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 wish there was a better way, but tools crafted for intermediate folks just don't have a market given the small subset who gets there.
maoeurk 58 days ago [-]
I’m working on a website for intermediate learners to practice by reading and listening, including Japanese, and Japanese is my strongest second language so I can answer a bit about why it’s so uncommon.
Japanese is just really, really hard for computers to deal with. The only reason I got parsing and word segmentation to be pretty good was because I was so familiar with the language and wrote a 3000 line post-processing function on the tokens to get reasonable results. We have a few similar post processing steps like one to better handle separated verbs in German but it’s nothing compared to what we needed for Japanese.
Additionally Japanese kind of breaks our word model, despite being aware of it and planning for it from the start and every part of the app needs special logic to support Japanese properly.
It’s a lovely language, honestly my favorite language I’ve spent time with, but it’s non-trivial to handle it in general with code.
Happy to answer any questions and also, self-promo: https://polyglatte.com for my project. Happy to make improvements to better support you / the intermediate reader use case, just let me know.
dayjaby 57 days ago [-]
Not wanting to sound too rude or harsh, but your tutorial appears to be very non-native Japanese. Grammar mistakes (like ...you+verb instead of ...you ni+verb) plus weird choice of words (tango o suru, seriously what does that mean?)
maoeurk 53 days ago [-]
Thanks for the feedback! I did originally write it myself in a rush using the English as the basis but have since had it rewritten by a native Japanese speaker -- I will have that done again.
> (tango o suru, seriously what does that mean?)
Thanks for pointing this out, there's actually a mismatch between the JSON fixture used to load this article into the DB and the raw text from which that JSON should have been generated: there's a missing token there. Frankly it's just good (or perhaps bad) fortune that it broke in such a way that it kind of made sense without that word there.
I will get that fixed up along with a general rephrasing/look over by a native again.
_rm 57 days ago [-]
That looks good.
It would be great if you could align it with the JLPT. Including the listening, which I think is the hardest.
I'm useless at learning languages, basically foreign language dyslexic. I've found targeting the tests & applying for then in advance was the only thing that allowed me to progress.
They're a huge motivator. Not just the looming deadline effect, but also passing makes you feel good, as it's a genuine asset as much as it is proof of progress.
maoeurk 53 days ago [-]
Thanks!
Yeah we have JLPT word lists available and you can set them as a focus and learn the words from the JLPT word lists from clips / snippets of videos and articles -- perhaps there's deeper integration we could do there too.
I agree with JLPT being a useful tool, I personally used their word lists as a core vocab builder when I was studying a lot of Japanese.
> I'm useless at learning languages, basically foreign language dyslexic.
Don't be too hard on yourself! If you were able to pass the JLPT at any level, I think you're doing great.
One of the motivating ideas of Polyglatte is to make language learning more fun. I'm a big believer in mass exposure and quality time spent with the language. I think for most people, most of the time, just being able to have fun with the language will give you great results.
If you're looking for new ways to improve your listening, consider watching some YouTube videos, not with the intention of understanding everything but with the intention of having a good time. For me, listening skill is something that largely came out of nowhere. I gave my brain a bunch of stimulus (Japanese YouTube videos I'd watch for hours every day, even if I didn't really understand it) and then I woke up one day and I just understood most of it or it felt like my brain was suddenly able to keep pace at the very least.
Anyways, the most important part of that system is finding videos you want to watch even if you don't fully understand them and that you'd want to watch even if it wasn't helping you develop a skill.
chrisvasselli 58 days ago [-]
Yeah, I'm trying to fill that gap a bit here.
My app Nihongo was the app I built for myself when I was getting to the advanced level, and wanted to focus on learning from native content. It helps automatically create flashcards from words you look up, OCR, etc.
Nihongo Lessons is a companion app for people that want something more guided to help them learn vocab/grammar. It covers everything from beginner-advanced, but is probably most suited for intermediate folks who want to make a push towards advanced.
rjh29 58 days ago [-]
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.
thaumasiotes 58 days ago [-]
> 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 viewer. In fact, it's a dictionary viewer that is not capable of correctly identifying word breaks; you have to handle that job yourself.
My brother and sister study Japanese and they use jisho, which is much worse. When I hassle them about it, they're not aware of anything better.
† In its primary and most useful function. It does have some complicated functionality available, like handwriting recognition and OCR through the camera.
jinto36 58 days ago [-]
Akebi for Android is pretty good. For a while I used the Nintendo DS Japanese dictionary (Rakubiki Jiten) for the ability to do stylus-based character recognition, which was less frustrating to use than the Windows IME pad feature. Akebi works reasonably well for that function.
I only just started learning Chinese, so I haven't looked at Pleco yet and can't really compare them.
I'll agree with some other comments that once you get into the area bordering intermediate and advanced proficiency there are many fewer resources, but by then you have a better idea of what you don't know, and and can use your existing base to sort of plot a path to fill those gaps.
rjh29 58 days ago [-]
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!
chrisvasselli 58 days ago [-]
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.
rjh29 58 days ago [-]
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.
thaumasiotes 57 days ago [-]
If you're interested in what makes a good dictionary, as opposed to a good app, I want to note something that I really want but that dictionaries generally do not provide:
Words generally accept several different parameters (known in linguistics as "complements"). If I look up the FrameNet entry for "notify (v.)" ( https://framenet2.icsi.berkeley.edu/fnReports/data/lu/lu9183... ), I see that it belongs to the semantic frame of "telling", with 7 "elements" potentially in play. Those are:
1. Addressee
2. Manner
3. Medium
4. Message
5. Speaker
6. Time
7. Topic
Some of those elements can appear with "notify" because they can appear generally on any verb (like Time, as in "I notified him yesterday"), and some are more specific to "notify" itself (like Message, as in "I notified him of your decision").
The FrameNet entries for notify also tell us how each element may be marked in a real English sentence, and provide examples in which each element is color coded. This is what I want to see in more dictionaries. I particularly want it for elements that are specific to the particular word.
For a concrete example from my own life, I spent a long time being aware that 保护 was Chinese for "protect", and yet I was completely unable to figure out how to use it in a sentence. The issue is that "protecting" involves (a) an agent, the subject of 保护; (b) a person being helped, the object of 保护; and (c) a threat. No dictionary that I consulted indicated how to talk about the threat in a sentence in which the verb was 保护, nor did any of them even feature an example sentence in which a threat appeared. Modeling a sentence on the example of English, in which the threat involved in a protecting action is marked by the preposition from, does not work and will confuse Chinese speakers.
