning from native content. It helps automatically create flashcards from words you look up, OCR, etc. Nihongo Lessons is a companion app for people that want something more guided to help them learn vocab/grammar. It covers everything from beginner-advanced, but is probably most suited for intermediate folks who want to make a push towards advanced.
resonious 4y ago
Agree on reading. The one tool I feel I want is a good OCR + dictionary setup, as a quick escape hatch for physical books. I actually cobbled together something like that using Google's OCR API for Android. Works well for me but might be too janky for release. Maybe I should release it as a good tool for upper intermediates.
- chrisvasselli 4y ago
  If you haven't checked it out my other app Nihongo has a good OCR + dictionary setup. You can see a demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffRxPyc9K8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffRxPyc9K8A iOS-only though.
  - resonious 4y ago
    Ahh yes that's basically perfect! Let me know when there's an Android version ;)
    - chrisvasselli 4y ago
      Haha yes! I would LOVE to make the app for Android someday. But as a solo dev, it’s just too much to take on on my own. If Nihongo ever blows up and I make enough to hire someone to help me out, an Android app is top of my list.
      - spankalee 4y ago
        Web apps work everywhere, fwiw
        lostgame 4y ago
        If I’m paying for an app; and it’s not native, it usually annoys the hell out of me; I’ll gravitate towards a native option every time.
  - glandium 4y ago
    Oh wow, first time I see an OCR that can deal with 行書体. How extensive is your dataset for 行書 and do you also have 草書 or 隷書?
    - chrisvasselli 4y ago
      Under the hood, it's actually using Google's Cloud OCR API. Not sure how well it handles 草書 or 隷書, but it does a pretty remarkable job with 行書. Also does surprisingly well with super pixelated text. I can look up words in 16-bit games trying to squeeze kanji into 16x16 sprites or something, and it holds up incredibly well. You can also swap out the OCR API it uses. Right now I support Google and ocr.space.
rjh29 4y ago
I mean nerds like Japanese so it's no surprise that Japanese has the best arrangement of apps and websites. Personally I just read easy manga (like Yotsuba-to) and worked my way up to books. I didn't use any tools except Genki 1+2.
- chrisvasselli 4y ago
  Yotsuba-to is a great one to start with, it's actually one of the ones that there are vocab decks for in the app. :)
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > nerds like Japanese so it's no surprise that Japanese has the best arrangement of apps and websites. It might not be a surprise... but is it true? Pleco (for Chinese) seems to reach a standard well above what's available for Japanese, despite the twin facts that (a) Chinese has much less cultural currency in the English-speaking world than Japanese does; and (b) Pleco is not at all a complex app.† It's a dictionary viewer. In fact, it's a dictionary viewer that is not capable of correctly identifying word breaks; you have to handle that job yourself. My brother and sister study Japanese and they use jisho, which is much worse. When I hassle them about it, they're not aware of anything better. † In its primary and most useful function. It does have some complicated functionality available, like handwriting recognition and OCR through the camera.
  - rjh29 4y ago
    You make a good point. Pleco is leagues better than anything available in the Japanese domain. I wonder why that is the case - why nobody has stepped up to make an equivalent Japanese app? It might be related to the Japanese publishers not wanting to sell their data. EPWING is an established format and there are plenty of epwing viewers on Android already so I'd guess advanced users will do that instead. My point was I guess, Japanese has a larger -variety- and quantity of apps. Tofugu and Wanikani are good, we have a really good public domain dictionary (edict), Japanese has the largest number of shared decks on AnkiWeb etc. Not to mention the huge amount of subtitled media available online. fwiw jisho.org at least handles pasting in sentences and breaking up the words for you. That's 90% the reason I use it!
owenpalmer 4y ago
Have you taken a look at LingQ? I highly recommend it!
glandium 4y ago
Satori Reader seems interesting in the reading space, although I never gave it a try.
- diob 4y ago
  Yes, I tried it, I think it would be good if you're not picky. I couldn't get into any of the stories, so my sub for two years just expired. Might resub if I can get some discipline. For now I'm reading through books on my own that are interesting.
chrisvasselli 4y ago
Reading is one of the things I developed my other app, Nihongo, to help with. I take DRM free ebooks and copy them into the app one chapter at a time. It automatically creates flashcards for all the words that appeared that I don't already know, and I can filter down to only words that appear at least twice. I pre-study those "essential" vocab, then usually just read without looking anything up. But the app also makes it so you can tap on words to get a quick definition.
- Nerada 4y ago
  I'm stuck somewhere between Anki hell and Graded Readers (~Level 1). Do I just continue working my way up the Graded Readers list, or is there something more engaging for adults that's a good stepping stone from Anki to being able to consume written content?
  - chrisvasselli 4y ago
    For me, a big breakthrough around that level was using books (or videogames) that I've already read in English so I know the story and don't get lost when there are chunks I don't understand. If I know the story already, I can enjoy going through it again even if I'm not getting everything.
