Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
1–10 of 102 posts
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#2Hey 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.
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#3Looks lovely.
Seems like even a starter-level student could benefit from this, with the flashcards and word commonality features.
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#4>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.
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#5>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 Jouyo…
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.
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#6Hey 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. Yo…
>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)?
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#7Does it leverage text to speech for pronouciation purposes?
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#8Looks great! Any timeline on Android?
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#9@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?
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#10Hey 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. Yo…
>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)?
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.