It turns out that the way to mark the threat is to include it in a subordinate clause governed by the verb avoid. 我保护她免挨饿, "I [will] protect her to avoid going hungry", not "I will protect her from going hungry". This is important information if you're trying to speak Chinese! But it's absent from the dictionaries. It is intensely frustrating to know exactly what information I'm looking for, to know that a dictionary is the place to find it, and yet to find that it is mysteriously absent from the dictionary.
chrisvasselli 57 days ago [-]
This is really really interesting. I wonder if the data from FrameNet would be enough to reliably generate this kind of information in a Japanese dictionary, and if the license supports is usage. I'm going to explore this more, thanks.
thaumasiotes 57 days ago [-]
features I use in Pleco:
- The main panel. You put in characters, and Pleco calls up a list of dictionary entries. As I mentioned above, if you put in several words at once, Pleco will try to call up entries for all of them, but it can't tell where one word ends and another begins, so if you do this you're not unlikely to end up fetching incorrect entries.
- The entry view.
- The stroke order view. Tells you the stroke order for a given character and will play an animation of the same on request.
- The dictionaries. There are a lot of them for different purposes and the quality level is high. This is easily the most important aspect of Pleco.
- Handwriting entry. You get a full screen to draw on like a touchpad. (One character at a time.) Input goes to the lookup field. There is no time limit on drawing the character (as is normal in handwriting IMEs), because this is an app for language learners. This is, obviously, an important way of looking up characters you don't recognize.
- "Reader" mode. When you enter the reader, the contents of your clipboard are laid out. (For this to be useful, you should have some Chinese text in your clipboard.) You can click on Chinese characters to open a popup window with dictionary entries for whatever is highlighted. (This will automatically highlight the character you click on, as well as any following characters that can join with the first one to make a single dictionary entry.) Because Pleco can't recognize word boundaries, there are also controls to directly manipulate what text is currently being highlighted.
- Reader mode also has a refresh button, in case the contents of your clipboard have changed. And a history button to review stuff you were "reading" a minute ago. It is great. I have a common workflow of talking in wechat, copying the message someone has sent to me (can be done with long press), and jumping over to Pleco where the message will be laid out for convenient lookups.
- Pleco also offers "graded reader" addons; books and stories that are written at a simple level and intended to help Chinese learners develop. Those are fairly nice in and of themselves, but when you get them through Pleco there's also an integration with the reader mode.
-----
Tangentially, a feature that I'd like, as a dilettante in Greek, is the ability to look up every form of a word that inflects. Wiktionary often provides full tables of verbs for inflectional languages (see e.g. https://es.wiktionary.org/wiki/ser#Conjugaci%C3%B3n ), and I would find such tables valuable in a dictionary app. (Pleco doesn't have them and doesn't need them, since the level of inflection in Chinese is juuuuuuust above zero. Japanese has more.)
chrisvasselli 57 days ago [-]
Thanks, this is really useful. I've got some of those in my app, but this gives me a good set of features to aim for as well.
SiVal 58 days ago [-]
Not to mention the huge amount of subtitled media available online.
Where are some of the best places to find it?
thaumasiotes 57 days ago [-]
viki.com if you like TV dramas. Crunchyroll for anime?
insane_dreamer 58 days ago [-]
Having used Pleco for years, it really is the best dictionary type app I've encountered.
majewsky 58 days ago [-]
> My brother and sister study Japanese and they use jisho, which is much worse. When I hassle them about it, they're not aware of anything better.
Not sure if this is exactly what you have in mind, but have a look at https://ichi.moe. It splits a sentence into tokens and then gives you the JMdict entries for each token (i.e. same base dictionary data as Jisho).
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 Chinese<->English and Japanese<->English 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 J<->E dictionary (Kenkyusha [2]) is still better than the best commercial C<->E 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.
Been thinking about adding EPWING dictionary support to Nihongo for a long time, maybe it’s time to make that happen. It seems to be the only way to get good J-J definitions in particular.
thaumasiotes 57 days ago [-]
Mostly I mean the paid add-on dictionaries. In dictionaries, you're getting what you pay for.
The interface to the dictionaries is good, but very straightforward. I don't think there's anything magical about it.
> In fact, the EB apps seem to offer more advanced functionality like dictionary groups and different search types (prefix/suffix/infix/exact/full-text).
Those search types are also available in Pleco, but you have to read the documentation to learn about them. The app has no way of teaching you to use them.
> In my eyes, the best general purpose J<->E dictionary (Kenkyusha [2]) is still better than the best commercial C<->E dictionaries, but it is aimed at Japanese speakers studying English and a bit hard to use for beginner Japanese learners.
I think this is a real issue. The native language of the intended audience has a huge effect on how useful the dictionary is for whom. This really shows up in the E -> C dictionaries available for Pleco, which seem to be targeted at Chinese speakers even when they are paired with C -> E dictionaries intended for English speakers. ABC / ABE is an offender there.
But by way of an example of what having a good dictionary means, here are the CC-CEDICT and ABC entries for 以:
-----
1. to use
2. by means of
3. according to
4. in order to
5. because of
6. at (a certain date or place)
-----
"coverb" [preposition]
1. using; taking - 以合成橡胶代替天然橡胶 use synthetic rubber in place of natural rubber
2. because of - 以盛产红茶著名 famous for abundantly producing black tea
3. in order to; so as to - 以应急需 in order to meet an urgent need
suffix
（"empty" verb suffix) - 加以 add; 给以 give
fixed construction
1. 以 A 为 B: take/regard A as B
2. 以 A 来说: as far as A is concerned
bound form [meanings that the character may express when it is part of another word, but not when it is independent]
from a point on in 以下，以北 [etc.]
-----
In my opinion, if you're using the PLC dictionary, you're not using Pleco correctly. (CC-CEDICT has lower quality entries, but is nevertheless better than PLC because it has entries that can't be found in other dictionaries, such as the Chinese names of foreign celebrities. PLC has OK quality, much better than CC-CEDICT, but if you're looking for entry quality you should use the paid dictionaries, which are quite far ahead of PLC.)
chrisvasselli 58 days ago [-]
Yotsuba-to is a great one to start with, it's actually one of the ones that there are vocab decks for in the app. :)
traceroute66 57 days ago [-]
> The Japanese learning space feels so crowded.
Let me fix that for you...
The Japanese learning space is crowded. With trash.
There's no "feels" about it.