  - chrisvasselli 4y ago
    Also if you're into videogames there's an amazing resource here if you haven't seen it before: https://sites.google.com/view/jo-mako/home?pli=1 https://sites.google.com/view/jo-mako/home?pli=1 Among many other things, it has a huge catalog of Japanese game transcripts. I will copy-paste those into my other app Nihongo (https://nihongo-app.com https://nihongo-app.com) which will automatically create flashcards that I can use to pre-study before going through each section, so I can get more out of it.
maoeurk 4y ago
I’m working on a website for intermediate learners to practice by reading and listening, including Japanese, and Japanese is my strongest second language so I can answer a bit about why it’s so uncommon. Japanese is just really, really hard for computers to deal with. The only reason I got parsing and word segmentation to be pretty good was because I was so familiar with the language and wrote a 3000 line post-processing function on the tokens to get reasonable results. We have a few similar post processing steps like one to better handle separated verbs in German but it’s nothing compared to what we needed for Japanese. Additionally Japanese kind of breaks our word model, despite being aware of it and planning for it from the start and every part of the app needs special logic to support Japanese properly. It’s a lovely language, honestly my favorite language I’ve spent time with, but it’s non-trivial to handle it in general with code. Happy to answer any questions and also, self-promo: https://polyglatte.com https://polyglatte.com for my project. Happy to make improvements to better support you / the intermediate reader use case, just let me know.
- jalapenos 4y ago
  That looks good. It would be great if you could align it with the JLPT. Including the listening, which I think is the hardest. I'm useless at learning languages, basically foreign language dyslexic. I've found targeting the tests & applying for then in advance was the only thing that allowed me to progress. They're a huge motivator. Not just the looming deadline effect, but also passing makes you feel good, as it's a genuine asset as much as it is proof of progress.
  - maoeurk 4y ago
    Thanks! Yeah we have JLPT word lists available and you can set them as a focus and learn the words from the JLPT word lists from clips / snippets of videos and articles -- perhaps there's deeper integration we could do there too. I agree with JLPT being a useful tool, I personally used their word lists as a core vocab builder when I was studying a lot of Japanese. > I'm useless at learning languages, basically foreign language dyslexic. Don't be too hard on yourself! If you were able to pass the JLPT at any level, I think you're doing great. One of the motivating ideas of Polyglatte is to make language learning more fun. I'm a big believer in mass exposure and quality time spent with the language. I think for most people, most of the time, just being able to have fun with the language will give you great results. If you're looking for new ways to improve your listening, consider watching some YouTube videos, not with the intention of understanding everything but with the intention of having a good time. For me, listening skill is something that largely came out of nowhere. I gave my brain a bunch of stimulus (Japanese YouTube videos I'd watch for hours every day, even if I didn't really understand it) and then I woke up one day and I just understood most of it or it felt like my brain was suddenly able to keep pace at the very least. Anyways, the most important part of that system is finding videos you want to watch even if you don't fully understand them and that you'd want to watch even if it wasn't helping you develop a skill.
ranger_danger 4y ago
nihongonomori.com (and their youtube channel 日本語の森) is most certainly not for beginners, definitely give them a try. They teach everything completely in Japanese. There are also other youtube channels that are all in Japanese but geared towards foreign speakers who are learning, like あかね的日本語教室, もしもしゆうすけ or Haruka Real Japanese.
ehnto 4y ago
I had issues with Wanikani in that the memory associations are arbitrary and unrelated to the meanings. Not an issue for most radicals, but it felt like I was making all theses conceptual connections that didn't actually exist. I would see a radical and my brain would go "Pitchfork! War radical!" When the kanji had no relationship with war at all. For me I had a much less confusing time with rote memorization of the kanji, and then getting familiar with the conjugation as early as possible so I could read quickly. In that way, learning one kanji was like learning ten words, and you also now have the real meaning of the kanji which often does translate across multiple kanji words. Now you are getting lots of meaningful associations which ultimate make up the web of understanding required to put it all together.
- mkenny 4y ago
  Regarding the Wanikani memory associations, I feel similarly about this. I speak Chinese and learned characters without any of these mnemonic devices. Not being a Japanese learner, I am only roughly familiar with Wanikani through market research I did while developing my app for learning Chinese. But I would think that the promise of mnemonics usually sounds great but, even if very effective, I imagine that it's harder to get users who are at any level other than beginner because I would think anyone who already knows even just a few hundred characters or so would feel the urge to skip past assigning radicals with arbitrary mnemonics. And from what I can tell, you have to build a users foundation with these required mnemonic building blocks before they can do anything meaningful with the product.
