Hacker News Reader

Comment by 633nm | Hacker News Reader

I've mostly used Anki for learning Japanese, so I'm biased towards that specific language. There are however some awesome free tools floating around that take the pain out of creating flashcards:

-[1] EPWING2Anki creates flashcards from a wordlist and a dictionary in EPWING format

-[2] Sub2srs creates flashcards based on a movie and subtitle files

It's also possible to use e.g. spreadsheets to mass-create cards. Further tools analyze e.g. a selection of ebooks and create word frequency lists of unknown words, Combined those tools have greatly assisted my progress.

[1]: http://subs2srs.sourceforge.net/

[2]: http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=181475

View on HN

I'm still pretty noob at Japanese, but I have lived there for 6 months and took 3 semesters of introductory classes. I've never had the motivation to study, but I thought I'd plug a really cool flash card type app called Wanikani [1], from the guys behind Tofugu. I maxed out the free level but I didn't want to dedicate my time to learning yet, so I haven't moved on to higher levels. I'm hoping this can be a way to develop my vocab, but I also like the idea from elsewhere in this post of finding some sort of radio broadcasts in Japanese, it would be super helpful if they had a text-based script of the dialogue too.

Also, in my comprehension of Japanese on the internet, a firefox extension rikai-chan or the chrome version rikai-kun (which I use) is invaluable. With computers even Japanese people don't need to know how to write kanji, they just type the hiragana and hit space til they see it. This extension allows you to highlight the kanji, going in the other direction (kanji -> pronunciation/meaning, use your japanese keyboard to go from pronunciation/hiragana -> kanji with spacebar).

Also, for a dictionary I use Alc [2] which I found is very commonly used by Japanese people that need to find English words. The main benefit to using this is that there are many examples of the words used in context, and showing other kanji used for those same meanings. This allows you to make sure the kanji you found for the meaning you want is actually used in, or find the correct kanji for, the context you are trying to use it in. It is important to have a database maintained by people that know proper Japanese for sure, it's much easier to understand broken English than to try to use broken Japanese.

[1] http://www.tofugu.com/resources/wanikani/ [2] http://www.alc.co.jp

User hermanschaaf and I live in Japan and set out to build a fast Japanese dictionary: http://nihongo.io

Source is here: http://github.com/gojp

Take a look if you have time, feature requests are very welcome :)

Once you study Japanese for any amount of time romaji becomes more of a liability than anything else. The thing I dislike most about most these one search bar dictionaries is there is no way to ignore romaji input. Its one of the main reasons I still use jisho.org so often and I'm very unexcited about their new beta. Adding the ability to turn it off would be a great start

I understand what you mean; I've been studying Japanese for five years now and learned hiragana and katakana in the first two weeks of class. I have always told new learners to do that first as you rarely see romaji used in Japan.

Do you mean that on jisho you always use the Japanese search box?

When I'm searching Japanese yes. Jisho splits up English and Japanese so that I don't have to filter through completely unrelated results if an English word just happens to be made up letters that could be romaji. I also usually type into both boxes if I have an idea of the word or I want a sentence example of the word used in a specific way

Ah, I think I get it. When searching for the term "shin" for example, it would ignore any English definition matches such as shin guard, and only match Japanese terms containing it, like 心配.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com