Its full of apps and wesbites that focus purely on cramming Kanji. Which alone is stupid, because you then find out about Kanji readings and compound Kanji. Which means you've wasted your life cramming only a fraction of the permutations.
There's only one way to properly learn a language, be it Japanese or any other. That is immersion.
Use graded readers for reading. Find the equivalent for listening. Use apps like Hello Talk to find opportunities to speak with willing victims.
You cannot learn a language through vocabulary alone, constantly referring back to your mother-tongue will not get you anywhere except endless avenues of frustrations and throw-away "where is the toilet" phrases.
You have to learn to think in the language you are learning, not constantly translate everything back to your mother-tongue.
There is no easy route, anyone who says there is is not telling the truth.
ehnto 58 days ago [-]
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.
mkenny 57 days ago [-]
Regarding the Wanikani memory associations, I feel similarly about this. I speak Chinese and learned characters without any of these mnemonic devices. Not being a Japanese learner, I am only roughly familiar with Wanikani through market research I did while developing my app for learning Chinese. But I would think that the promise of mnemonics usually sounds great but, even if very effective, I imagine that it's harder to get users who are at any level other than beginner because I would think anyone who already knows even just a few hundred characters or so would feel the urge to skip past assigning radicals with arbitrary mnemonics. And from what I can tell, you have to build a users foundation with these required mnemonic building blocks before they can do anything meaningful with the product.
jbm 58 days ago [-]
Once you pass intermediate, it gets even worse. Anki, Shinjigen, Aozora Bunko and a Kindle with a generous book budget on the Amazon.co.jp store is what I do now (that, and consulting for a Japanese company).
Related, if you are a beginner, apps other than Anki were a waste of time to me. (Actually, the most effective thing for me was basically being wrecked in a summer university level course and only getting out by the skin of my teeth thanks to the final exam; but I don't recommend that either)
eloisant 58 days ago [-]
Yes I really second Anki, when you're learning it's much better to create your own flash cards for the new words you encounter than having an app throw you random vocabulary words.
gabelschlager 57 days ago [-]
There are sites like japanese.io, that allow you to copy/paste any text and get vocabulary lookup, furigana support, allow to add words to a flashcard deck and other things.
I really like their idea and feel such a platform would add a lot of benefit, since you can read whatever you care about. Sadly, the site struggles with longer texts (the UI is not optimized for it) and their flashcard system isn't that great. I have been toying with a similar idea myself. I'd love to read my ebooks with an easy way to look up vocabulary and easily creating flashcard decks containing all unknown words. However, getting the morphological analysis correct while providing fast dictionary lookup has been quite the challenge. This is the first larger project I've attempted so far, so lack of experience definitely is an issue in that regard.
So if anyone has some ideas, feel free to share them. It's not something I pursue commercially, so lack of market doesn't bother me.
chrisvasselli 57 days ago [-]
You should check out my other app, Nihongo (https://nihongo-app.com), it has functionality like this, and is one of the reasons I developed it in the first place.
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.
ranger_danger 58 days ago [-]
nihongonomori.com (and their youtube channel 日本語の森) is most certainly not for beginners, definitely give them a try. They teach everything completely in Japanese. There are also other youtube channels that are all in Japanese but geared towards foreign speakers who are learning, like あかね的日本語教室, もしもしゆうすけ or Haruka Real Japanese.
resonious 58 days ago [-]
Agree on reading. The one tool I feel I want is a good OCR + dictionary setup, as a quick escape hatch for physical books.
I actually cobbled together something like that using Google's OCR API for Android. Works well for me but might be too janky for release. Maybe I should release it as a good tool for upper intermediates.
Ahh yes that's basically perfect! Let me know when there's an Android version ;)
chrisvasselli 58 days ago [-]
Haha yes! I would LOVE to make the app for Android someday. But as a solo dev, it’s just too much to take on on my own. If Nihongo ever blows up and I make enough to hire someone to help me out, an Android app is top of my list.
spankalee 58 days ago [-]
Web apps work everywhere, fwiw
lostgame 58 days ago [-]
If I’m paying for an app; and it’s not native, it usually annoys the hell out of me; I’ll gravitate towards a native option every time.
glandium 58 days ago [-]
Oh wow, first time I see an OCR that can deal with 行書体. How extensive is your dataset for 行書 and do you also have 草書 or 隷書?
chrisvasselli 58 days ago [-]
Under the hood, it's actually using Google's Cloud OCR API. Not sure how well it handles 草書 or 隷書, but it does a pretty remarkable job with 行書. Also does surprisingly well with super pixelated text. I can look up words in 16-bit games trying to squeeze kanji into 16x16 sprites or something, and it holds up incredibly well.
You can also swap out the OCR API it uses. Right now I support Google and ocr.space.
chrisvasselli 58 days ago [-]
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 makes it so you can tap on words to get a quick definition.
Nerada 58 days ago [-]
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?
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.
chrisvasselli 58 days ago [-]
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.
eloisant 58 days ago [-]
I used to live in Japan so I have a pretty good conversation level but still struggle with reading.
I tried many apps but it never really "sticked", especially as you said most are geared towards beginner and it's often a hassle until the app can figure out your actual level.
So I ended up biting the bullet and taking online group lessons. It is much more expensive, but also way better! I finally got back on track and now I feel like I'm progressing.
glandium 58 days ago [-]
Online group lessons? I'm intrigued, I've only ever seen 1-on-1 stuff. Does that work like normal classrooms, but on Zoom or whatever? With possible breakouts in smaller groups?
PS: Erwan, is that you?
eloisant 57 days ago [-]
> Does that work like normal classrooms, but on Zoom or whatever?
Yes. I really prefer group lessons, but in my area there are no group lessons for my level.
> With possible breakouts in smaller groups?
In my class we're only 3 students so no need for breakouts
> PS: Erwan, is that you?
yes :)
bamboozled 57 days ago [-]
I do 1 on 1 lessons for an hour each week via Zoom. Afterwards my brain feels "rearranged" but IMO there is no substitute for it.
dayvid 58 days ago [-]
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.
chrisvasselli 58 days ago [-]
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. :)
pizza_pleb 57 days ago [-]
I’m learning French with reading/media too and realized media will never exhaust itself like beginner apps do. I wanted an open-ended platform to to follow that reasoning, so I created https://languageroadmap.com as a way to keep finding interesting target-language media at my skill level.
glandium 58 days ago [-]
Satori Reader seems interesting in the reading space, although I never gave it a try.
diob 58 days ago [-]
Yes, I tried it, I think it would be good if you're not picky.
