Show HN: Learn Japanese through classic short stories

by njrc9 • 10 years ago

25 16 10 years ago

kaishiro• 10 years ago

I haven't been able to dig terribly deep into this, but I find this fascinating. I've been learning Mandarin and Japanese on and off over the years, and this is always the sort of thing that I wished I had.

The other was word for word translations of popular TV shows along with cultural notes. I remember watching a show called My Own Swordsman (武林外传) pretty regularly while living in Shanghai, and while I could follow the gist of some conversations, so much of what made it funny were cultural puns that I just couldn't grep.

Still enjoyed watching it though.

wodenokoto• 10 years ago

These things have existed in print as "graded readers" for years.

kevining• 10 years ago

Love the idea behind the site! As an intermediate level Japanese speaker I think I could benefit a lot from it, but I had a few suggestions.

1 - Consider having one story from each difficulty available for free. The free intermediate article is a bit daunting for my current kanji level. I would be interested in signing up just for the beginner articles, but probably not without a preview.

2 - If time permits, consider having a button which can display a translation of the entire sentence. Satori reader has something similar and it's very useful when there's unknown grammar

Hope the site takes off, I would love to use and support it in the future.

nv-vn• 10 years ago

As someone with very little knowledge of the language, I definitely agree with your first point. It's hard for me to figure out if the product would be useful for me at my level since there's no "Easy" book available for free. I imagine that for an advanced learner it would be similar not knowing whether there's actually any new knowledge to be gained at their level.

fuzzythinker2• 10 years ago

Actually, there is a book marked as "Easy" for free [1], it's 5 pages.

[1] https://languageinmotion.jp/library/10

njrc96• 10 years ago

nv-vn, as fuzzythinker pointed out, an “Easy” marked book has been added to those you can read for free. Hope that helps!

njrc96• 10 years ago

Thank you so much for the feedback everyone! I posted this yesterday evening (in Japan) and so catching up now the next day.

kevining: That is a very good point about having free access to a book of each difficulty level. You are absolutely right, since with only an intermediate level book available for free, subscribing is a gamble as to whether there are books suitable for you (definitely don’t want to put people in that position).

I’ve updated the site now so that you can access 3 books (1 of each level) for free.

2 - If time permits, consider having a button which can display a translation of the entire sentence. Satori reader has something similar and it's very useful when there's unknown grammar

This is definitely something I’m thinking about. I toyed with the idea of translating each page myself and making that available at the bottom of each page. But scrolling to the bottom of the page is a hassle so I’d want to figure out something more integrated.

I also wasn’t sure how useful whole-sentence translations would be since I figured people using this would probably already have a good understanding of grammar. But perhaps these books are advanced enough to warrant whole-sentence translations regardless? Thoughts?

coroxout• 10 years ago

This looks very cool. I'd love to see something similar for other languages.

How do you envisage the fluency colour coding being used?

njrc96• 10 years ago

Sorry for the late reply, but thanks very much for the feedback! Yes, doing the same for other languages is something I’ve thought of too. If I knew German, for example, that’d be great fun (thinking of using works by Goethe and Nietzsche). For now, this is a one-man show so I’ll have to keep my focus on just Japanese.

How do you envisage the fluency colour coding being used?

The color-coding is just to visualize your progress if you are recording how well you know words. Red indicates words you don’t know or haven’t recorded anything for. Each time you click “Got It” for a word, the color will be updated to a new color: red -> brown -> yellow -> light green -> green (green indicates you know it completely; clicking “Know It” will make it green immediately).

zumu• 10 years ago

Very cool project. I've been thinking about doing something like this for years.

However, I must ask, is there an option to display the definitions in simple Japanese/use the app entirely in Japanese?

Seems to me if you're reading short stories, you probably shouldn't be translating words to English.

Also, do you explain the nuances of the kanji themselves? There is a lot of connotation(?) not provided by the definition.

njrc96• 10 years ago

Thank you very much for the input!

Seems to me if you're reading short stories, you probably shouldn't be translating words to English.

Definitely, Japanese that is as nuanced as in these stories does not translate very well. To try to overcome that, the definitions are always shown right in the context of the text and each definition includes all alternative meanings of that word so that puns and nuances are preserved as much as possible. This seems, for the moment, the best compromise between accessibility to English speakers and honoring the Japanese text. However, if you have any better ideas of how to approach this I'd be grateful for your input!

However, I must ask, is there an option to display the definitions in simple Japanese/use the app entirely in Japanese?

Right now there is no option to use the app entirely in Japanese or to display definitions in Japanese. That is something I had not thought of, so thanks for the suggestion! To begin with, I’m going to work on refining it as it is in English since I figured that what keeps people from breaking into Japanese literature is largely the intimidation of a page of completely Japanese text (e.g. navigating Aozora Bunko for the first time).

Also, do you explain the nuances of the kanji themselves? There is a lot of connotation(?) not provided by the definition.

Right now there is no explanation of nuances of the kanji themselves (only the words). That is another idea I had not thought much of! Thanks. I’m hoping to get more feedback from users and to find out how they use it and what they might find lacking. This could be one of those lacking features.

fuzzythinker2• 10 years ago

Besides reading, being able to speak and pronounce the text would be extremely helpful in learning a language. If I'm paying $10/mo, I would expect that ability to be added.

njrc96• 10 years ago

Thank you for the feedback. I’ve deliberately not attempted to teach grammar or pronunciation with it since I’m aiming for people who already understand those things (i.e. intermediate learners) but who need help to go from intermediate to advanced Japanese (mostly a matter of building vocabulary) and for which there do not seem to be many educational resources. So right now my foremost goal is to get more books published to broaden the vocabulary presented in the books. Hope that explains its approach!

fizzbatter2• 10 years ago

This is nifty. For absolute beginners, do you[1] recommend any resources?

Though, the pricing confuses me a bit. It mentions ¥1,000/month for all content, is that a comma in the American sense (¥1000), or a decimal (¥1)? Apparently in USD, that is ~$150 vs $0.15.. one is insanely expensive _(in my opinion)_, the other is insanely cheap. Pardon my ignorance :)

[1]: You, being the author.. or anyone i suppose.

njrc96• 10 years ago

Thanks for taking a look at it –

Regarding resources for absolute beginners, I haven’t read it myself, but this book [1] takes a similar approach to my site, but since it has full English translations of the text it seems like it could be useful to beginners (however, it looks like you still need to understand basic grammar and vocabulary).

As to pricing, the comma is in the American sense. So that would make it about $10/month.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-into-Japanese-Literature-Cla...

fizzbatter2• 10 years ago

$10/m? I must have really messed something up. I somehow got $150/m o_O. $10/m is much more reasonable, thank you

Show HN: Learn Japanese through classic short stories

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