Weekly Thread: Material Recs and Self-Promo Wednesdays! (May 22, 2024)

2 comments

1. Hello friends, fellow Japanese language learner here. I am working on building an intuitive Japanese conversational tutor with a few friends, called Nora. It’s designed to accelerate your path to speaking fluency.

   It all started when a few of us realized that even though we had been studying Japanese for years (through apps, immersion, and self-study), we still had trouble saying even the most basic things. We had a “duh” moment when we realized that we were getting tons and tons of input practice and not a whole lot of output (speaking) practice. We looked around for other tools and apps in the market, and couldn’t find the right kind of solution.

   We decided to build a premium conversation tutoring tool specifically for Japanese that removes all the annoying barriers to getting that speaking practice. With Nora, you don’t have to pay for or schedule something with an expensive human tutor, you don’t have to know someone in Japan, and you don’t have to have a spouse or friend to pester about practicing with you. You can practice speaking on your terms, no awkwardness necessary. 

   Some of the coolest features of Nora: 

   • Bilingual mode: Nora can offer corrections and explanations in both Japanese and English.

   • Free talk or roleplay: You can have any type of conversation with Nora in Japanese, or practice everyday topics like ordering at a restaurant, asking for directions, talking about school, and more.

   • Formal and casual mode: Practice speaking keigo and tameguchi.

   • Flow or strict modes: You can adjust to your desired amount of correction (whether you want to have a flowing conversation or be corrected on every mistake).

   • No annoying onboarding: Nora understands your level of speaking quickly and adjusts to you.

   We’ll also soon include gamification and community features to make Nora even more fun to use! 

   You all know better than anyone else that with Japanese, you basically need to upload a whole new operating system into your brain. When you start doing speaking practice, you discover the things you really need to work on… the “chinks in your armor”.

    Anyway, I wanted to share Nora with this community, and also see if you guys have any feedback. We want to make this thing as awesome as possible for people who truly want to learn to speak Japanese, and co-create with learners who really care about having the best tool.

   You can watch the demo here: [https://youtu.be/UjX4Peh4xqM](https://youtu.be/UjX4Peh4xqM) and join the pre-release list if you are interested: [https://signup.hellonora.ai/](https://signup.hellonora.ai/) 

   We are offering the pre-release for free for the first 100 people who sign up, and of course a mega discount for when the full release comes out. 

   Alsooo definitely not here to spam anyone, just want to get the word out about this project!

2. Migaku just released their the course material they worked on for a while. I’ve been using it for a few weeks since it got released to early access for testing, and so far I’m loving it. They also take a lot of feedback and try to improve it as much as they can. Also seems like there is even more planned (iirc so far 1 of 3 levels has been released). Good thing for me:
   – The course teaches from 0

   – All sentences (and grammar) are introduced in 1T fashion, meaning that every new sentence card you learn is only a little bit harder than would you learned before.

   – The lessons have a lot of detailed extra info that is not necessary to learn if you just want to get a quick intro to the grammar. Some do feel a bit too detailed, but I guess thats also taste.

   With like 10-15 new cards a day it feel really easy and the slow increase in difficulty means that I can understand everything I encounter. Gives a nice sense of progression.

   [https://x.com/MigakuOfficial/status/1793253671641506282](https://x.com/MigakuOfficial/status/1793253671641506282)