Does it leverage text to speech for pronouciation purposes?
Not yet! But it's on my short list of features to add! Good to know there's interest.
Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
11–20 of 102 posts
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#12>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 nov…
>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.
That's actually a pretty awesome way to handle it compared to other methods I've seen used.
>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.
Of course, I'm understanding of that issue. Parsing arbitrary input will always have errors, Google isn't exempt from this problem either. :)
It's very, very difficult to get some of these things right (and sometimes just impossible given current technology/software).
My issue with it is that not all people who use the app will be technologically savvy and understand that the furigana could be wrong. For someone learning a new language, giving the wrong reading could be extremely detrimental for them.
I guess just voicing a gripe I have. I understand from a marketing point, every JP app does this when they automatically add furigana readings. I just wish there was some transparency that they aren't always accurate. :\
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#13Looks great! Any timeline on Android?
This
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 me…
* internet high five *
Awesome.
I couldn't think of how to phrase the problem. "Short phrases with meanings that don't match the individual words used being parsed as individual words instead of the short phrase" is kind of wordy and a little confusing.
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#15@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 o…
Nice, that's exactly what I'm going for! Part of my philosophy with the app was to make my studying of Japanese as efficient as it could possibly be. I tried to shave out all of the time spent doing tasks that don't contribute to my actual learning, like trying to draw kanji, count strokes, manually type out flashcards, etc.
As for the clippings, those are all user-supplied. For example, I love classic JRPGs, and FFVI is my favorite. If you google around a bit, you can find the script for the Japanese version of FFVI. Import the script into Nihongo, and you can pre-study the words as you play along. You can also filter the flashcards down to just the words that show up more than once, so if you're not ready to study everything, you can just focus on the important words. It also works great if you want to study song lyrics, and I even used it to read Harry Potter in Japanese (thanks J.K. Rowling for putting out DRM-free books!)
Unfortunately, I don't have any plans for Android or the web right now, since this is a solo side-project for me, and I just don't have the time. But I'd love to do it in the future!
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#16Looks great! Any timeline on Android?
Thanks! Unfortunately, I don't have any plans for Android right now. This is a solo side-project for me, so I just don't have the time. I'd love to at some point in the future though!
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 nov…
>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. That's actually a pretty awesome way to handle it compared to other methods I've seen used. >As for the furigana, sinc…
Yeah, it's a good gripe to bring up. I'd love to come up with some indication of "confidence" in the parsing. Or maybe when there are two possible parses, give the user the ability to see both somehow?
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 me…
* internet high five * Awesome. I couldn't think of how to phrase the problem. "Short phrases with meanings that don't match the individual words used being parsed as individual words instead of the short phrase" is kind of wordy and a little confusing.
Heheh, got it! Yeah, fortunately JMDict is a really mature project, and has got a ton of these kinds of things covered.
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#19Looks great! Any timeline on Android?
Second vote for Android version.
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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. That's actually a pretty awesome way to handle it compared to other methods I've seen used. >As for the furigana, sinc…
Yeah, it's a good gripe to bring up. I'd love to come up with some indication of "confidence" in the parsing. Or maybe when there are two possible parses, give the user the ability to see both somehow?
I think giving an option of two possible parsing would confuse people learning. They wouldn't know which is the right one to pick! So adding a second option just ads to the confusion...
I think showing a confidence level would be a good solution based on the number of available readings for the given context of the kanji.
生 would be a good example. When used by itself, the confidence that the reading is correct should be low (since there are many possible options!) but if it is used in 生まれる the confidence level is very high (because there is only the one possible reading). When used in 生す it could be 50/50 (since it could be read な or む).
Explaining this to learners is a little tricky.