Review of Japanese Complete: I used it for two months.
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.
$50/month to use a website for learning Japanese especially when you are English speaker sounds like a ripoff.
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.
Agreed, just go buy Genki 1 and 2, sign up for wanikani for kanji ($10/mo).
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.
Where do you get classes for $50/month. I have several friends who are going to Japanese language school in Japan and cheapest is $500/month. Even on iTalk, $50 might only get you 2-3 classes
Fair enough, and I live in Seattle so chances of finding Japanese teachers are high.
> $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.
Learning Japanese pre-covid was basically free, UW holds weekly meetings in the food court for Japanese Conversation (日本語会話）where Japanese students go and language exchange for English.
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.
$50 a month?!?! There’s a lot of ways to use that money. Perhaps a used textbook (Genki is popular) and then Netflix + a VPN. US Netflix accounts work in Japan with native / local content.
I wish there was a good way to get JP TV stateside. Had a SlingBox but it didn’t work out so well.
This project, Rolling Questions, is a forum that treats chat rooms as fundamental objects. Any line of chat can be "promoted to a question" which gets its own, new chatroom with the question as the topic for the page. Promoted answers are highlighted in green. It's a remix of the classical Q&A forum and we find it to be fast and efficient. This way, no questions are removed for not being "questiony enough," rather, they never become questions to begin with. Your constructive thoughts and feedback greatly appreciated and welcome.
..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.
Wow that's an incredible story. Thank you so much for your support. I have been thinking about open-sourcing the code because it could be useful for many other domains.
There are many issues with the design. Why are the buttons so thin (and therefore unnecessarily hard to click)? Why is there so much space between a question title and the row of buttons for it (far more than the space between the buttons and the title of the unrelated question below)? Why can't you just click on a question's big title to visit it, and instead have to hunt for the tiny "visit question page" button?
While we're on this topic I would love a live OCR app that just overlays furigana on kanji. Like Google Translate's camera feature but without obscuring the original text.
Kanji is my biggest hurdle but I can't find a good combination of handwriting and OCR recognition in the same app.
When it comes to language learning, the biggest problems aren't that the QA forum isn't right in terms of how the software is designed. There's far more complex problems around ensuring good and correct content is curated so that people aren't mislead, providing correct language-specific learning tools (stroke order, toggle-able furigana, highlighting of names are all super helpful for japanese for example).
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.
Every line of chat can be upvoted or downvoted, which influences your reputation much like on HN, and your reputation is visible next to every chat line. So there is a user incentive to provide good/reputable content. You are right about seeding the site. For now, the focus has simply been functionality, appreciate your feedback!
May I ask why you decided to roll your own forum software instead of using something off the shelf like NodeBB (disclaimer, I own NodeBB)?
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...
Mainly the fact that there is nothing that operates on the same model: chat as a fundamental component, elevation to "question pages" and answers after that. Plus, it's great excitement seeing one of your own creations come to life, especially when it has real-time feedback (like on reputation changes or upvotes/downvotes). I wanted to see also how minimal the final product could be on what I consider a "barebones product" and it's around ~550kB. Yes, feature creep is real, I would love to pick your brain about NodeBB over tea sometime.
I looked quickly through the site and I love the fact you’re using verbs instead of adjectives, as japanese does not really have them. This already made me consider subscribing.
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.
There are general chat rooms where you can promote chat to a question, I think HiNative is more of a Q&A site (but not sure). These questions are not necessarily "how do you say ___ in Japanese" although they can be, but more along the lines of any relevant questions for studying Japanese. It also serves as a place for community. It's probably similar in terms of market served but this is a very minimal application designed to be fast and real-time and useful for looking up info via search when there is more usership. As far as I know, there are no platforms out there that use chatrooms as a fundamental component first, and then later differentiate to Q&A.
I don't want to discourage the author but, to be honest, what I see is nowhere close to what I figure would help me to learn Japanese. Questions I see on home page have nothing to do with learning - some about traveling around the country, some about translating "good morning", etc. True - I haven't registered. TBH though I don't see why should I.
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.
I was near native level 5 years ago. I'd additionally watched all the TV shows, the kids shows, read the newspapers and important books, the assigned school poetry. I even memorized the periodic table and read a translation of Feynmans lectures. People honestly thought I was born in Japan.
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.
Reading is so much easier than speaking for me. Grammatically it's so different, and there is so much conjugation that I am very, very slow to put sentences together when speaking. But reading or understanding spoken japanese? No problem, instantly get it, no translation to english required in my head.
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.