Show HN: A Japanese learning app focused on efficient vocab/grammar acquisition

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.

I am not sure which aspects you are looking to recreate exactly, but please check out my Chinese learning web app (JinbuPal).

The primary focus is to help you learn high frequency characters and words as quickly as possible while giving you real-time data as to the application of what you've learned. You can gain familiarity with character pronunciations and then learn words that use only characters you've already studied. Seeing your progress score helps boost your confidence when starting to read real Chinese texts.

You will reach 80%+ recognition of characters and knowledge of words through completing everything in the app. At that point, you'll feel much more confident to approach real-world written Chinese from any resource you find personally interesting.

Mostly I mean the paid add-on dictionaries. In dictionaries, you're getting what you pay for.

The interface to the dictionaries is good, but very straightforward. I don't think there's anything magical about it.

> In fact, the EB apps seem to offer more advanced functionality like dictionary groups and different search types (prefix/suffix/infix/exact/full-text).

Those search types are also available in Pleco, but you have to read the documentation to learn about them. The app has no way of teaching you to use them.

> In my eyes, the best general purpose JE dictionary (Kenkyusha [2]) is still better than the best commercial CE dictionaries, but it is aimed at Japanese speakers studying English and a bit hard to use for beginner Japanese learners.

I think this is a real issue. The native language of the intended audience has a huge effect on how useful the dictionary is for whom. This really shows up in the E -> C dictionaries available for Pleco, which seem to be targeted at Chinese speakers even when they are paired with C -> E dictionaries intended for English speakers. ABC / ABE is an offender there.

But by way of an example of what having a good dictionary means, here are the CC-CEDICT and ABC entries for 以:

-----

1. to use

2. by means of

3. according to

4. in order to

5. because of

6. at (a certain date or place)

-----

"coverb" [preposition]

1. using; taking - 以合成橡胶代替天然橡胶 use synthetic rubber in place of natural rubber

2. because of - 以盛产红茶著名 famous for abundantly producing black tea

3. in order to; so as to - 以应急需 in order to meet an urgent need

suffix

（"empty" verb suffix) - 加以 add; 给以 give

fixed construction

1. 以 A 为 B: take/regard A as B

2. 以 A 来说: as far as A is concerned

bound form [meanings that the character may express when it is part of another word, but not when it is independent]

from a point on in 以下，以北 [etc.]

-----

In my opinion, if you're using the PLC dictionary, you're not using Pleco correctly. (CC-CEDICT has lower quality entries, but is nevertheless better than PLC because it has entries that can't be found in other dictionaries, such as the Chinese names of foreign celebrities. PLC has OK quality, much better than CC-CEDICT, but if you're looking for entry quality you should use the paid dictionaries, which are quite far ahead of PLC.)

viki.com if you like TV dramas. Crunchyroll for anime?

If you're interested in what makes a good dictionary, as opposed to a good app, I want to note something that I really want but that dictionaries generally do not provide:

Words generally accept several different parameters (known in linguistics as "complements"). If I look up the FrameNet entry for "notify (v.)" ( https://framenet2.icsi.berkeley.edu/fnReports/data/lu/lu9183... ), I see that it belongs to the semantic frame of "telling", with 7 "elements" potentially in play. Those are:

1. Addressee

2. Manner

3. Medium

4. Message

5. Speaker

6. Time

7. Topic

Some of those elements can appear with "notify" because they can appear generally on any verb (like Time, as in "I notified him yesterday"), and some are more specific to "notify" itself (like Message, as in "I notified him of your decision").

The FrameNet entries for notify also tell us how each element may be marked in a real English sentence, and provide examples in which each element is color coded. This is what I want to see in more dictionaries. I particularly want it for elements that are specific to the particular word.

For a concrete example from my own life, I spent a long time being aware that 保护 was Chinese for "protect", and yet I was completely unable to figure out how to use it in a sentence. The issue is that "protecting" involves (a) an agent, the subject of 保护; (b) a person being helped, the object of 保护; and (c) a threat. No dictionary that I consulted indicated how to talk about the threat in a sentence in which the verb was 保护, nor did any of them even feature an example sentence in which a threat appeared. Modeling a sentence on the example of English, in which the threat involved in a protecting action is marked by the preposition from, does not work and will confuse Chinese speakers.

It turns out that the way to mark the threat is to include it in a subordinate clause governed by the verb avoid. 我保护她免挨饿, "I [will] protect her to avoid going hungry", not "I will protect her from going hungry". This is important information if you're trying to speak Chinese! But it's absent from the dictionaries. It is intensely frustrating to know exactly what information I'm looking for, to know that a dictionary is the place to find it, and yet to find that it is mysteriously absent from the dictionary.