Show HN: A Japanese learning app focused on efficient vocab/grammar acquisition

If you're thinking about going to the theater watch a movie, yeah, 見ましょう is weird, but if it's Netflix or whatever, much less... I'm more weirded out by the 博ちゃん. Hiroshi would have to be very little to be chan-suffixed, or some other very specific circumstance.

Most comments here look at this as "yet another SRS/flashcard app" and with all the usual Japanese learning app traits.

  - The usual read, flip, recall, choose if you got the card right.
  - The usual local Japanese voice records of the sentences to shadow to.
  - The usual i+1 decks, where you learn 1 new word mixed with a sentence of words you've already learnt in previous cards.
  - The usual teaches you your first 1000 words/grammar with English translations.
  - The unusual common twitter/conversational/colloquial slang words taught early.
  - The unusual those same first thousand words "coincidentally" allowing the first step to using monolingual Japanese-Japanese dictionaries.
  - The unusual next 1000 words * 6 decks with no English, just pure Japanese that you transitioned to from only knowing the first 1000 Japanese -> English translated words.

It is a lot more amazing than most people realize from just a headline or a quick glance at the home page!

My one dopamine-inducing memory using this was against a person who has been learning Japanese for about a year with a tutor and Japanese friends vs me who has only been using the app for about a month now. We were presented with a tweet and he was confused because of a few slang terms in there, I could make out the tweet naturally as if I was reading English, although with the reading speed of a 6 year old. Granted the tweet was fairly simple with basic words just expressing the thoughts of the user. I definitely would be outmatched with a tweet/conversation with more advanced words. But at that moment, I knew I had him beat with most casual simple colloquial sentences that I don't have to internally translate back to English in my head. This is not to say who's better than who, he was clearly better in almost every way, but he was learning it textbook style. I went with the path of wanting to read the internet too, and textbook language just are like valid vibes, but lowkey, no cap, fit the internet fr fr.

You make a good point. Pleco is leagues better than anything available in the Japanese domain. I wonder why that is the case - why nobody has stepped up to make an equivalent Japanese app? It might be related to the Japanese publishers not wanting to sell their data. EPWING is an established format and there are plenty of epwing viewers on Android already so I'd guess advanced users will do that instead.

My point was I guess, Japanese has a larger -variety- and quantity of apps. Tofugu and Wanikani are good, we have a really good public domain dictionary (edict), Japanese has the largest number of shared decks on AnkiWeb etc. Not to mention the huge amount of subtitled media available online.

fwiw jisho.org at least handles pasting in sentences and breaking up the words for you. That's 90% the reason I use it!

I had issues with Wanikani in that the memory associations are arbitrary and unrelated to the meanings. Not an issue for most radicals, but it felt like I was making all theses conceptual connections that didn't actually exist. I would see a radical and my brain would go "Pitchfork! War radical!" When the kanji had no relationship with war at all.

For me I had a much less confusing time with rote memorization of the kanji, and then getting familiar with the conjugation as early as possible so I could read quickly. In that way, learning one kanji was like learning ten words, and you also now have the real meaning of the kanji which often does translate across multiple kanji words. Now you are getting lots of meaningful associations which ultimate make up the web of understanding required to put it all together.

Cool! Does anyone know of apps similar to this for Chinese?