This is an entirely spare-time project on which I've been working publicly for the past year.
Here's some info about the tech stack I'm using: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26693959
I ended up linking to my Google account, but I spent a long while trying to "sign up" with my email only to be given an message about failing to meet the password requirements (no mention of character limit and no special characters allowed). At first I thought I just needed to adjust my password generator to get a valid password (usually 64 chars with alpha-numerics and special characters), but even the simplest passwords failed with the same error message.
This is strange; I don't really have any special password requirements. What's the exact error message you were getting? The only requirements are that it's at least 6 characters long and different than your username, and in each case it should tell you exactly what's wrong.
My main complaint is that I haven't known about this until now. I frequently search for Japanese resources and specifically did searches to find pre-made decks of Japanese content from Japanese language media, but never encountered your site.
Thank you for the effort to revamp the Heisig kanji keywords - makes me wish I didn't already learn it the RTK way. The way to teach new kanji by introducing the enclosed primitives first is smart - it's a good compromise between "primitive first" and "usage first" approaches.
Yeah, it's still pretty much a very niche resource that many people do not know about. (:
Indeed, Heisig's keywords can be janky. Mine are not perfect, but in general they should be better than Heisig's. Well, at least for most of the really common kanji; I still need to change/improve the keywords for some of the more rare kanji and tweak a few more common ones. (As you can imagine doing that manually for a few thousand characters is a lot of work, so it has been slow going.)
jpdb looks really cool, but will it work for somebody who is a complete beginner?
I want to learn Japanese, and intend to commit time to doing so sometime in the upcoming 2-3 months. However, right now, I'm literally at zero.
Is there somewhere else I should go to learn things like basic grammar and sentence structure first, or will jpdb help with that sort of thing too?
Eventually I do want to make it a one-stop-shop which will teach you everything and take you from a complete beginner to someone who can immerse in native media as soon as possible. We're not there yet, and the site works best if you're at least an advanced beginner. The bare minimum requirement is that you know hiragana and katakana already.
Your best bet would be to start with a textbook of some kind and/or some actual lessons with real teachers to learn the basics. The more of a beginner you are the more the human touch helps; the more advanced you are the more you can depend on apps.
Sorry, I'm a little confused? The pronunciation is listed for every word; that's the hiragana next/on top of the words. (:
> Do you know of something similar for Chinese by any chance?
Alas, I do not. Maybe I'll make something like that in, like, 20 years if I'll ever be able to make a living off of this. (:
I don’t follow his book but I do refer to it when studying and sometimes his keywords really can be far out. If I remember correctly he never clarifies if the kanji for “can” is “can do” or “can of soup”.
There's nothing extra running on the server; no reverse proxy (the app itself automatically fetches/renews the HTTPS cert), no database, nothing. Just the app, the SSH server and the default system services.