Show HN: Japanese Language Learning Forum
questions.japanesecomplete.com
questions.japanesecomplete.com
I caution people to use a Privacy card [0] when subscribing to this service. There was no clear way to cancel or pause my subscription (maybe I didn't look hard enough.) Two months in I wanted to pause due to COVID-19 but simply closed the card instead.
I have no way to unsubscribe to the e-mails that keep coming in. The author should be careful here -- people will report and blacklist your domains.
It is not easy from visiting the main site that Japanese Complete is in beta. The site has promise but it's not worth $50.00 / mo right now. I strongly recommend:
1. Fleshing out all the missing lessons; there just aren't enough yet.
2. Add audio to all the lessons. I can't tell you how frustrated I was to lose audio after merely a few lessons.
3. Audio should play upon selecting lesson paragraphs. I want to practice along with (or re-listen to) text without scrubbing some audio player somewhere. At the very least least make the audio player a popup window.
4. The signup / login flow needs serious improvements, as discussed elsewhere in this thread.
Good luck. You have unique ideas not seen in typical texts: the animal stories, Iroha poem, Kanji frequency analysis, etc. but the system is too rough for the current asking price.
From my own experience, it's way more effective to have good old physical class with a native teacher (who also speaks good english and is a good teacher!). Yes it's hard to find a good teacher but it's worth it.
Close the computer, turn off your phone, go to class and you can learn and if you go for group class $50/month will do it.
Then spend the remainder of that $50 the months after that on hellotalk or italki sessions with a native speakers. You can find highly rated japanese speakers (including professional teachers) for $10-$25 an hour and it's one on one training. That's what I would do if I wasn't taking in person classes.
> $50/month to use a website for learning Japanese especially when you are English speaker sounds like a ripoff.
In hindsight I'm inclined to agree. Someone here suggested to drop it down to $20/month or less.
Even then, once the lessons are fleshed out and the interactive features are complete, charging a subscription will be seen as rent-seeking. Better to charge a lifetime membership at, say, $150 and do mass advertising with a free trial.
They're always fun and was my first stopping point to eliminate the freeze. I'd check them out!
There's also the random poster around international district, but italki has been great for finding conversation at 10-15/hr.
There's also the Japanese Center around the same part of downtown, but I always missed their signup period.
Learning Japanese in Seattle is a cinch!
I wish there was a good way to get JP TV stateside. Had a SlingBox but it didn’t work out so well.
I got an enormous amount from wordreference.com when learning spanish, e.g. you look up "sigue"
https://www.wordreference.com/es/en/translation.asp?spen=sig...
..and at the bottom of the page are links to friendly discussions about hundreds of questions asked about the word 'sigue' alone or in idioms. Questions are answered within hours. I found it invaluable reading the discussions about usage, more than any single piece of writing could be, and it tells you where the people are from, which variety of english/spanish they speak, whether native speakers etc.
The other most important thing was meeting a teacher on a language exchange site that matches your language levels, and teaching each other. I had one teacher as a beginner and another years later, both became dear friends, endless hours of chatting.
But I never thought of combining the two! Good luck.
Kanji is my biggest hurdle but I can't find a good combination of handwriting and OCR recognition in the same app.
I'm not a Japanese learner, but my friend Chris Vaselli built that app, and he recently added a feature that sounds like what you're describing.[1]
[1] https://twitter.com/Nihongo_App/status/1274760586115657728
Creating a forum with a slightly different QA model is technically interesting, but this one doesn't seem to be tackling any of the more important things around moderation, curation, and actually having a good community.
I also have some specific critiques of this website.
The login flow / signup flow is, to say the best, not great.
If I open the network tab in my browser, this thing is constantly making requests to 'chsk' the entire time the site is open.
In addition, all the current question's answers are just plain bad, so I'm wary of the community its attracted thusfar. Usually you'll want to "seed" software like this with a group of trusted contributors who are knowledgeable, and a few possible users who need help. Clearly, right now it's not that.
It may seem like a good idea at first to build just what you need, but you will get feature creeped HARD by your users wondering why your forum-lite software doesn't have X feature (that other forums have), once you get past the MVP stage...
However i have to agree that $50 on top of all other subscriptions I have is a bit too much. I would go for it, if it were $20 or if it would even have a some sort of trial, but as of now, the price makes me hesitate quite a lot.
I'm getting some Javascript error and then like 1 qps XHRs triggered hammering your server.
When it comes to learning any language, but Japanese in particular, I can't thank enough to the guys who created Mass Immersion Approach web page[0]. Their method is based on Stephen Krashen's "language acquisition through comprehensible input"[1] and... it just works.
I've been learning Japanese in the classroom for around 2 years. I've been living in Japan for 5 years and my Japanese was rather mediocre. I've left Japan for a year and forgot a lot. Grammar is gone now, most sentence patterns are gone, mose kanji (and I've never been big on kanji) are gone.
Now, after 4 months of MIA I am better then I've ever been. If you truly want to learn the language - read the page, watch their YT videos[2], just do yourself a favor and stop wasting your time.
PS. I am not related. Just a happy learner.
[0] https://massimmersionapproach.com/
Five years later, I would struggle to have a conversation about anything consequential. I started learning when I was 19, so I guess too old to have it stick.
Funnily though, I can still read a good amount.