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.
Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
61–70 of 102 posts
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#62OP, 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 workin…
Harry Potter is notorious among Japanese readers for having a horribly inaccurate translation. Example: http://islaya.sarashi.com/haripota01.html
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#63Hey 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…
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#64Hey 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…
Unfortunately being iOS only locks me out. I noticed at the bottom of the page it states it was built from the ground up for iOS. This tells me it could take a while (maybe never) to get a port to another OS.
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#66Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sen…
This has highlighted some reservations I have about it.
The most available example (not the best) is 適当, where it can be interchangeably be used to mean "adequate" and "half-assed", sort of sarcastically. The definition being a mostly undifferentiated bag of words, without necessarily regard for nuance or typical use cases.
Contrast this with the goo dictionary, which has a slightly better structure (http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/leaf/jn2/151064/m0u/%E9%81%A9%E5...) and the 類語 dictionary, that gives synonyms and situations where you would use one over another (http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/leaf/thsrs/2512/m0u/).
I understand that there's probably no way to deal with this in a scaleable way that would be as easy to turn it into flash cards but it's kinda sad to see the gap between the two solutions.
Apologies for not having a more constructive suggestion.
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#68Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#69OP, 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…
So with regard to the clippings feature I feel that generating single-word flash cards might come back to bite you. It makes English->Japanese "production" difficult and annoying in the long run. On the other hand, it also makes Japanese->English unnecessarily complicated with all the meanings associated with a single word. A relatively simple example that comes to mind is 手入れ, of which I would rather have two short sentences describing each use case. Or with regards to the clippings feature, I want it to generate the card with the meaning I encountered, because the other meanings of that word might never actually be used by the Japanese.
I am not sure an app will (or even should) be able to generate such cards. Condensing both the Japanese, while getting the English meaning right, is hard enough for a human. It certainly would be awesome, because at the moment I have to resort to generating the cards manually for the words/sentences I encounter while reading manga or books on my Kobo e-reader. History shows that (1) I am too lazy to generate a card for a word that I had to look up, and that I tend to just keep on reading (and forgetting the word again later on), or (2) that I actually stop reading for a few days/weeks because I feel I have to enter the back log of cards in Anki before continuing.
Re: Show HN: Nihongo – Study Japanese using authentic text from games, songs, etc.
#70Earlier 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.
These are called "idioms", or, if you want to be really technical for its own sake, "non-compositional phrases". But I note that, at least according to wikipedia, "idiom" is the technical term as well as the vernacular one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phraseme#Non-compositional_phr...