just curious, how do you mark a word as common? I often used jisho.org or classic.jisho.org (from wwwjdic) and from what i remember, a lot of those words marked as "common" were mostly definitely not.
Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
51–60 of 102 posts
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#52Hey 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…
>I built Nihongo because it was the tool that I wanted and felt like was missing for studying Japanese. Hopefully it'll be useful for some of you too! I'd love to hear your feedback.
This alone made me download the app even though I haven't seriously studied Japanese since college. Have you written anywhere about your learning habits / methods?
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#53just curious, how do you mark a word as common? I often used jisho.org or classic.jisho.org (from wwwjdic) and from what i remember, a lot of those words marked as "common" were mostly definitely not.
Yeah, I found the commonalities in WWWJDic/JMDict to be pretty problematic, so I came up with my own. I use a combination of corpuses including newspapers, novels, literature/poetry, and spoken language. Some of these have been hand-parsed by humans, and others I parse using the same parsing as clippings. I think the result is pretty good!
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#54Hey 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…
Nice app, will definitely play with it soon!
By auto-generating flashcards, what are you doing about showing accurate definitions/meanings for the cards? I couldn't tell from your page alone - are you just pulling down the list of senses from JMDict or something? That's always been my hesitation with auto-generating cards, the "meaning" side of the card tends not to be helpful.
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aozora Bunko ( http://www.aozora.gr.jp/ ) is the only legitimate source I know of for ebooks (and they are free). Long term it would be really great to get some Japanese publishers to commit to ebooks, but I know that historically they have been strongly, publicly resistant. The Wakaru app does allow ebooks reading with a dictionary, but I always found it clunky and I don't think it allows easily generating cards fro…
Yeah, unfortunately I find the content in Aozora Bunko not all that interesting. Or at least, I don't know how to find good content in it. I actually built a proof-of-concept of a "Books" tab in Nihongo using Aozora Bunko, but I found it sort of unsatisfying, so I never pursued it further. I haven't used Wakaru before, I'll have to check that out. I'll explore the audiovisual ideas more, that's pretty interesting, th…
I've got the same problem with finding decent content in Aozora Bunko. For me, the main issue is how to find content which matches my level (actually being interesting being the other problem, but seemingly harder to solve).
I set up a really hacky "grader" algorithm and run it on a bunch of the Aozora Bunko books, then put them online [1]. The very "easiest" books are kinda boring, but it is certainly easier finding usable material in that list than looking in Aozora Bunko itself. The one I've found most interesting so far is 銀河鉄道の夜 [2]
[1] http://www.readyourgrade.com/
[2] http://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000081/files/43737_19215.html
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#56Hey 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…
>I built Nihongo because it was the tool that I wanted and felt like was missing for studying Japanese. Hopefully it'll be useful for some of you too! I'd love to hear your feedback. This alone made me download the app even though I haven't seriously studied Japanese since college. Have you written anywhere about your learning habits / methods?
I haven't, but I'd like to! I've been meaning to start a blog to discuss topics like that, but haven't found the time quite yet.
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#57Hey 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…
Nice app, will definitely play with it soon! By auto-generating flashcards, what are you doing about showing accurate definitions/meanings for the cards? I couldn't tell from your page alone - are you just pulling down the list of senses from JMDict or something? That's always been my hesitation with auto-generating cards, the "meaning" side of the card tends not to be helpful.
By default, the backside of the card has the first "sense" from JMDict on it. This sense is supposed to represent the primary meaning of the word. You can also add/replace that with the other senses by editing the flashcard, or you can add your own notes to the back.
I've found using the first sense works pretty well. Having the whole definition on the back is way too much for your brain to process, but the first sense is usually only a few words that encapsulate the meaning of the word pretty well.
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#58Hey 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…
I'm also the author of a Japanese learning tool: https://github.com/mikekchar/jldrill I have some advice for you if you decide to use spaced repetition in your flashcards (not sure if you do already as I haven't had time to look in detail).
JLDrill is mostly abandonware at the moment and is written in very poor Ruby ;-). I don't actually recommend that anyone use it. It was written for me. I think the pheonix branch will actually work on modern Ruby, but I was half way through trying a different scheduling idea, so it probably has considerable bugs.
However, if you decide to do spaced repetition in your app, I would humbly suggest reading JLDrill's strategy on it: https://github.com/mikekchar/JLDrill/blob/master/web/src/Str...
Most tools (like Anki) use the SM2 algorithm, but I found that my strategy works considerably better (for me, anyway ;-) ) The latest version of JLDrill has an ability to "forget" items if you have neglected studying them for too long: https://github.com/mikekchar/JLDrill/blob/master/web/src/Usa...
Feel free to ping me if you have any questions.
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#59> Have you ever tried to use a word you looked up in the dictionary, only to find out that no one has ever heard of it?
This is so great. EDICT has so many entries that Japanese speakers have either never heard of, or would never use, or even where the definition is archaic or just plain wrong.
Maybe someday, this app will be available for Android :-)
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, unfortunately I find the content in Aozora Bunko not all that interesting. Or at least, I don't know how to find good content in it. I actually built a proof-of-concept of a "Books" tab in Nihongo using Aozora Bunko, but I found it sort of unsatisfying, so I never pursued it further. I haven't used Wakaru before, I'll have to check that out. I'll explore the audiovisual ideas more, that's pretty interesting, th…
I've got the same problem with finding decent content in Aozora Bunko. For me, the main issue is how to find content which matches my level (actually being interesting being the other problem, but seemingly harder to solve). I set up a really hacky "grader" algorithm and run it on a bunch of the Aozora Bunko books, then put them online [1]. The very "easiest" books are kinda boring, but it is certainly easier finding…
Ohh this is cool. Very nicely put together!