I just want more people to try out this website since for me (and many others) it has made learning Japanese feel easier and also more fun compared to using Anki.
There’s prebuilt decks made from anime, visual novels, light novels and so on. JPDB tracks your known words so it tells you what coverage you have on different pieces of media.
Also the scheduling system I find much more efficient compared to Ankis. I can learn more new words per day and still not feel overwhelmed by the reviews.
There are more features as well and there’s a discord server with nice people.
Give it a try.
Btw I didn’t make the site or anything I just want to recommend it to japanese learners cause it hasn made my learning more fun and efficient.
16 comments
It’s generally great. The main things people complain about are the lack of an offline mode and export feature. Last I heard there was an API in development/beta testing. Any news on this and what it will allow people to do?
It seems pretty cool from the quick look I gave it! Can I ask if it’s totally free before I sign up? Thank you! 🙂
I like that it has pitch accent which is definitely nice. I’ll have to consider doing this after my 5k deck!
It’s helped me a lot. I only wish you could make your own cards.
I haven’t used it but it seems like a good way to prep for reading a book.
I could see myself using it, but I use anki. Perhaps if it could somehow merge with anki.
The API + JPDB-Browser-Reader extension has been an absolute game changer in terms of making the learning/reviewing process from media seamless. Absolutely recommend even though it’s still buggy/in development
makes playing games a breeze to learn from: https://streamable.com/ci0az0
By FAR the best feature of jpdb is the text parser. You can just paste in a block of text and it will spit out a deck with all the vocab in it. It’s an absolutely killer feature and a game changer – instead of just relying on the premade decks, you can make a solid vocab deck for absolutely anything you plan to read.
If you just want the data and don’t want to use the jpdb srs, unfortunately there’s no way to export the data just yet. However if you have some programming skillz you can scrape the data from your own custom decks very easily. Luckily the developers haven’t put any road blocks in the way.
jpdb rules 👍
One thing I’ve never understood about Jpdb is when you click on something to add as a deck will it then add every single word from the media it’s from? Like the really common words such as あれ それ なに 私 etc. Or can you filter it in terms of word frequency?
I literally just bought all the NGNL light novels and was going to painstakingly make a deck for them if I couldn’t find one. This is a huge help, thank you!
I give it a positive review too.
I like the SRS pacing, I like the way everything is organized and straightforward.
It’s like all the Anki add-ons I wanted to use in one.
I do wish it had offline mode since I use the subway to commute.
The main pitfall IMO is that the example sentences are selected automatically and sometimes they aren’t really the same word or have different readings. It’s the same as jisho.org and such. You can bring your own examples which is great.
As a beginner I’m loving this. I loaded up the Genki decks, then the other textbooks, and finally the core 2.3k deck. It’s a great vocab and kanji learning tool to go along with my textbook work and reading practice. There’s a yomichan extension as well for easily adding cards to your deck from yomichan lookups.
Does anyone know if it works with the tobira beginning textbooks? I want to give it a try!
Thanks for the reccomendation it looks neat!
Thanks for the recommendation it looks neat!
Tysm
I’ve started using the Genki II premade deck, and it is a really incredible tool. I like it quite a bit more than Anki so far.
A couple of criticisms. The example sentences are sometimes too advanced for me. I’m sure it’s a difficult balancing act of creating example sentences that would make sense in a variety of decks for a given word. It would be nice if a deck could marked a certain level (N5, N4, beginner, advanced, whatever) and the example sentences would correspond to that level. Sometimes the most common meaning that JPDB picks doesn’t really match up with what Genki is teaching the meaning to me. Like, for あげる, Genki II is teaching it in the context of to give. JPDB picked the meaning of to do for the sake of someone else in the te form of a verb. It might very well be the most common meaning, but it doesn’t match up with the book. The cool thing is that you can go in and edit the card and select which meanings you want to show up on the back.
Anyway, I also highly recommend it!
Is there a version of this for Mandarin?