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I would LOVE to have integration with e-books, I think that could totally change the way I learn Japanese. Since over time the app learns what words you know and what words you don't, it could even suggest books for you that are around the right difficulty level. Wouldn't that be amazing?

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any place where you can purchase DRM-free e-books, so I think this would require working with Japanese book publishers. The one exception is the Harry Potter books, which are published DRM-free through their own website. I read the first two Harry Potter books using clippings to generate flashcards for each chapter as I went along, and it was incredibly helpful.

The idea of audiovisual context is interesting. Could you tell me more about what you have in mind? I've thought about adding text-to-speech options on the dictionary entries and in flashcards. But something more complete, like what Rosetta Stone does, seems a lot harder, just from the perspective of acquiring rights to the images.

Aozora Bunko (http://www.aozora.gr.jp/) is the only legitimate source I know of for ebooks (and they are free). Long term it would be really great to get some Japanese publishers to commit to ebooks, but I know that historically they have been strongly, publicly resistant.

The Wakaru app does allow ebooks reading with a dictionary, but I always found it clunky and I don't think it allows easily generating cards from a book, the dictionary was less useful than yours looks, and it doesn't learn your vocab over time.

For audiovisual context, I'm really thinking of:

  - images to match vocab items (potentially auto-sourced from a Creative Commons licensed image search engine)
  - images from articles to match sentences from articles
  - sound clips to match text taken from audio captions
  - video clips OR audio clips + screenshots to match sentences from video subtitles

Regarding image rights, I would say that there is a huge amount of stuff in the public domain or liberally licensed (e.g. on Mediawiki). But you could also allow the user to add their own images, where they take responsibility for making sure they have the rights.

Yeah, unfortunately I find the content in Aozora Bunko not all that interesting. Or at least, I don't know how to find good content in it. I actually built a proof-of-concept of a "Books" tab in Nihongo using Aozora Bunko, but I found it sort of unsatisfying, so I never pursued it further. I haven't used Wakaru before, I'll have to check that out.

I'll explore the audiovisual ideas more, that's pretty interesting, thanks. I'd love to have user-generated content in the app, like the ability to share decks. Seems like that could be a good way to handle image rights as well.

memrise.com handles media how Blahah described. User-submitted and it's the users' responsibility instead of Memrise's responsibility.

Mnemonics is essentially audiovisual cues to aid learning. Memrise is largely centered around them.

You might be able to borrow concepts, although this is making an assumption that you have not heard of Memrise.

I've heard of Memrise, but haven't really spent any time playing with it. In fact, I just checked my phone and it looks like I downloaded it at some point and never opened it. Adding it to my list to check out, thanks!

I've got the same problem with finding decent content in Aozora Bunko. For me, the main issue is how to find content which matches my level (actually being interesting being the other problem, but seemingly harder to solve).

I set up a really hacky "grader" algorithm and run it on a bunch of the Aozora Bunko books, then put them online [1]. The very "easiest" books are kinda boring, but it is certainly easier finding usable material in that list than looking in Aozora Bunko itself. The one I've found most interesting so far is 銀河鉄道の夜 [2]

[1] http://www.readyourgrade.com/

[2] http://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000081/files/43737_19215.html

Ohh this is cool. Very nicely put together!

This is awesome. I'd love to have these kind of features in Nihongo.

> The one exception is the Harry Potter books

Harry Potter is notorious among Japanese readers for having a horribly inaccurate translation. Example: http://islaya.sarashi.com/haripota01.html

Interesting, I hadn't heard that before. Still, for people learning Japanese, I tend to think it's a good choice. At my level, it's easy to get lost when reading things that I don't already know the general plot for. Harry Potter is pretty easy to follow and not too difficult from a vocabulary perspective.

> 'clippings' looks really excellent. I would go so far as to say this is a game-changer for me as it currently stands.

Midori, my personal favorite iOS J/E dictionary, has had a feature like this since I started using it, so for at least five years or so. =/ See the "Text Translation" section: http://www.midoriapp.com/features/

So it does, and it looks nicely executed too. Wish I'd found it back when I had an iOS device.

Yep, Midori's great, and I even took some inspiration from them for the Clippings UI. For me, the big difference is that Midori's version isn't integrated with flashcards.

I have also been at it for a while now. What I notice nowadays is that the same English->Japanese cards keep coming up quite often, because they have very similar cards/synonyms. Therefore, when adding new words, I take extra precaution to come up with a short 2-4 word sentence that is unique enough and captures the meaning quite well. Sometimes it might take me a few tries though, when I end up confusing it with another card anyway. This may also mean that sometimes I have to go and change a card/note I made a few years ago, because it 'conflicts' with something I want to add now.

So with regard to the clippings feature I feel that generating single-word flash cards might come back to bite you. It makes English->Japanese "production" difficult and annoying in the long run. On the other hand, it also makes Japanese->English unnecessarily complicated with all the meanings associated with a single word. A relatively simple example that comes to mind is 手入れ, of which I would rather have two short sentences describing each use case. Or with regards to the clippings feature, I want it to generate the card with the meaning I encountered, because the other meanings of that word might never actually be used by the Japanese.

I am not sure an app will (or even should) be able to generate such cards. Condensing both the Japanese, while getting the English meaning right, is hard enough for a human. It certainly would be awesome, because at the moment I have to resort to generating the cards manually for the words/sentences I encounter while reading manga or books on my Kobo e-reader. History shows that (1) I am too lazy to generate a card for a word that I had to look up, and that I tend to just keep on reading (and forgetting the word again later on), or (2) that I actually stop reading for a few days/weeks because I feel I have to enter the back log of cards in Anki before continuing.

Really good observations.

With regards to English->Japanese cards, I actually decided not to support them in the app. I used to study with both J->E and E->J flashcards, but I find that E->J gets you into the habit of thinking about one-to-one relationships between words in English and Japanese, when most of the time the relationship is not that simple. I found it more effective to study only J->E, and internalize the general meaning and "feeling" of the word. Then, as you start to encounter it in natural contexts, you'll internalize the subtleties to the meaning. When you go to produce Japanese, it's best not to start from English and translate to Japanese anyway, so I found the most important thing was to internalize the Japanese words.

The whole experience you mentioned where you either didn't create flashcards for words you encountered, or stopped reading to catch up on generating flashcards is exactly why I built Clippings. And you're right, they aren't going to be perfect, but I still think it's way better than doing it manually. 手入れ is a good example, here's how that would work in Nihongo:

When you create a clipping that included 手入れ, a flashcard gets created with 手入れ on the front, and "repairs, maintenance, tending, trimming, grooming" on the back. That's the primary meaning in the dictionary. If you get to that flashcard, and that doesn't sound right, you can edit the flashcard to add to or replace that backside text with "crackdown, (police) raid". There's no way we can know which meaning was intended in the text, but we can at least make it easy to edit. And if you want, you can always add your own custom text to be displayed on the back of the flashcard. If I encounter a sentence that really clearly shows how the word is used, I'll often add that on the back in addition to the dictionary meaning.

Every feature in this app except the flash cards already exist in "imi wa" that has been available for years.

I think I have a fair number of new ideas in Nihongo that improve on imiwa. I used to use imiwa, and it's a good app, but I wouldn't have built Nihongo if I didn't think there were significant ways I could improve on it. I hope you'll check it out! =)