Comment by chrisvasselli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisvasselli | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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

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

Ohh this is cool. Very nicely put together!

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!

> 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.

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