My hello to fellow geeks

[Deirh]

...and to all the other Japanese students!
Glad to be aboard. I actually resisted Japanese for quite some time. All of my friends were raving about anime; it was annoying and looked childish. I vowed not to blindly follow. But then Miyazaki came along...and his Mononoke Hime did it for me.

With my eyes wide open, I started preparing for a journey. First into the depths of the language, hoping then to follow with a real journey, one that involved walking downtown Akihabara, riding a shinkansen and spending a night in an onsen, all the while being able to talk to people.

Taking classes and going through a textbook seemed quite unimaginative however. So I did what every self-respecting programmer and a nerd would: start to write a program that would teach me :chinese:. Somehow it worked out in the end: it will be my 3rd time in Japan this year since I was always enjoying my time there so much I just have to keep coming back for more. What a beautiful culture to behold.

Anyway, that's my story in a nutshell. I'm 30 and still hungry. And I have something to give: my program that taught me vocabulary. I'd like it to be useful to all fellow students that are also driven to visit Japan and master the language as I am. Feel free to do anything with it, I only ask for providing me with some feedback so I can further shape it into something that is useful for everyone, not just me. Thanks!

 

[thomas]

Hi Deirh, welcome to the forum.

Thanks for your compelling introduction and for showing off your program! So before we head over there in droves, could share a few words on it and tell us why we should use it, otherwise we might get the impression you're just here to plug it. ;-)

 

[Deirh]

Hi Thomas,
my apologies for giving such an impression. I should have been more considerate in letting on how anxious I am to see what other Japanese learners may say about my study project. Reading it all again, I must seem like a bot

In any case, let me still try to answer the question why anyone might like to test it out. In its core, I developed a spaced-repetition vocabulary drill that, unlike Anki, doesn't rely on you grading your answers but does it itself by requiring you to type in the answers (while hinting if you're close or not). While this can have a caveat of missing out a few synonyms here and there, I found this approach to be much more fun for me since I could compete with my previous answers, always trying to improve their speed which made the word more readily available in my memory. It is competitive in nature, with stats and grades to hunt for, and hopefully it can motivate others to keep trying as well.

For those not interested doing a vocabulary drill, my application offers also a full-fledged Japanese-English dictionary (open-source edict) and a large database of Japanese sentences you can consult whenever you are unsure of how a particular word is usually used in real life (I use it a lot when writing e-mails to Japanese friends).

So that's that. I hope this does not come across as a sales pitch or anything, just interested if other people will like it this way or not.