Show HN: I'm making an open-source platform for learning Japanese
Unfortunately, pretty much all language learning apps are closed-sourced and paid these days, and the ones that are free have unfortunately been abandoned.
But of course, just creating yet another language learning app was not enough - there has to be a unique selling point. And then I thought to myself: why not make it crazy and do what no other language learning app ever did by adding a gazillion different color themes and fonts, to really hit it home and honor the app's original inspiration, Monkeytype?
And so I did. Now, I'm looking to find contributors and testers for the early stages of the app.
Why? Because weebs and otakus deserve to have a 100% free, beautiful, quality language learning app too！
For anyone interested, you can check it out at --> https://kanadojo.com and let me know what you think ^ ^
https://learnjapanese.moe
https://alljapanesealltheti.me/ (this used to be THE guide for learning)
The communities are also… particular. People tend to espouse certain deep beliefs or attitudes that you just don’t see for other languages (and I don’t think complexity is the reason; you don’t see that for Chinese or Russian or Finnish, to name some other notoriously hard languages).
His result to efforts ratio listed back in the days was terrible and reading through is blog - back when it was a blog - was impossible. Everything read like an informercial and never got to the point.
Last time I checked it was a book club. Didn’t bother to check this time.
You mention "result to efforts ratio," but I'm not sure I understand what this could me. In language learning, "results" and "efforts" are more or less the same thing. If you read a lot of books, you'll be good at reading books. It's not like there's some reading that is "effort" reading and other reading that is "results" reading; it's all just reading. For most people, the goal of learning Japanese is to be able to use Japanese in the real world. In which case I don’t see why any amount of time spent using Japanese should count as effort (but not results), since that’s the whole point.
I never paid any money to AJATT nor agree with everything on the site, but did find it inspirational in various ways early on in my studies. I'm fluent in written and spoken Japanese, and I do think living in Japan as well as immersing myself in Japanese media was a big part of that. I studied French in high school and college using traditional courses and I was never a great French speaker, I think in large part because I didn't do much with French outside the classroom.
When I lived in Tokyo I met lots of immigrants that came over with little or no knowledge of Japanese and if they were working in ordinary jobs like in a restaurant or convenience store, they would usually be conversational in a couple months and verbally fluent in a half year. The ones that studied were usually ready to take the N1 after a few years.
People that struggled were usually in jobs like English teaching or programming where most of their day was not in Japanese.
And like I said above, if you want to learn Japanese, the whole point is to use it, so using Japanese for most of the day doesn’t necessarily seem like a burden.
Obviously it’s not for everyone, but that’s true of everything.
Do you think there is another, faster way to fluency?
I tried and failed several times to get started with Anki before having success with Wanikani. The key diffentiator for me was the learning step. Anki is great for remembering things you were taught or learned outside of it, but using Anki to learn new things is very much a learned skill that Wanikani holds your hand through.
I have N2 and am working on N1 now, and feel I still have a very long way to go before getting to CEFR C1. Now I only use Anki with the yomitan and takoboto integrations to quickly add any words I look up, which seems to be working well.
Writing and speaking are effective at establishing long term memories, it's why we do it for other things, but a language learning beginner has no idea if what they're writing makes sense or if there's any subtle mistakes in how they're pronouncing words or how they're putting them together, etc.
Language learning experts don't recommend you start speaking/writing unless you have a coach or have reached an intermediate level so that you can discern when something sounds native or not. That way you can self evaluate with recordings, etc.
It is an effective tool for learning, but for self-learning you're gonna be shooting yourself in the foot long term. You should only do it if you have, say, a partner that speaks the language and doesn't mind correcting you all the time.
For Japanese I recommend that you do learn how to write kana/kanji from the start, and even some vocab if you want. But stop there. Don't write sentences, don't try to talk to japanese people on those apps/discord etc. and wait until you're at an intermediate level to do it, otherwise you'll form some very bad habits that are very hard to undo.