jbm 4y ago
Once you pass intermediate, it gets even worse. Anki, Shinjigen, Aozora Bunko and a Kindle with a generous book budget on the Amazon.co.jp store is what I do now (that, and consulting for a Japanese company). Related, if you are a beginner, apps other than Anki were a waste of time to me. (Actually, the most effective thing for me was basically being wrecked in a summer university level course and only getting out by the skin of my teeth thanks to the final exam; but I don't recommend that either)
- eloisant 4y ago
  Yes I really second Anki, when you're learning it's much better to create your own flash cards for the new words you encounter than having an app throw you random vocabulary words.
dayvid 4y ago
Yeah, I think simple fundamentals are better for learning Japanese. Some JLPT books/genki for a foundation and going through primary source materials and making flash cards for things you don't understand. On top of that, quickly attempting to speak the language with native speakers is VERY important. You can join a meetup group and there are even many online language exchange things for free now.
- chrisvasselli 4y ago
  If you haven't checked it out, my other app Nihongo (https://nihongo-app.com https://nihongo-app.com) is good for native content reading and making flashcards automatically from words you don't know. :)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
eloisant 4y ago
I used to live in Japan so I have a pretty good conversation level but still struggle with reading. I tried many apps but it never really "sticked", especially as you said most are geared towards beginner and it's often a hassle until the app can figure out your actual level. So I ended up biting the bullet and taking online group lessons. It is much more expensive, but also way better! I finally got back on track and now I feel like I'm progressing.
- glandium 4y ago
  Online group lessons? I'm intrigued, I've only ever seen 1-on-1 stuff. Does that work like normal classrooms, but on Zoom or whatever? With possible breakouts in smaller groups? PS: Erwan, is that you?
  - eloisant 4y ago
    > Does that work like normal classrooms, but on Zoom or whatever? Yes. I really prefer group lessons, but in my area there are no group lessons for my level. > With possible breakouts in smaller groups? In my class we're only 3 students so no need for breakouts > PS: Erwan, is that you? yes :)
- bamboozled 4y ago
  I do 1 on 1 lessons for an hour each week via Zoom. Afterwards my brain feels "rearranged" but IMO there is no substitute for it.
gabelschlager 4y ago
There are sites like japanese.io, that allow you to copy/paste any text and get vocabulary lookup, furigana support, allow to add words to a flashcard deck and other things. I really like their idea and feel such a platform would add a lot of benefit, since you can read whatever you care about. Sadly, the site struggles with longer texts (the UI is not optimized for it) and their flashcard system isn't that great. I have been toying with a similar idea myself. I'd love to read my ebooks with an easy way to look up vocabulary and easily creating flashcard decks containing all unknown words. However, getting the morphological analysis correct while providing fast dictionary lookup has been quite the challenge. This is the first larger project I've attempted so far, so lack of experience definitely is an issue in that regard. So if anyone has some ideas, feel free to share them. It's not something I pursue commercially, so lack of market doesn't bother me.
- chrisvasselli 4y ago
  You should check out my other app, Nihongo (https://nihongo-app.com https://nihongo-app.com), it has functionality like this, and is one of the reasons I developed it in the first place. I take DRM free ebooks and copy them into the app one chapter at a time. It automatically creates flashcards for all the words that appeared that I don't already know, and I can filter down to only words that appear at least twice.
pizza_pleb 4y ago
I’m learning French with reading/media too and realized media will never exhaust itself like beginner apps do. I wanted an open-ended platform to to follow that reasoning, so I created https://languageroadmap.com https://languageroadmap.com as a way to keep finding interesting target-language media at my skill level.
dr-detroit 4y ago
traceroute66 4y ago
> The Japanese learning space feels so crowded. Let me fix that for you... The Japanese learning space is crowded. With trash. There's no "feels" about it. Its full of apps and wesbites that focus purely on cramming Kanji. Which alone is stupid, because you then find out about Kanji readings and compound Kanji. Which means you've wasted your life cramming only a fraction of the permutations. There's only one way to properly learn a language, be it Japanese or any other. That is immersion. Use graded readers for reading. Find the equivalent for listening. Use apps like Hello Talk to find opportunities to speak with willing victims. You cannot learn a language through vocabulary alone, constantly referring back to your mother-tongue will not get you anywhere except endless avenues of frustrations and throw-away "where is the toilet" phrases. You have to learn to think in the language you are learning, not constantly translate everything back to your mother-tongue. There is no easy route, anyone who says there is is not telling the truth.
zkid18 4y ago
Have you been looking for an N3+ app that will help with your studying? I've found it difficult to find the perfect one.