I couldn't get into any of the stories, so my sub for two years just expired. Might resub if I can get some discipline.
For now I'm reading through books on my own that are interesting.
owenpalmer 58 days ago [-]
Have you taken a look at LingQ? I highly recommend it!
zkid18 57 days ago [-]
Have you been looking for an N3+ app that will help with your studying? I've found it difficult to find the perfect one.
58 days ago [-]
dr-detroit 57 days ago [-]
dayjaby 57 days ago [-]
Huge shoutout to jpdb.io, which is imho second to none as they have flashcard sets for 5600 different books/animes/mangas/novels etc.
That's literally the best way to learn to read a language: reading actual Japanese written by a Japanese. No artificial workbook sentences. Actual context that surrounds your sentences. And you only have to deal with unknown vocabulary, where jpdb steps in.
dtdynasty 57 days ago [-]
Huge +1 to jpdb. If I were to start my journey over I would just use jpdb instead of recreating a worse version by hacking together plugins and handmade tools.
jwrallie 58 days ago [-]
Spotted some typo (Nihnogo), so you might want to double check your spelling.
I'm not sure if it is a personal thing, but I would like to have an idea of your pricing before trying your app, and it was not clear from the web page.
This one might be subjective, but I've lived in Japan a couple of years and it is quite rare to hear somebody saying 見ましょう in the context of your example. I get the point is to teach the grammar, but if you claim your app lead people to fluency, there might be better examples to show up in your screenshots. Maybe I'm not the target customer, but I get the feeling I'll be learning more for passing the jlpt tests and less for the real world.
glandium 58 days ago [-]
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.
Tor3 58 days ago [-]
chan-suffixed isn't really age limited - I have friends (both genders) in their sixties where everybody use a -chan form for their names. It's more about familiarity. Think e.g. "おばちゃん“。
glandium 58 days ago [-]
Thus "specific circumstances". But that's quite rare to hear for adult males, and only from a limited set of people in that person's entourage.
Tor3 58 days ago [-]
There's no way I can pull up statistics, I only have my own experience to rely on. I know a couple of men in their sixties who only go by -chan, except in formal situations. And one woman who hates her given name so much that she only goes by a different -chan name, strangers and friends alike. As for "おばちゃん" about middle-aged women you happens to know, from what I see it's quite common to address nearby and not-so-nearby neighbours that way, though it may depend on where in the country you are, as is the case for so many practices elsewhere.
As for -chan in general, with my wife's rather large network of friends and others which I have observed over the years, it starts out with -san but over time it always migrate to -chan, as their friendships grow closer, at nearly 100% for women and quite a few of the men too. And completely age independent. It's true that using -chan at the start is definitely a young person thing, but as described above it's not limited to that - it's just that if you don't know someone you only use it with children, or at least someone quite a bit younger than you. But there's no age limitation per se in it.
eloisant 58 days ago [-]
It's not really an age limitation, but it's much easier to use "chan" for kids.
Basically -chan for girls and -kun for boys is used pretty much automatically for smaller kids, even if you meet them for the first time.
For adults it's more complex, it depends how close you are, how that person is used to be called among family/close friends, etc.
chrisvasselli 58 days ago [-]
Oh thanks! I swear I must've read that typo 100 times and never noticed it. Good point about the pricing and 見ましょう examples, I'll consider changing it to something else.
SiVal 58 days ago [-]
Chris, I'll second the pricing feedback. It sounded interesting, so I went to the App Store. FREE. Yay! But with in-app purchases. Oh. Okay, I guess that's how they all do it these days. Could mean you don't really need to pay for most features. Or you can't realistically use it without paying $2. Or maybe $200. Or maybe $10/month forever. Who knows? The App Store policy is to hide all but the initial price, so developers' policy is to make that zero and hide the actual cost in "in-app".
But, the website will explain what you get for how much, right? The website explanation is that you potentially get lots of great features, and if you want to know which features cost how much, go to the App Store and "buy" it for "free" and see what happens.
So, I figured maybe I would read some reviews. Later. Too busy now. If it was impulse purchase price, I would have just bought it, but I can't tell, so I'll put it on my mental "check it out someday" list. For now, I just shrugged and moved on, but since you're participating in the discussion here, and I'm a small dev too, I figured I'd just give you some feedback from the "usability lab", FWIW.
chrisvasselli 58 days ago [-]
This is great feedback, thanks. I’ll definitely be putting pricing information on the website.
lostgame 58 days ago [-]
It’s not just you; at all - in fact; if I don’t see the price immediately; online, in person; anywhere - I’m uninterested and assume either you don’t think you’ve priced your product fairly; or you feel the need to psychologically manipulate people to stay on your website longer to seek more information, rather than being immediately upfront.
anigbrowl 58 days ago [-]
Looks great and I am your target customer prior language experience but very out of practice and wanting to go from adequacy to fluency), but why phone-only? I was quite disappointed as I have a Mac but don't own an iPhone, and while I'd be willing to pay for this I don't want to buy a new device just to try it out. Another reason is that for study I actually like to sit at a desk and make notes with a pencil on paper.
chrisvasselli 58 days ago [-]
Thanks! Phone-only for now just because I wanted to get it out the door and focus on polishing a single user experience, but I definitely plan on adding iPad support soon. That's good feedback that you like studying on your Mac, I'll consider putting together a Mac version as well (although the iPad version will at least run decently well on any Apple-Silicon Mac).
gimmeTheJalup 58 days ago [-]
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.
chrisvasselli 58 days ago [-]
Glad to hear you've had such a good experience! And you've actually given me some good ideas about how I can improve my marketing too!
trophycase 58 days ago [-]
If you are trying to learn Japanese I highly recommend the Youtube Channel:
It explains the actual structure of the language in a way I've not seen anywhere else. The creator passed away last year but the content is still incredible and useful.
Tor3 58 days ago [-]
Agreed. It's tragic that she passed away. The content of her 92 videos describe Japanese grammar better than any textbook in existence (ignoring her own small booklet - and unfortunately she passed before she could finish her newer book).
risingsubmarine 57 days ago [-]
Her grammar lessons were so insightful it was actually exhilarating to watch them for first time. So good I downloaded the entire channel.
toxik 58 days ago [-]
This is one of those cases where the hyphenation really matters.
A Japanese learning app would be an app in or by Japanese for learning things.
