I actually have considered adding a feature for easily-confused characters in a more obvious way. As for now, you can filter by a particular radical, but that requires you applying it outside of a card. I would like to eventually show easily confused cards or a way to directly apply a radical filter from directly inside of cards, based on the radical components of that character. I will have to get that one back on the list. Even if it is not comprehensive to start, there would definitely be a benefit to cover some of the most commonly confused characters (己/已，土/士, etc).
It has definitely been a challenge to get the balance right of getting people up and running, while also fully understanding the capabilities JinbuPal has right from start. We will have to consider how best to accomplish that and I appreciate your suggestions. It sounds like we still have some tweaking to do to get the balance right there!
Sorry about that! We will definitely incorporate a direct link to the Terms & Conditions from the registration page. Thanks for that feedback! You can access the terms directly here: https://app.jinbupal.com/terms.
The app gives you 50 free characters, after which you will be unable to track new characters unless you are a subscriber. When you try to track characters after you've used all 50, you will be shown a popup with a link to subscribe. You can see how many free characters you have remaining in the left menu pane. The left menu pane also shows a coupon code for your first month free (code: JIAYOU23). Subscription pricing is available here: https://jinbupal.com/pricing/
We actually have a beta going on right now for Cantonese, so Japanese would be the next language after that. With the Cantonese version, we incorporate additional filters that allow you to leverage what you might already know from Mandarin to learn Cantonese faster. We would plan to do the same thing with Japanese as well.
I will definitely consider a way we could batch the marking of characters and words as known once you are through the onboarding. I am not sure if you've already set up an account or not, but I should mention that you are able to do this in the onboarding flow when you import characters.
I like your suggestion of the auto-recommendation of characters to learn based on your current knowledge and the frequency of words you could potentially access by knowing the next character. I will definitely consider how to incorporate this functionality. If you import characters through the onboarding, JinbuPal will automatically apply filters to recommend your first 20 characters to learn based on which unknown character have the least number of meanings and are most frequently used. However, this is just for when you complete the onboarding and I see a big benefit to making continual recommendations as you suggested.
JinbuPal is a tool for anyone from complete beginners all the way up to higher level speakers. Regarding grammar, characters which have grammatical usages have links in their respective cards which send users to articles on external grammar resources. As a learner, you can choose to study whatever you want, whenever you want based on your curiosity or how much time you have on a given day of study. You can apply grammar filters in the app to hone your focus on studying only grammatically used characters or filter them away for days when you don’t have the time or patience to learn about grammar.
What makes JinbuPal unique is the ability to see your percentage recognition grow in real time as you complete characters and words in the app. Not only that, but you can then use the JinbuPal Chrome Extension to boost your confidence by visually seeing what you already know from authentic content. Additionally, the side-by-side card layout gets you in the habit of scanning left to right as you test your knowledge, making for a more natural transition from memorization to natural reading than you would get from using traditional flashcards.
Also, traditional flashcard apps (Anki included) by default emphasize a Pass/Fail method with regard to assessing how well you remember all aspects of a character simultaneously (Pinyin, Tone, & Meaning). We believe that allowing for independently tracking these aspects helps you feel more confident as a beginner since you can track more characters as “learned”, even if you aren’t yet very confident with the tone. We believe it’s important to understand that fully grasping tones and remembering them correctly often takes far more repetition than learning new pinyin pronunciations and meanings. We’d much rather encourage beginners to start by learning 2x-3x times the number of characters with inaccurate tones than only 1x but with perfect tones. The reason being, the more you can recognize in a short time, the more confidence you feel about being able to approach real content you enjoy and the more likely your confidence will foster long term study. As learners progress, they can easily go back and shore up areas of weakness because what they know and don’t know is tracked accordingly.
I wonder if there might be a way to incorporate metrics like h-index, which I would think that many researchers themselves would be interested in. Perhaps something like that might detract from the posts standing for themselves, but I just thought I'd throw that out there if you find it might be useful. Great work though, seems like a great idea to me. I hope you can draw in a community around it successfully.
I have experienced a lot of frustration trying to set up ngrok in the past, so this looks very interesting! I will have to try it out soon! Thanks for sharing!
There's something about this that is really interesting. I would be interested to see this as a Chrome extension that takes over your browser at specified times for you to schedule meditation throughout the day. The Momentum Chrome Extension comes to mind as a similar product that helps you set focus throughout the day and the way it is pervasive on each new tab you create.
Excellent work! You're probably already aware but I figured I would provide feedback in case not. Almost all of the clips would play for a few seconds, pause, and then start again from the beginning; they would play through to the end but not on the first pass. I like the way the text writes out word by word with the audio; it made the TikTok-style feed even more addictive for audio-only media content.
I really like this idea. I felt a real desire to want to be good at it so it was definitely addictive haha. In keeping with the score idea already mentioned, it might be cool to display a high score streak of correct answers amongst all users. I would think that'd make it even more addicting by comparing your current streak with the best all time streak.
I really like how you can chart the data. I will say though that I found myself wanting to click the dots on the chart as links and wasn't able to. If you intent people to use this same use case for the Ohayo, I would think that might be a nice option. (That is, unless I missed this somehow)
I've probably read around 5. Honestly though, after I discovered the Y Combinator YouTube channel, I just started blazing through those videos instead because they were so densely packed with knowledge and I could just listen at ~3-3.5x. But that's not to say I don't feel like I should still be reading more of them.
I am not sure which aspects you are looking to recreate exactly, but please check out my Chinese learning web app (JinbuPal).
The primary focus is to help you learn high frequency characters and words as quickly as possible while giving you real-time data as to the application of what you've learned. You can gain familiarity with character pronunciations and then learn words that use only characters you've already studied. Seeing your progress score helps boost your confidence when starting to read real Chinese texts.
You will reach 80%+ recognition of characters and knowledge of words through completing everything in the app. At that point, you'll feel much more confident to approach real-world written Chinese from any resource you find personally interesting.
Great work! I just downloaded the app and was testing it out. I like the way the onboarding is down with a gentle suggestion of what to do first without locking the user out of parts of the app. I believe users should be able to explore as much as they want to decide if something is beyond their current comprehension.
One thing, when learning some of the hiragana, the sensitivity seems to be set pretty high on the precision of handwriting to get accepted. I must have tried え 10 times before just swiping down to get out of it because it would not accept the second stroke. I didn't have trouble with the others leading up to it though.
Regarding the Wanikani memory associations, I feel similarly about this. I speak Chinese and learned characters without any of these mnemonic devices. Not being a Japanese learner, I am only roughly familiar with Wanikani through market research I did while developing my app for learning Chinese. But I would think that the promise of mnemonics usually sounds great but, even if very effective, I imagine that it's harder to get users who are at any level other than beginner because I would think anyone who already knows even just a few hundred characters or so would feel the urge to skip past assigning radicals with arbitrary mnemonics. And from what I can tell, you have to build a users foundation with these required mnemonic building blocks before they can do anything meaningful with the product.
I actually have considered adding a feature for easily-confused characters in a more obvious way. As for now, you can filter by a particular radical, but that requires you applying it outside of a card. I would like to eventually show easily confused cards or a way to directly apply a radical filter from directly inside of cards, based on the radical components of that character. I will have to get that one back on the list. Even if it is not comprehensive to start, there would definitely be a benefit to cover some of the most commonly confused characters (己/已，土/士, etc).
It has definitely been a challenge to get the balance right of getting people up and running, while also fully understanding the capabilities JinbuPal has right from start. We will have to consider how best to accomplish that and I appreciate your suggestions. It sounds like we still have some tweaking to do to get the balance right there!