by diob 4y ago

chrisvasselli 4y ago

Yeah, I'm trying to fill that gap a bit here. My app Nihongo was the app I built for myself when I was getting to the advanced level, and wanted to focus on learning from native content. It helps automatically create flashcards from words you look up, OCR, etc. Nihongo Lessons is a companion app for people that want something more guided to help them learn vocab/grammar. It covers everything from beginner-advanced, but is probably most suited for intermediate folks who want to make a push towards advanced.

resonious 4y ago

Agree on reading. The one tool I feel I want is a good OCR + dictionary setup, as a quick escape hatch for physical books. I actually cobbled together something like that using Google's OCR API for Android. Works well for me but might be too janky for release. Maybe I should release it as a good tool for upper intermediates.

chrisvasselli 4y ago
If you haven't checked it out my other app Nihongo has a good OCR + dictionary setup. You can see a demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffRxPyc9K8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffRxPyc9K8A iOS-only though.
- resonious 4y ago
  Ahh yes that's basically perfect! Let me know when there's an Android version ;)
  - chrisvasselli 4y ago
    Haha yes! I would LOVE to make the app for Android someday. But as a solo dev, it’s just too much to take on on my own. If Nihongo ever blows up and I make enough to hire someone to help me out, an Android app is top of my list.
    - spankalee 4y ago
      Web apps work everywhere, fwiw
      - lostgame 4y ago
        If I’m paying for an app; and it’s not native, it usually annoys the hell out of me; I’ll gravitate towards a native option every time.
- glandium 4y ago
  Oh wow, first time I see an OCR that can deal with 行書体. How extensive is your dataset for 行書 and do you also have 草書 or 隷書?
  - chrisvasselli 4y ago
    Under the hood, it's actually using Google's Cloud OCR API. Not sure how well it handles 草書 or 隷書, but it does a pretty remarkable job with 行書. Also does surprisingly well with super pixelated text. I can look up words in 16-bit games trying to squeeze kanji into 16x16 sprites or something, and it holds up incredibly well. You can also swap out the OCR API it uses. Right now I support Google and ocr.space.