A Japanese-learning app would be an app for learning Japanese.
chrisvasselli 58 days ago [-]
Whoops! Japanese-learning app then.
valenterry 58 days ago [-]
What I'd like to have is an app that allows me to easily select specific vocab that I want to learn (with flashcards).
Essentially, I would pick "cooking" and get a list of vocabulary, sorted by usage/importance that contains all the words that I need for "cooking" such as tools, ingredients, techniques and so on.
Or the same for traveling, hiking, cycling, ordering in a restaurant, buying a house, ...
That would be super useful.
sirmarksalot 58 days ago [-]
This looks interesting to me, but I've been looking for a language learning app that goes beyond flash cards and SRS as its core teaching concept. SRS is great for learning individual vocabulary in a vacuum, but kind of falls apart when you need to teach bigger concepts like number systems, grammatical theory, or conjugation rules. If you've already been taught the rules, then an SRS app like Wanikani can be a really great supplement to that, but it's not going to serve as a full learning experience.
This is where I find Duolingo and its imitators really frustrating, and I've been looking for a higher-effort product that actually uses subject-appropriate teaching strategies, and not treating SRS as a silver bullet.
The "puzzle" feature here looks interesting, so I'd like to see how integrated it is with the concepts, vs. being another view onto "word <-> translation" and SRS.
teen 58 days ago [-]
Lingodeer is really good. Check it out.
_rm 57 days ago [-]
This is great. I'm not going to recommend porting to web (or android) because it's too obvious :). Maybe buy out his existing other assets too?
But if you aligned it with the JLPT I would subscribe. JLPT is the official gauge of progress and is a great motivator.
glandium 57 days ago [-]
I don't think JLPT is granular enough to be a gauge of progress. It's only really useful to show to institutions that ask for it (implying N3 to N5 are mostly useless).
_rm 57 days ago [-]
The progress does feel more real though, which motivates.
To a large extent even an N1 is useless too for practical uses. It doesn't cover production so employers etc are more concerned with interview performance anyway. But it's psychologically validating.
I have a friend who has N1 and who still just works as an English teacher, so it's not like it suddenly opens lucrative doors.
Also the N5 is a requirement for some student visas I believe.
chrisvasselli 56 days ago [-]
Planning on at least adding "this is approximately JLPT N4" kind of tags on the levels in the future.
mkenny 57 days ago [-]
Great work! I just downloaded the app and was testing it out. I like the way the onboarding is down with a gentle suggestion of what to do first without locking the user out of parts of the app. I believe users should be able to explore as much as they want to decide if something is beyond their current comprehension.
One thing, when learning some of the hiragana, the sensitivity seems to be set pretty high on the precision of handwriting to get accepted. I must have tried え 10 times before just swiping down to get out of it because it would not accept the second stroke. I didn't have trouble with the others leading up to it though.
chrisvasselli 57 days ago [-]
Thanks for that feedback. The drawing system was originally developed for writing kanji, used in my other app Nihongo. Kanji doesn't have the same kind of long strokes that change direction as hiragana, so I could see it not behaving as well for those. I'll see if I can improve it, thanks!
frellus 58 days ago [-]
Wow, I really like this app. The way you've done this, it's extremely visually appealing, it's well designed and from the start I felt productive in learning where I'm weakest with my Japanese writing.
Well done!!
chrisvasselli 58 days ago [-]
Thank you so much, I'm so glad you like it!
kasool 53 days ago [-]
Hi, I’ve been using the app for a few days and I’m really enjoying it! Until recently I was using WaniKani, which I still enjoy, but I’ve been intimidated on how to start learning real grammar and conversation. Would enjoy a web or Mac version as some others may have pointed out.
raylad 58 days ago [-]
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 the way.
timr 58 days ago [-]
> 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 Japanese language schools), but that's not necessary (or necessarily advisable), and going from that to "I must first learn the characters" is pathological. People get stuck on this because they spend weeks/months/years doing rote memorization, and make no progress toward understanding the actual language.
Eventually you get to a place where you can start to infer word meanings from kanji, but that's a lot like using latin roots to infer the meanings of unknown words in English. It's a nice-to-have, not an essential tool, and you'll get there anyway if you simply study words.
ehnto 58 days ago [-]
I think an issue self learners have is that they are often reading only. Without knowing the kanji you can't actually read anything. With furigana and the phonetic alphabets you can at least read them out loud but I think reading only is why you see people thinking they need to learn a bunch of kanji before doing anything else.
I agree with you though, you really benfit from the dense web of association you get from actually reading and hearing words in sentences. Much quicker path to practical fluency in my opinion, and you get the benefit of learning words in contexts you will actually use.
chrisvasselli 58 days ago [-]
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.
Ruarl 58 days ago [-]
In his books, Heisig recommends learning all the joyo kanji before anything else. It's what his books are for, so it isn't a surprise, but perhaps that's where the idea that it's useful to do so came from.
eloisant 58 days ago [-]
Yes, that's his point of view but he's a bit alone on that. It probably works if you're not using Japanese at all while learning the Kanji, but if you do need to use Japanese (i.e. freshly arrived in Japan) it doesn't really make sense to spend 1 year on kanji before learning the language.
For most people kanji is better learned with vocabulary.
You definitely need to learn hiragana first, and not use romaji at all, but that can be done in 2 weeks.
Ruarl 57 days ago [-]
The idea is somewhat persistent amongst beginners though, whether sources agree or not. I guess that’s a problem of community-lead learning, instead of instructor-lead.
raylad 57 days ago [-]
You misunderstand me. I am actually referring to katakana and hiragana, not kanji.
Just having to learn those first will stop a large percentage of people who would otherwise be able to learn to talk reasonably well.
chrisvasselli 56 days ago [-]
I'm going to add some ability to display things in romaji in the future, so users can start on some of the actual sentences before completing hiragana/katakana. Agree that getting through all the characters before starting anything else is not motivating.
ehnto 58 days ago [-]
I think conversational fluency takes a bit of gumption, in that you need to find people to talk to. You can join Japanese/English discord servers, get into the voice chats and listen and learn. iTalki is an app where you can schedule conversation time with tutors. There are also lots of YouTube channels that focus on natural Japanese and not textbook learning. But the theme with all of these is that no one is guiding you through, there's no easy to follow path and it is very DIY. I think drilling kanji catches people because it feels like a gamified progress that ends in fluency, if only you could drill enough kanji. So it becomes a morale failing in someones mind, rather than seeing it as a failure to teach.
cehrlich 57 days ago [-]
This looks great, and I remember seeing Jalup a few years ago. I'm alright at the language now (N1 a year ago, 50+ books read, etc) and so deep into Anki at this point that I doubt I'll ever transition away, but I could see recommending this to someone who wants an easier solution.
