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

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

#51

Post by chrisvasselli »

dayvid wrote: post #49
diob wrote: post #7

The Japanese learning space feels so crowded. Most are marketed towards beginners, which makes sense when you see statistics (most folks give up). The top tier tools I recommend anyone are Wanikani and Bunpro. Beyond that, reading! I tried a site dedicated to it, but realized that I'm too much of a picky reader to do anything but read things I find interesting. So I read japanese and english books side by side now. I…

Yeah, I think simple fundamentals are better for learning Japanese. Some JLPT books/genki for a foundation and going through primary source materials and making flash cards for things you don't understand. On top of that, quickly attempting to speak the language with native speakers is VERY important. You can join a meetup group and there are even many online language exchange things for free now.

If you haven't checked it out, my other app Nihongo (https://nihongo-app.com) is good for native content reading and making flashcards automatically from words you don't know. :)

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

#52

Post by chrisvasselli »

Nerada wrote: post #47
chrisvasselli wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading is one of the things I developed my other app, Nihongo, to help with. I take DRM free ebooks and copy them into the app one chapter at a time. It automatically creates flashcards for all the words that appeared that I don't already know, and I can filter down to only words that appear at least twice. I pre-study those "essential" vocab, then usually just read without looking anything up. But the app also make…

I'm stuck somewhere between Anki hell and Graded Readers (~Level 1). Do I just continue working my way up the Graded Readers list, or is there something more engaging for adults that's a good stepping stone from Anki to being able to consume written content?

For me, a big breakthrough around that level was using books (or videogames) that I've already read in English so I know the story and don't get lost when there are chunks I don't understand. If I know the story already, I can enjoy going through it again even if I'm not getting everything.

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

#53

Post by [deleted] »

diob wrote: post #7

The Japanese learning space feels so crowded. Most are marketed towards beginners, which makes sense when you see statistics (most folks give up). The top tier tools I recommend anyone are Wanikani and Bunpro. Beyond that, reading! I tried a site dedicated to it, but realized that I'm too much of a picky reader to do anything but read things I find interesting. So I read japanese and english books side by side now. I…

[deleted]

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

#54

Post by chrisvasselli »

Nerada wrote: post #47
chrisvasselli wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading is one of the things I developed my other app, Nihongo, to help with. I take DRM free ebooks and copy them into the app one chapter at a time. It automatically creates flashcards for all the words that appeared that I don't already know, and I can filter down to only words that appear at least twice. I pre-study those "essential" vocab, then usually just read without looking anything up. But the app also make…

I'm stuck somewhere between Anki hell and Graded Readers (~Level 1). Do I just continue working my way up the Graded Readers list, or is there something more engaging for adults that's a good stepping stone from Anki to being able to consume written content?

Also if you're into videogames there's an amazing resource here if you haven't seen it before: https://sites.google.com/view/jo-mako/home?pli=1

Among many other things, it has a huge catalog of Japanese game transcripts. I will copy-paste those into my other app Nihongo (https://nihongo-app.com) which will automatically create flashcards that I can use to pre-study before going through each section, so I can get more out of it.

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

#55

Post by insane_dreamer »

rjh29 wrote: post #35
thaumasiotes wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nerds like Japanese so it's no surprise that Japanese has the best arrangement of apps and websites. It might not be a surprise... but is it true? Pleco (for Chinese) seems to reach a standard well above what's available for Japanese, despite the twin facts that (a) Chinese has much less cultural currency in the English-speaking world than Japanese does; and (b) Pleco is not at all a complex app.† It's a dictionary…

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…

Having used Pleco for years, it really is the best dictionary type app I've encountered.

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

#56

Post by rjh29 »

chrisvasselli wrote: post #45
rjh29 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Would love to hear more about what makes Pleco stand out for you. I make a dictionary app as well ( https://nihongo-app.com ) and am always trying to improve it.

It has OCR, it can parse text from your screen (screen reader) or clipboard, has male and female recorded voices, handwriting recognition, has about 20 different dictionaries including Chinese->Chinese and Cantonese, character etymology, their own flashcard system, the UI is extremely good. The search supports wildcards but is really fast. They are really attentive too, for example when their userbase pushed back against their flashcard system saying they use Anki, the devs added an extremely powerful and customisable Anki integration too.

To be honest I'm not the target audience for your app anyway, I'm not interested in yet another Edict-based dictionary - there are tons of them around and the quality is not good enough once you get to a certain level.