Do you have any citations for the idea that it’s better not to practice actually using the language while trying to learn it?
These days AI can tell you if it makes sense and the subtle mistakes you are making. I think this view point is outdated now that everyone has a personal language tutor in their pocket.
There's even a self-deprecating slang term: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%83%AF%E3%83%BC%E3%83%97...
Even just forgetting about Kanji for a moment, just like in other languages, written Japanese is not identical to spoken Japanese and requires practice if you want to be able to compose natural sounding texts, emails, letters, and so on.
1. For picking the kana answers, using the keyboard key is better than numbers. When you actually type an え, you type 'e', so it's a useful mapping to learn in terms of how IME works.
2. For vocabulary, there should be an option to turn off romaji in favor of kana only. No explanation needed I think
3. The vocab quiz, between kanji and just an english word, is an anti-pattern in my opinion. Recognizing the meaning if vocab in a full japanese sentence is a much better basic quiz, especially since not all words have 1-1 mappings. It also doesn't quiz on the reading, which seems weird. Also, an easy example of something confusing there is that 辺 is 'area', but if I see 'area' my first thought is 面積 (like the area of a triangle), while 辺 would be edge in that context... and my second thought is 地域, like "the area of the country I grew up in". I think 辺 is maybe 4th or 5th for 'area', and that's just because 'area' is a broad english word. My point is, quizzing vocab -> english word, without reading, without an example sentence, is a recipe to confuse learner's brains.
4. Same complaints as vocab for the kanji quiz, but moreso since kanji's meaning is more abstract.
The beautiful aesthetic and open-source way to learn Japanese is to make Anki flash cards, and customize the cards using html (which it already supports).
This entire site could have been anki decks, and then it would have had spaced repetition for free, and users could even more easily edit things to suit themselves ad add to it.
I'd love to collaborate, but I think we've got to look at overall concept first. There's a lot of information on the screen and it's not really clear how the learner journeys through. Greatly reducing the amount of info on the screen at once, focusing learner's attention on a single path would be helpful.
There's many theories of language acquisition, but I think Krashen is most on-point: we learn through comprehensible input. New vocabulary really needs to be encountered in context of meaningful sentences that are understandable to the learner. Further, when training, production with spaced repetition is really the most effective strategy.
I'd love to see there be a really great free learning tool that brings a pedagogically sound approach to Japanese learners!
Some alternatives:
Might be good to allow the kanji/vocabulary to be filtered by JLPT or Jouyou stage. Picking multiple sets on the kanji units was a bit tedious, it's be nice to 'pick all' for a drill (but I was using it to test myself rather than learn new ones). I don't understand the pick options (pick, reverse, input, output) - they seem superfluous and perhaps need tooltips. Maybe add audio recordings at some point, although that's a bunch of work. You can use AI to generate it of course and it will be mostly correct as far as individual words go, but Japanese AI voices still seem to get pitch shapes and timing wrong sometimes.
Edit: I didn't realise there were multiple modes either until I stumbled upon that as well
anyway drilling vocab/characters isn't the same thing as learning a language
On the test screens I was expecting there to be an option to shown the answers (ie cheat mode) so I could go through and get 100% score first few times.
And use that as a kind of flash card mode to get my footing in understanding stuff.
Then move out of cheat mode and see if I learnt anything!
For studying N5 and N4, I’ve found Bunpro’s lesson grouping by JLPT levels a really nice format. It’s been encouraging seeing a progress bar for each step of the journey. I’d suggest looking for inspo there too if that interests you.
Mainly because of the content. Designing a beautiful UI and framework is one thing, but what is your plan for pooling together enough effort to produce enough learning material that the app becomes a meaningful learning resource?
A textbook font like Motoya Kyotai would be ideal.
出 means "to go out or exit" and doesn't have anything to do with learning Kanji. 言 means "to say" and is only tangentially related to learning vocabulary.
Still, great job!