rjh29 4y ago

I mean nerds like Japanese so it's no surprise that Japanese has the best arrangement of apps and websites. Personally I just read easy manga (like Yotsuba-to) and worked my way up to books. I didn't use any tools except Genki 1+2.

chrisvasselli 4y ago
Yotsuba-to is a great one to start with, it's actually one of the ones that there are vocab decks for in the app. :)
thaumasiotes 4y ago
> nerds like Japanese so it's no surprise that Japanese has the best arrangement of apps and websites. It might not be a surprise... but is it true? Pleco (for Chinese) seems to reach a standard well above what's available for Japanese, despite the twin facts that (a) Chinese has much less cultural currency in the English-speaking world than Japanese does; and (b) Pleco is not at all a complex app.† It's a dictionary viewer. In fact, it's a dictionary viewer that is not capable of correctly identifying word breaks; you have to handle that job yourself. My brother and sister study Japanese and they use jisho, which is much worse. When I hassle them about it, they're not aware of anything better. † In its primary and most useful function. It does have some complicated functionality available, like handwriting recognition and OCR through the camera.
- rjh29 4y ago
  You make a good point. Pleco is leagues better than anything available in the Japanese domain. I wonder why that is the case - why nobody has stepped up to make an equivalent Japanese app? It might be related to the Japanese publishers not wanting to sell their data. EPWING is an established format and there are plenty of epwing viewers on Android already so I'd guess advanced users will do that instead. My point was I guess, Japanese has a larger -variety- and quantity of apps. Tofugu and Wanikani are good, we have a really good public domain dictionary (edict), Japanese has the largest number of shared decks on AnkiWeb etc. Not to mention the huge amount of subtitled media available online. fwiw jisho.org at least handles pasting in sentences and breaking up the words for you. That's 90% the reason I use it!

owenpalmer 4y ago

Have you taken a look at LingQ? I highly recommend it!

glandium 4y ago

Satori Reader seems interesting in the reading space, although I never gave it a try.

diob 4y ago
Yes, I tried it, I think it would be good if you're not picky. I couldn't get into any of the stories, so my sub for two years just expired. Might resub if I can get some discipline. For now I'm reading through books on my own that are interesting.

chrisvasselli 4y ago

Reading is one of the things I developed my other app, Nihongo, to help with. I take DRM free ebooks and copy them into the app one chapter at a time. It automatically creates flashcards for all the words that appeared that I don't already know, and I can filter down to only words that appear at least twice. I pre-study those "essential" vocab, then usually just read without looking anything up. But the app also makes it so you can tap on words to get a quick definition.

Nerada 4y ago
I'm stuck somewhere between Anki hell and Graded Readers (~Level 1). Do I just continue working my way up the Graded Readers list, or is there something more engaging for adults that's a good stepping stone from Anki to being able to consume written content?
- chrisvasselli 4y ago
  For me, a big breakthrough around that level was using books (or videogames) that I've already read in English so I know the story and don't get lost when there are chunks I don't understand. If I know the story already, I can enjoy going through it again even if I'm not getting everything.
- chrisvasselli 4y ago
  Also if you're into videogames there's an amazing resource here if you haven't seen it before: https://sites.google.com/view/jo-mako/home?pli=1 https://sites.google.com/view/jo-mako/home?pli=1 Among many other things, it has a huge catalog of Japanese game transcripts. I will copy-paste those into my other app Nihongo (https://nihongo-app.com https://nihongo-app.com) which will automatically create flashcards that I can use to pre-study before going through each section, so I can get more out of it.

maoeurk 4y ago

I’m working on a website for intermediate learners to practice by reading and listening, including Japanese, and Japanese is my strongest second language so I can answer a bit about why it’s so uncommon. Japanese is just really, really hard for computers to deal with. The only reason I got parsing and word segmentation to be pretty good was because I was so familiar with the language and wrote a 3000 line post-processing function on the tokens to get reasonable results. We have a few similar post processing steps like one to better handle separated verbs in German but it’s nothing compared to what we needed for Japanese. Additionally Japanese kind of breaks our word model, despite being aware of it and planning for it from the start and every part of the app needs special logic to support Japanese properly. It’s a lovely language, honestly my favorite language I’ve spent time with, but it’s non-trivial to handle it in general with code. Happy to answer any questions and also, self-promo: https://polyglatte.com https://polyglatte.com for my project. Happy to make improvements to better support you / the intermediate reader use case, just let me know.

