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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.

#21

Post by chrisvasselli »

Nadya wrote: post #20
chrisvasselli wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shoul…

Yeah, 生 is a good example. Fortunately, there are corpuses out there with hand-parsed sentences, so we at least train on those to pick the word for 生 on its own that's most common (I just tried - it's なま). We could use this to get our confidence even better than 50-50 for 生す.

I can see how giving users more options could just bring more confusion. Such a tricky problem! I'll be thinking about this one.

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

#22

Post by Navarr »

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…

iOS only :No planned Android support anywhere? No signup for android news subscription system or RSS if you don't want to setup a mail system?

Sadface.

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

#23

Post by MarkSweep »

chrisvasselli wrote: post #10
Nadya wrote: post #6

Earlier 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…

Which morphological analyzer are you using to do the deconjugation?

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

#24

Post by chrisvasselli »

MarkSweep wrote: post #23
chrisvasselli wrote: post #10

Earlier 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…

Which morphological analyzer are you using to do the deconjugation?

I actually ended up rolling my own. There are some tricky cases involved, and I wanted full control over it.

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

#26

Post by hkmurakami »

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 of your interests in a digitally integrated way is quite awesome (I remember meeting a South Korean guy in college whose Japanese was quite good just from learning form Anime/manga).

Commonality is useful as well, since the language has changed dramatically in the last 100 years, particularly pre and post war.

Kudos! :)

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

#27

Post by veidr »

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 はな brought the two obvious matches (花 and 鼻) to the top, but I had to go back and cycle through several other input methods to get to Japanese input mode, which was annoying and took longer than the rest of looking up the word. Some other dictionaries do this, and even sites like Amazon Japan now do this for searches as well -- dealing with input methods is just a hassle in general.

2. The understanding of verb conjugation seems really awesome and jumping between things on a "learning tangent" works really well.

3. You have to sync vocab lists and spaced repetition drill status/progress to the cloud. It's just too useful not to do it -- you want to be able to do that in quick downtime moments from any device. Luckily there are many easy ways to do it nowadays. I don't blame you for shipping without that, though! ;-)

All in all, great start!

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

#28

Post by chrisvasselli »

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…

Thanks for the feedback!

1. I actually just finished implementing romaji entry, and it will be coming in the next version update. Honestly, after implementing it, I can't believe how much time I've wasted switching input methods. =)

2. Thanks!

3. I know, I know! I really want to, but I spent a couple weeks diving into it and found it really buggy and hard to get right. I'm using Core Data under the hood to store this stuff. Any suggestions for tools I should look at to help with syncing?

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

#30

Post by KerrickStaley »

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 :)
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