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Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.

nihongo-app.com

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Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.

#31

Post by chrisvasselli »

hkmurakami wrote: post #26
chrisvasselli wrote: post #2

Hey 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…

Native speaker of both Japanese and English here. This looks quite nice and I've forwarded it to my friends who are learning Japanese. :) I was initially really skeptical when I saw the tagline about "learning from songs and games", because songs are grammatically broken and often nonsensical, while games/anime/manga often have brash speech that you stop using once you're past Junior High. But being able to learn off…

Yeah, it's hard to sum up the idea in 80 characters, but I like that idea of learning off of your interests.

Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.

#32

Post by chrisvasselli »

djent wrote: post #29

Unfortunately doesn't run on iOS 7 or below. Any chance you could support it? I'd love to use this app.

The first couple versions of the app supported iOS 7, so when you try to download it, you should get a prompt to download the earlier version. Unfortunately, I don't have any plans to support iOS 7 going forward. =/

Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.

#33

Post by Blahah »

OP, this is wonderful. I'm a long time japanese learner and I wrote the iOS Anki app.

Just looking through the website (unfortunately I don't have an iOS device on hand), you've got some killer features here that I've wanted for a long time.

'clippings' looks really excellent. I would go so far as to say this is a game-changer for me as it currently stands. If you took the same idea and went bigger, that would be awesome: I'm thinking an e-book reader. That is, load up a Japanese ePub and then have one-click access to a context-aware J->E dictionary lookup via your app. Then being able to generate cards from the book would be perfect.

If I had to pick a missing feature (again just going from the description) it would be audiovisual context. This has been crucial to my learning - any plans to integrate it?

Finally, I don't know if you're aware but there is precedent for 'clippings' in the tools that generate Anki apps from movie subtitles. They create cards that have a still from the movie, the audio clip, and the subtitles in Japanese and English. Yours is more universal, but I think something that combined features of both would be even more powerful (i.e. audio and images).

Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.

#35

Post by gizmo686 »

veidr wrote: post #27
chrisvasselli wrote: post #2

Hey 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…

Hi Chris, looks like an awesome start. Some quick suggestions and questions: 1. You should fully support romaji entry for looking things up. The mechanics of switching input methods on iOS are pretty terrible so it is really inconvenient to have to switch into Japanese input mode. I searched for "hana" but got only 花合わせ and 花を引く as matches -- because those have 'hana' in the English definition string. Searching for は…

I like the approach that the kanji useing website I am useing [0] took to input. They accept the input itself to be in romaji, by transliterate into hiragana as you type.

[0]https://www.wanikani.com/

Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.

#36

Post by chrisvasselli »

KerrickStaley wrote: post #30
chrisvasselli wrote: post #2

Hey 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…

Tangential shameless self-promotion: I built a tool for Chinese learners that can take starred entries from the Hanping Dictionary app (for Android) and import them into Anki. It's available at https://github.com/kerrickstaley/hsk_flashcards . File a bug if you have trouble running/using it. Obviously not as seamless as Nihongo :)

Before I built Nihongo, I used to use Imiwa as my Japanese dictionary, and Flashcards Deluxe for spaced repetition studying. I built this ridiculously convoluted setup where I would upload a list of words from Imiwa to dropbox, my laptop at home would detect a new file in my dropbox and run a script to convert the format to the one supported by Flashcards Deluxe, and then I'd open up Flashcards Deluxe and download the deck from dropbox. I told someone about this, and they said "man, wouldn't it be awesome if there were a Japanese app that could just do that automatically?" And thus, Nihongo was born. =)

So KerrickStaley, wouldn't it be awesome if there were a Chinese app that could just do that automatically? =p

Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.

#38

Post by chrisvasselli »

Blahah wrote: post #33

OP, this is wonderful. I'm a long time japanese learner and I wrote the iOS Anki app. Just looking through the website (unfortunately I don't have an iOS device on hand), you've got some killer features here that I've wanted for a long time. 'clippings' looks really excellent. I would go so far as to say this is a game-changer for me as it currently stands. If you took the same idea and went bigger, that would be awe…

I would LOVE to have integration with e-books, I think that could totally change the way I learn Japanese. Since over time the app learns what words you know and what words you don't, it could even suggest books for you that are around the right difficulty level. Wouldn't that be amazing?

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any place where you can purchase DRM-free e-books, so I think this would require working with Japanese book publishers. The one exception is the Harry Potter books, which are published DRM-free through their own website. I read the first two Harry Potter books using clippings to generate flashcards for each chapter as I went along, and it was incredibly helpful.

The idea of audiovisual context is interesting. Could you tell me more about what you have in mind? I've thought about adding text-to-speech options on the dictionary entries and in flashcards. But something more complete, like what Rosetta Stone does, seems a lot harder, just from the perspective of acquiring rights to the images.

Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.

#39

Post by chrisvasselli »

archseer wrote: post #25

Sweet! Looks like a nice addition to WaniKani. I'm using WaniKani for my general studies, but automatic card generation based on my word lookup is definitely neat.

Yeah, I think Nihongo makes a great compliment to WaniKani! Nihongo doesn't have lessons, and isn't really meant to teach you Japanese in the same way WaniKani is. I like to think of Nihongo as a great companion tool for however you're learning Japanese already, whether that be from a class, from living in Japan, reading books, or studying using other tools.

Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.

#40

Post by Albright »

Blahah wrote: post #33

OP, this is wonderful. I'm a long time japanese learner and I wrote the iOS Anki app. Just looking through the website (unfortunately I don't have an iOS device on hand), you've got some killer features here that I've wanted for a long time. 'clippings' looks really excellent. I would go so far as to say this is a game-changer for me as it currently stands. If you took the same idea and went bigger, that would be awe…

> 'clippings' looks really excellent. I would go so far as to say this is a game-changer for me as it currently stands.

Midori, my personal favorite iOS J/E dictionary, has had a feature like this since I started using it, so for at least five years or so. =/ See the "Text Translation" section: http://www.midoriapp.com/features/

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