jalapenos 4y ago
That looks good. It would be great if you could align it with the JLPT. Including the listening, which I think is the hardest. I'm useless at learning languages, basically foreign language dyslexic. I've found targeting the tests & applying for then in advance was the only thing that allowed me to progress. They're a huge motivator. Not just the looming deadline effect, but also passing makes you feel good, as it's a genuine asset as much as it is proof of progress.
- maoeurk 4y ago
  Thanks! Yeah we have JLPT word lists available and you can set them as a focus and learn the words from the JLPT word lists from clips / snippets of videos and articles -- perhaps there's deeper integration we could do there too. I agree with JLPT being a useful tool, I personally used their word lists as a core vocab builder when I was studying a lot of Japanese. > I'm useless at learning languages, basically foreign language dyslexic. Don't be too hard on yourself! If you were able to pass the JLPT at any level, I think you're doing great. One of the motivating ideas of Polyglatte is to make language learning more fun. I'm a big believer in mass exposure and quality time spent with the language. I think for most people, most of the time, just being able to have fun with the language will give you great results. If you're looking for new ways to improve your listening, consider watching some YouTube videos, not with the intention of understanding everything but with the intention of having a good time. For me, listening skill is something that largely came out of nowhere. I gave my brain a bunch of stimulus (Japanese YouTube videos I'd watch for hours every day, even if I didn't really understand it) and then I woke up one day and I just understood most of it or it felt like my brain was suddenly able to keep pace at the very least. Anyways, the most important part of that system is finding videos you want to watch even if you don't fully understand them and that you'd want to watch even if it wasn't helping you develop a skill.

ranger_danger 4y ago

nihongonomori.com (and their youtube channel 日本語の森) is most certainly not for beginners, definitely give them a try. They teach everything completely in Japanese. There are also other youtube channels that are all in Japanese but geared towards foreign speakers who are learning, like あかね的日本語教室, もしもしゆうすけ or Haruka Real Japanese.

ehnto 4y ago

I had issues with Wanikani in that the memory associations are arbitrary and unrelated to the meanings. Not an issue for most radicals, but it felt like I was making all theses conceptual connections that didn't actually exist. I would see a radical and my brain would go "Pitchfork! War radical!" When the kanji had no relationship with war at all. For me I had a much less confusing time with rote memorization of the kanji, and then getting familiar with the conjugation as early as possible so I could read quickly. In that way, learning one kanji was like learning ten words, and you also now have the real meaning of the kanji which often does translate across multiple kanji words. Now you are getting lots of meaningful associations which ultimate make up the web of understanding required to put it all together.

mkenny 4y ago
Regarding the Wanikani memory associations, I feel similarly about this. I speak Chinese and learned characters without any of these mnemonic devices. Not being a Japanese learner, I am only roughly familiar with Wanikani through market research I did while developing my app for learning Chinese. But I would think that the promise of mnemonics usually sounds great but, even if very effective, I imagine that it's harder to get users who are at any level other than beginner because I would think anyone who already knows even just a few hundred characters or so would feel the urge to skip past assigning radicals with arbitrary mnemonics. And from what I can tell, you have to build a users foundation with these required mnemonic building blocks before they can do anything meaningful with the product.

jbm 4y ago

Once you pass intermediate, it gets even worse. Anki, Shinjigen, Aozora Bunko and a Kindle with a generous book budget on the Amazon.co.jp store is what I do now (that, and consulting for a Japanese company). Related, if you are a beginner, apps other than Anki were a waste of time to me. (Actually, the most effective thing for me was basically being wrecked in a summer university level course and only getting out by the skin of my teeth thanks to the final exam; but I don't recommend that either)

eloisant 4y ago
Yes I really second Anki, when you're learning it's much better to create your own flash cards for the new words you encounter than having an app throw you random vocabulary words.