58 days ago [-]
entropicgravity 57 days ago [-]
In learning a new language job 1 is get pronunciation correct. For adults this be very tricky unless you're a muscian or you listen to a lot of movies in the target language.
Job two is get strong hearing.
Grammar is last.
Language is a sport, you have to play with an opponent (or friend)
ngcc_hk 58 days ago [-]
Fan boys aside.
I use another app called learn Japanese !! (Plus the easy Japanese news which is not related). That seems to be similar superficially. I did pay for that to get the additional feature. (and forget how I pay it. Does not seem to be subscription based.)
kinbiko 57 days ago [-]
Your timing could not be better. Just this morning I was thinking how I'm set on the kanji front (with Anki) but I could really use a system for learning more vocab and grammar at an advanced level.
Then this came along. Excited to have a go!
chrisvasselli 57 days ago [-]
Awesome! Let me know if you have any feedback after playing around with it.
revskill 58 days ago [-]
I don't see the Reading/Pronounciation part. Knowing how to pronouce correctly the Kanji characters seem like an impossible task.
chrisvasselli 58 days ago [-]
Kanji lessons coming soon. :)
alexklarjr 58 days ago [-]
Am I right, full app cost is 500 dorrars?
chrisvasselli 58 days ago [-]
Individual courses are $120, unlocking all seven is $300 (USD).
russelg 58 days ago [-]
Nice! Shame it's iOS only. I guess I could run it on my Macbook...
nosefrog 58 days ago [-]
Cool! Does anyone know of apps similar to this for Chinese?
mkenny 57 days ago [-]
I am not sure which aspects you are looking to recreate exactly, but please check out my Chinese learning web app (JinbuPal).
The primary focus is to help you learn high frequency characters and words as quickly as possible while giving you real-time data as to the application of what you've learned. You can gain familiarity with character pronunciations and then learn words that use only characters you've already studied. Seeing your progress score helps boost your confidence when starting to read real Chinese texts.
You will reach 80%+ recognition of characters and knowledge of words through completing everything in the app. At that point, you'll feel much more confident to approach real-world written Chinese from any resource you find personally interesting.
100phlecs 58 days ago [-]
What do you like about this app that you would want for your chinese learning?
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 wish there was a better way, but tools crafted for intermediate folks just don't have a market given the small subset who gets there.
Japanese is just really, really hard for computers to deal with. The only reason I got parsing and word segmentation to be pretty good was because I was so familiar with the language and wrote a 3000 line post-processing function on the tokens to get reasonable results. We have a few similar post processing steps like one to better handle separated verbs in German but it’s nothing compared to what we needed for Japanese.
Additionally Japanese kind of breaks our word model, despite being aware of it and planning for it from the start and every part of the app needs special logic to support Japanese properly.
It’s a lovely language, honestly my favorite language I’ve spent time with, but it’s non-trivial to handle it in general with code.
Happy to answer any questions and also, self-promo: https://polyglatte.com for my project. Happy to make improvements to better support you / the intermediate reader use case, just let me know.
> (tango o suru, seriously what does that mean?)
Thanks for pointing this out, there's actually a mismatch between the JSON fixture used to load this article into the DB and the raw text from which that JSON should have been generated: there's a missing token there. Frankly it's just good (or perhaps bad) fortune that it broke in such a way that it kind of made sense without that word there.
I will get that fixed up along with a general rephrasing/look over by a native again.
It would be great if you could align it with the JLPT. Including the listening, which I think is the hardest.
I'm useless at learning languages, basically foreign language dyslexic. I've found targeting the tests & applying for then in advance was the only thing that allowed me to progress.
They're a huge motivator. Not just the looming deadline effect, but also passing makes you feel good, as it's a genuine asset as much as it is proof of progress.
Yeah we have JLPT word lists available and you can set them as a focus and learn the words from the JLPT word lists from clips / snippets of videos and articles -- perhaps there's deeper integration we could do there too.
I agree with JLPT being a useful tool, I personally used their word lists as a core vocab builder when I was studying a lot of Japanese.
> I'm useless at learning languages, basically foreign language dyslexic.
Don't be too hard on yourself! If you were able to pass the JLPT at any level, I think you're doing great.
One of the motivating ideas of Polyglatte is to make language learning more fun. I'm a big believer in mass exposure and quality time spent with the language. I think for most people, most of the time, just being able to have fun with the language will give you great results.
If you're looking for new ways to improve your listening, consider watching some YouTube videos, not with the intention of understanding everything but with the intention of having a good time. For me, listening skill is something that largely came out of nowhere. I gave my brain a bunch of stimulus (Japanese YouTube videos I'd watch for hours every day, even if I didn't really understand it) and then I woke up one day and I just understood most of it or it felt like my brain was suddenly able to keep pace at the very least.
Anyways, the most important part of that system is finding videos you want to watch even if you don't fully understand them and that you'd want to watch even if it wasn't helping you develop a skill.
My app Nihongo was the app I built for myself when I was getting to the advanced level, and wanted to focus on learning from native content. It helps automatically create flashcards from words you look up, OCR, etc.
Nihongo Lessons is a companion app for people that want something more guided to help them learn vocab/grammar. It covers everything from beginner-advanced, but is probably most suited for intermediate folks who want to make a push towards advanced.
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.
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 viewer. In fact, it's a dictionary viewer that is not capable of correctly identifying word breaks; you have to handle that job yourself.
My brother and sister study Japanese and they use jisho, which is much worse. When I hassle them about it, they're not aware of anything better.
† In its primary and most useful function. It does have some complicated functionality available, like handwriting recognition and OCR through the camera.
I only just started learning Chinese, so I haven't looked at Pleco yet and can't really compare them.
I'll agree with some other comments that once you get into the area bordering intermediate and advanced proficiency there are many fewer resources, but by then you have a better idea of what you don't know, and and can use your existing base to sort of plot a path to fill those gaps.
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!
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.
Words generally accept several different parameters (known in linguistics as "complements"). If I look up the FrameNet entry for "notify (v.)" ( https://framenet2.icsi.berkeley.edu/fnReports/data/lu/lu9183... ), I see that it belongs to the semantic frame of "telling", with 7 "elements" potentially in play. Those are:
1. Addressee
2. Manner
3. Medium
4. Message
5. Speaker
6. Time
7. Topic
Some of those elements can appear with "notify" because they can appear generally on any verb (like Time, as in "I notified him yesterday"), and some are more specific to "notify" itself (like Message, as in "I notified him of your decision").
