Weekly Thread: Material Recs and Self-Promo Wednesdays! (June 05, 2024)

4 comments

1. **Manabi Reader** – iOS and macOS native app for learning Japanese through reading

   As featured by Tofugu:

   >*Overall,* ***a solid app that we recommend*** *for reading sentences that aren’t drab and contextless—especially if you’re more motivated when reading about something you’re personally interested in.*

   * EPUB, web browser, RSS feeds, spoken audio. Tap words to look them up and translate sentences. (PDF + manga mode soon!)
   * Tracks every word and kanji you read and learn. Charts your progress page-by-page and per JLPT level. See what vocab and kanji you need to know to read every webpage, chapter or ebook.
   * Anki or built-in flashcards with SRS (FSRS soon). Makes sentence mining easy. Includes links back to the source of each sentence in your flashcards.
   * Privacy obsessed: works like a web browser with processing and storage on-device (and in your personal iCloud)

   I quit my job to work on this so expect a lot more soon, such as YouTube with clickable transcripts, MPV-based movie player, visionOS, opt-in AI-backed assistive features, etc.

   Next up: I’m working on adding support for Yomichan dictionaries, and adding a manga mode. I’m also going to launch a WebRcade.com iOS port for playing Japanese games and getting realtime OCR transcripts you can look up as you play called Manabi TV, with HDMI inputs on iPad too.

   [https://reader.manabi.io](https://reader.manabi.io)

   Discord / beta news https://discord.gg/NAD2YJGNsr

2. Hello everyone! I’m making a free program that teaches kanji characters (stroke order, readings, words…) and I would really appreciate some feedback. It currently features 103 kanji but I would like to expand it to more than 1900 when the game is fully developed. Many thanks in advance!

   [https://mascachapas27.itch.io/kanji-god](https://mascachapas27.itch.io/kanji-god)

3. Hello,

   I’ve created [https://nihongoclassroom.com](https://nihongoclassroom.com), a website to learn Japanese through interactive drills and spaced repetition.

   Right now, you can learn Hiragana, Katakana, 2136 Kanji, and more than 6K vocabulary words. All of this includes male and female audio, explanations, and examples.

   You can group and sort these in various ways (more than 30 combinations), including JLPT level, school grade, Onyomi group, stroke count, and more. This allows you to learn in the way you find most comfortable and change it anytime without losing or resetting your progress.

   It’s not a flashcard app. These drills are more useful than that.

   First, they focus on active recall instead of multiple-choice options, making your brain do the work so you can learn faster.

   Second, they focus on many skills, including readings, meanings, and building up words and kanji by their parts.

   Third, they provide immediate feedback to correct your mistakes, so you don’t continue making errors without stopping to think about and correct them.

   Fourth, they can detect your confusions with other characters in the same drill session. For example, characters like さ and ち will appear side by side after you confuse them enough times. This is incredibly helpful when learning look-alike characters.

   Fifth, these drills adapt to your performance, giving more focus to the items that give you more problems. This is achieved with a dynamic points system that counts your correct and incorrect answers.

   Additionally, the automated spell checking allows for typos in your answers, which is important as you don’t want to get too caught up in English spelling when your goal is to learn Japanese.

   Finally, you can answer in natural language instead of memorized keywords. For example, for a kanji like 月 (moon), you could answer with the keyword “moon” or something like “the celestial body that appears at night.” This approach helps you learn Japanese through explanations and meanings instead of just memorizing keywords or rough translations.

   These drills come in two modes: practice and test.

   In practice mode, you can make as many mistakes as needed to learn the items.

   In test mode, you have a limited number of errors you can make before failing the drill.

   After you pass a test, the items are sent to your reviews.

   These reviews are scheduled using spaced repetition, meaning that only the items you get wrong will be reviewed regularly, while the ones you get right will be reviewed further apart.

   Finally, on the content pages, you can see your progress. This progress is global, regardless of the order you choose to study. For example, if you are studying by school grade, you can still see the progress you’ve made by JLPT level or stroke count, giving you a more holistic view of your Japanese learning progress.

4. Hey folks, I made an app to help my girlfriend and I practice handwriting kanji. It has been really helpful for her and I. We have to submit handwritten homework for our course and it used to be super painful because we spent the majority of the time looking up kanji stroke orders, but now it is a breeze.

   If anyone else is struggling with handwriting kanji and is interested in trying the app leave a message in this thread or DM me and I’ll connect with you to get you a beta copy.