dayvid 4y ago

Yeah, I think simple fundamentals are better for learning Japanese. Some JLPT books/genki for a foundation and going through primary source materials and making flash cards for things you don't understand. On top of that, quickly attempting to speak the language with native speakers is VERY important. You can join a meetup group and there are even many online language exchange things for free now.

chrisvasselli 4y ago
If you haven't checked it out, my other app Nihongo (https://nihongo-app.com https://nihongo-app.com) is good for native content reading and making flashcards automatically from words you don't know. :)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

eloisant 4y ago

I used to live in Japan so I have a pretty good conversation level but still struggle with reading. I tried many apps but it never really "sticked", especially as you said most are geared towards beginner and it's often a hassle until the app can figure out your actual level. So I ended up biting the bullet and taking online group lessons. It is much more expensive, but also way better! I finally got back on track and now I feel like I'm progressing.

glandium 4y ago
Online group lessons? I'm intrigued, I've only ever seen 1-on-1 stuff. Does that work like normal classrooms, but on Zoom or whatever? With possible breakouts in smaller groups? PS: Erwan, is that you?
- eloisant 4y ago
  > Does that work like normal classrooms, but on Zoom or whatever? Yes. I really prefer group lessons, but in my area there are no group lessons for my level. > With possible breakouts in smaller groups? In my class we're only 3 students so no need for breakouts > PS: Erwan, is that you? yes :)
bamboozled 4y ago
I do 1 on 1 lessons for an hour each week via Zoom. Afterwards my brain feels "rearranged" but IMO there is no substitute for it.

gabelschlager 4y ago

There are sites like japanese.io, that allow you to copy/paste any text and get vocabulary lookup, furigana support, allow to add words to a flashcard deck and other things. I really like their idea and feel such a platform would add a lot of benefit, since you can read whatever you care about. Sadly, the site struggles with longer texts (the UI is not optimized for it) and their flashcard system isn't that great. I have been toying with a similar idea myself. I'd love to read my ebooks with an easy way to look up vocabulary and easily creating flashcard decks containing all unknown words. However, getting the morphological analysis correct while providing fast dictionary lookup has been quite the challenge. This is the first larger project I've attempted so far, so lack of experience definitely is an issue in that regard. So if anyone has some ideas, feel free to share them. It's not something I pursue commercially, so lack of market doesn't bother me.

chrisvasselli 4y ago
You should check out my other app, Nihongo (https://nihongo-app.com https://nihongo-app.com), it has functionality like this, and is one of the reasons I developed it in the first place. I take DRM free ebooks and copy them into the app one chapter at a time. It automatically creates flashcards for all the words that appeared that I don't already know, and I can filter down to only words that appear at least twice.

pizza_pleb 4y ago

I’m learning French with reading/media too and realized media will never exhaust itself like beginner apps do. I wanted an open-ended platform to to follow that reasoning, so I created https://languageroadmap.com https://languageroadmap.com as a way to keep finding interesting target-language media at my skill level.

dr-detroit 4y ago

traceroute66 4y ago

> The Japanese learning space feels so crowded. Let me fix that for you... The Japanese learning space is crowded. With trash. There's no "feels" about it. Its full of apps and wesbites that focus purely on cramming Kanji. Which alone is stupid, because you then find out about Kanji readings and compound Kanji. Which means you've wasted your life cramming only a fraction of the permutations. There's only one way to properly learn a language, be it Japanese or any other. That is immersion. Use graded readers for reading. Find the equivalent for listening. Use apps like Hello Talk to find opportunities to speak with willing victims. You cannot learn a language through vocabulary alone, constantly referring back to your mother-tongue will not get you anywhere except endless avenues of frustrations and throw-away "where is the toilet" phrases. You have to learn to think in the language you are learning, not constantly translate everything back to your mother-tongue. There is no easy route, anyone who says there is is not telling the truth.

zkid18 4y ago

Have you been looking for an N3+ app that will help with your studying? I've found it difficult to find the perfect one.