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

#57

Post by chrisvasselli »

timr wrote: post #36
raylad wrote: post #28

I think a lot of people don't get past the "learn all the characters first" barrier. What would really be useful to them (and me) is an app focused on how people really talk, that teaches actually commonly used phrases as well as grammar and vocabulary. Apps focused on reading often produce people who can read but can't have a conversation. This is one of the main criticisms of the way English is taught in Japan by t…

> I think a lot of people don't get past the "learn all the characters first" barrier. PSA: That's not an actual barrier. It's a borderline useless thing that some significant subset of self-learners seem to do, for reasons I cannot explain. There is no such thing as "learning the characters". You need to learn words and sentences. You can certainly categorize the learning by character (this is how it's done in Japan…

I'm also a fan of learning kanji only in the context of words, and not on their own in a vacuum.

I made the kanji decks in my other app Nihongo (https://nihongo-app.com) based on this philosophy. Basically, they teach you (1) the kun-yomi word(s) for each character, (2) the 1-3 most common words for each on-yomi, and (3) to write the kanji.

Don't try to learn the readings in isolation, learn them in the context of the words where they appear. And by learning a small set of the most common words using the character (especially if it has a standalone kun-yomi word), you'll internalize the meaning of the kanji itself.

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

#58

Post by unscaled »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #34
rjh29 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean nerds like Japanese so it's no surprise that Japanese has the best arrangement of apps and websites. Personally I just read easy manga (like Yotsuba-to) and worked my way up to books. I didn't use any tools except Genki 1+2.

> nerds like Japanese so it's no surprise that Japanese has the best arrangement of apps and websites. It might not be a surprise... but is it true? Pleco (for Chinese) seems to reach a standard well above what's available for Japanese, despite the twin facts that (a) Chinese has much less cultural currency in the English-speaking world than Japanese does; and (b) Pleco is not at all a complex app.† It's a dictionary…

I haven't used Pleco that much, so I wonder what you're referring to. Is that:

1. The dictionary app (excluding the dictionary).

2. The built-in (free) dictionaries (PLC and CC-CEDICT).

3. The paid add-on dictionaries.

4. The add-on marketplace.

I think if you want to be fair, you shouldn't compare Pleco to apps based on EDict/JMDict, but rather to apps that can read EPWING dictionaries.

From what I can see and judge:

1. The dictionary functionality in the app doesn't seem any better than EBWin/EBMac/EBPocket [1]. In fact, the EB apps seem to offer more advanced functionality like dictionary groups and different search types (prefix/suffix/infix/exact/full-text).

On the other hand, Pleco is also more user friendly than EBPocket. Replacing dictionary groups by a Chinese-English/English-Chinese is a usability win for 99% of the users.

The Japanese-only documentation and retro homepage probably also deter users from using EBPocket. This is a shame, since the apps are pretty great (they do have English UI). If you just want a dictionary they are miles better than Imiwa/Yomiwa and all the other apps which are based on JMDict.

2. The built-in PLC dictionary seems better than JMDict. It's got better and clearer tagging for the headword and definitions and in-line examples (which you can only get by linking JMDict to another dictionary). These are not issues with JMDict itself though, since it seems to contain all this data (there is even a version that incorporates example sentences from the Tanaka corpus [2]). But most of the JMDict dictionary apps I've seen are not good at displaying it. The EPWING conversions I've found are also not great.

While the PLC dict is great, CC-EDict seems much worse than JMDict.

3. The quality of commercially available ChineseEnglish and JapaneseEnglish dictionaries really depends on the publishers. Compiling and editing good dictionaries take years, and as far as I know Japan has been doing digital dictionaries for a pretty long time. In my eyes, the best general purpose JE dictionary (Kenkyusha [2]) is still better than the best commercial CE dictionaries, but it is aimed at Japanese speakers studying English and a bit hard to use for beginner Japanese learners.

4. I think the easy to use marketplace is where Pleco really shines. With Japanese dictionaries, you either need to buy the EPWING dictionary in a CDROM (I think it's out of print nowadays) or use the official app, which is pretty limited.

This is the real issue here. I don't know if it's Japanese publishers who don't want to sell the dictionary data to third parties in a marketplace model or the app developers themselves being content with JMDict. It's quite sad, since there used to be a vibrant ecosystem of add-on dictionaries on SD cards for physical electronic dictionaries.

[1]: http://ebstudio.info/manual/EBPocket_iPhone/ [2]: Specifically 研究者新英和大辞典 and 研究者新和英大辞典

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