The FrameNet entries for notify also tell us how each element may be marked in a real English sentence, and provide examples in which each element is color coded. This is what I want to see in more dictionaries. I particularly want it for elements that are specific to the particular word.
For a concrete example from my own life, I spent a long time being aware that 保护 was Chinese for "protect", and yet I was completely unable to figure out how to use it in a sentence. The issue is that "protecting" involves (a) an agent, the subject of 保护; (b) a person being helped, the object of 保护; and (c) a threat. No dictionary that I consulted indicated how to talk about the threat in a sentence in which the verb was 保护, nor did any of them even feature an example sentence in which a threat appeared. Modeling a sentence on the example of English, in which the threat involved in a protecting action is marked by the preposition from, does not work and will confuse Chinese speakers.
It turns out that the way to mark the threat is to include it in a subordinate clause governed by the verb avoid. 我保护她免挨饿, "I [will] protect her to avoid going hungry", not "I will protect her from going hungry". This is important information if you're trying to speak Chinese! But it's absent from the dictionaries. It is intensely frustrating to know exactly what information I'm looking for, to know that a dictionary is the place to find it, and yet to find that it is mysteriously absent from the dictionary.
- The main panel. You put in characters, and Pleco calls up a list of dictionary entries. As I mentioned above, if you put in several words at once, Pleco will try to call up entries for all of them, but it can't tell where one word ends and another begins, so if you do this you're not unlikely to end up fetching incorrect entries.
- The entry view.
- The stroke order view. Tells you the stroke order for a given character and will play an animation of the same on request.
- The dictionaries. There are a lot of them for different purposes and the quality level is high. This is easily the most important aspect of Pleco.
- Handwriting entry. You get a full screen to draw on like a touchpad. (One character at a time.) Input goes to the lookup field. There is no time limit on drawing the character (as is normal in handwriting IMEs), because this is an app for language learners. This is, obviously, an important way of looking up characters you don't recognize.
- "Reader" mode. When you enter the reader, the contents of your clipboard are laid out. (For this to be useful, you should have some Chinese text in your clipboard.) You can click on Chinese characters to open a popup window with dictionary entries for whatever is highlighted. (This will automatically highlight the character you click on, as well as any following characters that can join with the first one to make a single dictionary entry.) Because Pleco can't recognize word boundaries, there are also controls to directly manipulate what text is currently being highlighted.
- Reader mode also has a refresh button, in case the contents of your clipboard have changed. And a history button to review stuff you were "reading" a minute ago. It is great. I have a common workflow of talking in wechat, copying the message someone has sent to me (can be done with long press), and jumping over to Pleco where the message will be laid out for convenient lookups.
- Pleco also offers "graded reader" addons; books and stories that are written at a simple level and intended to help Chinese learners develop. Those are fairly nice in and of themselves, but when you get them through Pleco there's also an integration with the reader mode.
-----
Tangentially, a feature that I'd like, as a dilettante in Greek, is the ability to look up every form of a word that inflects. Wiktionary often provides full tables of verbs for inflectional languages (see e.g. https://es.wiktionary.org/wiki/ser#Conjugaci%C3%B3n ), and I would find such tables valuable in a dictionary app. (Pleco doesn't have them and doesn't need them, since the level of inflection in Chinese is juuuuuuust above zero. Japanese has more.)
Where are some of the best places to find it?
Not sure if this is exactly what you have in mind, but have a look at https://ichi.moe. It splits a sentence into tokens and then gives you the JMdict entries for each token (i.e. same base dictionary data as Jisho).
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 Chinese<->English and Japanese<->English 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 J<->E dictionary (Kenkyusha [2]) is still better than the best commercial C<->E 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
The interface to the dictionaries is good, but very straightforward. I don't think there's anything magical about it.
> In fact, the EB apps seem to offer more advanced functionality like dictionary groups and different search types (prefix/suffix/infix/exact/full-text).
Those search types are also available in Pleco, but you have to read the documentation to learn about them. The app has no way of teaching you to use them.
> In my eyes, the best general purpose J<->E dictionary (Kenkyusha [2]) is still better than the best commercial C<->E dictionaries, but it is aimed at Japanese speakers studying English and a bit hard to use for beginner Japanese learners.
I think this is a real issue. The native language of the intended audience has a huge effect on how useful the dictionary is for whom. This really shows up in the E -> C dictionaries available for Pleco, which seem to be targeted at Chinese speakers even when they are paired with C -> E dictionaries intended for English speakers. ABC / ABE is an offender there.
But by way of an example of what having a good dictionary means, here are the CC-CEDICT and ABC entries for 以:
-----
1. to use
2. by means of
3. according to
4. in order to
5. because of
6. at (a certain date or place)
-----
"coverb" [preposition]
1. using; taking - 以合成橡胶代替天然橡胶 use synthetic rubber in place of natural rubber
2. because of - 以盛产红茶著名 famous for abundantly producing black tea
3. in order to; so as to - 以应急需 in order to meet an urgent need
suffix
（"empty" verb suffix) - 加以 add; 给以 give
fixed construction
1. 以 A 为 B: take/regard A as B
2. 以 A 来说: as far as A is concerned
bound form [meanings that the character may express when it is part of another word, but not when it is independent]
from a point on in 以下，以北 [etc.]
-----
In my opinion, if you're using the PLC dictionary, you're not using Pleco correctly. (CC-CEDICT has lower quality entries, but is nevertheless better than PLC because it has entries that can't be found in other dictionaries, such as the Chinese names of foreign celebrities. PLC has OK quality, much better than CC-CEDICT, but if you're looking for entry quality you should use the paid dictionaries, which are quite far ahead of PLC.)
Let me fix that for you...
The Japanese learning space is crowded. With trash.
There's no "feels" about it.
Its full of apps and wesbites that focus purely on cramming Kanji. Which alone is stupid, because you then find out about Kanji readings and compound Kanji. Which means you've wasted your life cramming only a fraction of the permutations.
There's only one way to properly learn a language, be it Japanese or any other. That is immersion.
Use graded readers for reading. Find the equivalent for listening. Use apps like Hello Talk to find opportunities to speak with willing victims.
You cannot learn a language through vocabulary alone, constantly referring back to your mother-tongue will not get you anywhere except endless avenues of frustrations and throw-away "where is the toilet" phrases.
