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

lessons.nihongo-app.com

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

#21

Post by chrisvasselli »

glandium wrote: post #18
chrisvasselli wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 iOS-only though.

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?

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.

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

#22

Post by chrisvasselli »

diob wrote: post #7

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…

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.

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

#23

Post by spankalee »

chrisvasselli wrote: post #15
resonious wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh yes that's basically perfect! Let me know when there's an Android version ;)

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.

Web apps work everywhere, fwiw

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

#24

Post by lostgame »

spankalee wrote: post #23
chrisvasselli wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Web apps work everywhere, fwiw

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.

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

#25

Post by lostgame »

jwrallie wrote: post #6

Spotted some typo (Nihnogo), so you might want to double check your spelling. I'm not sure if it is a personal thing, but I would like to have an idea of your pricing before trying your app, and it was not clear from the web page. This one might be subjective, but I've lived in Japan a couple of years and it is quite rare to hear somebody saying 見ましょう in the context of your example. I get the point is to teach the gr…

It’s not just you; at all - in fact; if I don’t see the price immediately; online, in person; anywhere - I’m uninterested and assume either you don’t think you’ve priced your product fairly; or you feel the need to psychologically manipulate people to stay on your website longer to seek more information, rather than being immediately upfront.

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

#26

Post by maoeurk »

diob wrote: post #7

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…

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 for my project. Happy to make improvements to better support you / the intermediate reader use case, just let me know.

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

#27

Post by sirmarksalot »

This looks interesting to me, but I've been looking for a language learning app that goes beyond flash cards and SRS as its core teaching concept. SRS is great for learning individual vocabulary in a vacuum, but kind of falls apart when you need to teach bigger concepts like number systems, grammatical theory, or conjugation rules. If you've already been taught the rules, then an SRS app like Wanikani can be a really great supplement to that, but it's not going to serve as a full learning experience.

This is where I find Duolingo and its imitators really frustrating, and I've been looking for a higher-effort product that actually uses subject-appropriate teaching strategies, and not treating SRS as a silver bullet.

The "puzzle" feature here looks interesting, so I'd like to see how integrated it is with the concepts, vs. being another view onto "word translation" and SRS.

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

#28

Post by raylad »

I think a lot of people don't get past the "learn all the characters first" barrier.

What would really be useful to them (and me) is an app focused on how people really talk, that teaches actually commonly used phrases as well as grammar and vocabulary.

Apps focused on reading often produce people who can read but can't have a conversation. This is one of the main criticisms of the way English is taught in Japan by the way.

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

#29

Post by teen »

sirmarksalot wrote: post #27

This looks interesting to me, but I've been looking for a language learning app that goes beyond flash cards and SRS as its core teaching concept. SRS is great for learning individual vocabulary in a vacuum, but kind of falls apart when you need to teach bigger concepts like number systems, grammatical theory, or conjugation rules. If you've already been taught the rules, then an SRS app like Wanikani can be a really…

Lingodeer is really good. Check it out.
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