You have to learn to think in the language you are learning, not constantly translate everything back to your mother-tongue.
There is no easy route, anyone who says there is is not telling the truth.
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.
Related, if you are a beginner, apps other than Anki were a waste of time to me. (Actually, the most effective thing for me was basically being wrecked in a summer university level course and only getting out by the skin of my teeth thanks to the final exam; but I don't recommend that either)
I really like their idea and feel such a platform would add a lot of benefit, since you can read whatever you care about. Sadly, the site struggles with longer texts (the UI is not optimized for it) and their flashcard system isn't that great. I have been toying with a similar idea myself. I'd love to read my ebooks with an easy way to look up vocabulary and easily creating flashcard decks containing all unknown words. However, getting the morphological analysis correct while providing fast dictionary lookup has been quite the challenge. This is the first larger project I've attempted so far, so lack of experience definitely is an issue in that regard.
So if anyone has some ideas, feel free to share them. It's not something I pursue commercially, so lack of market doesn't bother me.
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 actually cobbled together something like that using Google's OCR API for Android. Works well for me but might be too janky for release. Maybe I should release it as a good tool for upper intermediates.
iOS-only though.
You can also swap out the OCR API it uses. Right now I support Google and ocr.space.
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 makes it so you can tap on words to get a quick definition.
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.
I tried many apps but it never really "sticked", especially as you said most are geared towards beginner and it's often a hassle until the app can figure out your actual level.
So I ended up biting the bullet and taking online group lessons. It is much more expensive, but also way better! I finally got back on track and now I feel like I'm progressing.
PS: Erwan, is that you?
Yes. I really prefer group lessons, but in my area there are no group lessons for my level.
> With possible breakouts in smaller groups?
In my class we're only 3 students so no need for breakouts
> PS: Erwan, is that you?
yes :)
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.
I couldn't get into any of the stories, so my sub for two years just expired. Might resub if I can get some discipline.
For now I'm reading through books on my own that are interesting.
That's literally the best way to learn to read a language: reading actual Japanese written by a Japanese. No artificial workbook sentences. Actual context that surrounds your sentences. And you only have to deal with unknown vocabulary, where jpdb steps in.
I'm not sure if it is a personal thing, but I would like to have an idea of your pricing before trying your app, and it was not clear from the web page.
This one might be subjective, but I've lived in Japan a couple of years and it is quite rare to hear somebody saying 見ましょう in the context of your example. I get the point is to teach the grammar, but if you claim your app lead people to fluency, there might be better examples to show up in your screenshots. Maybe I'm not the target customer, but I get the feeling I'll be learning more for passing the jlpt tests and less for the real world.
Basically -chan for girls and -kun for boys is used pretty much automatically for smaller kids, even if you meet them for the first time.
For adults it's more complex, it depends how close you are, how that person is used to be called among family/close friends, etc.
But, the website will explain what you get for how much, right? The website explanation is that you potentially get lots of great features, and if you want to know which features cost how much, go to the App Store and "buy" it for "free" and see what happens.
So, I figured maybe I would read some reviews. Later. Too busy now. If it was impulse purchase price, I would have just bought it, but I can't tell, so I'll put it on my mental "check it out someday" list. For now, I just shrugged and moved on, but since you're participating in the discussion here, and I'm a small dev too, I figured I'd just give you some feedback from the "usability lab", FWIW.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/@organicjapanesewithcuredol49
It explains the actual structure of the language in a way I've not seen anywhere else. The creator passed away last year but the content is still incredible and useful.
A Japanese learning app would be an app in or by Japanese for learning things.
A Japanese-learning app would be an app for learning Japanese.
Essentially, I would pick "cooking" and get a list of vocabulary, sorted by usage/importance that contains all the words that I need for "cooking" such as tools, ingredients, techniques and so on.
Or the same for traveling, hiking, cycling, ordering in a restaurant, buying a house, ...
That would be super useful.
This is where I find Duolingo and its imitators really frustrating, and I've been looking for a higher-effort product that actually uses subject-appropriate teaching strategies, and not treating SRS as a silver bullet.
The "puzzle" feature here looks interesting, so I'd like to see how integrated it is with the concepts, vs. being another view onto "word <-> translation" and SRS.
But if you aligned it with the JLPT I would subscribe. JLPT is the official gauge of progress and is a great motivator.
To a large extent even an N1 is useless too for practical uses. It doesn't cover production so employers etc are more concerned with interview performance anyway. But it's psychologically validating.
I have a friend who has N1 and who still just works as an English teacher, so it's not like it suddenly opens lucrative doors.
Also the N5 is a requirement for some student visas I believe.
One thing, when learning some of the hiragana, the sensitivity seems to be set pretty high on the precision of handwriting to get accepted. I must have tried え 10 times before just swiping down to get out of it because it would not accept the second stroke. I didn't have trouble with the others leading up to it though.
Well done!!
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 the way.
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 Japanese language schools), but that's not necessary (or necessarily advisable), and going from that to "I must first learn the characters" is pathological. People get stuck on this because they spend weeks/months/years doing rote memorization, and make no progress toward understanding the actual language.
Eventually you get to a place where you can start to infer word meanings from kanji, but that's a lot like using latin roots to infer the meanings of unknown words in English. It's a nice-to-have, not an essential tool, and you'll get there anyway if you simply study words.
I agree with you though, you really benfit from the dense web of association you get from actually reading and hearing words in sentences. Much quicker path to practical fluency in my opinion, and you get the benefit of learning words in contexts you will actually use.
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.
For most people kanji is better learned with vocabulary.
You definitely need to learn hiragana first, and not use romaji at all, but that can be done in 2 weeks.
Just having to learn those first will stop a large percentage of people who would otherwise be able to learn to talk reasonably well.
Job two is get strong hearing.
Grammar is last.
Language is a sport, you have to play with an opponent (or friend)
I use another app called learn Japanese !! (Plus the easy Japanese news which is not related). That seems to be similar superficially. I did pay for that to get the additional feature. (and forget how I pay it. Does not seem to be subscription based.)
Then this came along. Excited to have a go!
The primary focus is to help you learn high frequency characters and words as quickly as possible while giving you real-time data as to the application of what you've learned. You can gain familiarity with character pronunciations and then learn words that use only characters you've already studied. Seeing your progress score helps boost your confidence when starting to read real Chinese texts.
You will reach 80%+ recognition of characters and knowledge of words through completing everything in the app. At that point, you'll feel much more confident to approach real-world written Chinese from any resource you find personally interesting.