Update for the New Year
あけましておめでとう！Happy New Year! We hope that we can help you achieve your New Years’ Resolutions for learning Japanese this year.
A few promised updates:
Verb Module: We’re launching our own verb conjugation tool today! If you click ‘Verbs’ in the header, you’ll now be able to search through our verb database and find conjugation tables for all those verbs. There are currently 305 verbs in the database; we’ll add more over time.
All the verb forms are programmatically generated, so please let us know if you find any errors. Also, if there are any other forms you want to see as well, please let us know and we’ll build them into the next update.
Frequency 5000: Frequency 5000 is now complete You may see that there are in fact fewer than 5000 words in the collection. This is largely due to repeats, and the exclusion of certain types of words like particles, interjections, and classical language.
We mainly used Routledge’s definitions to build each card, but we don’t think these definitions are quite good enough. There are a lot more complexities and nuances to each of the vocabulary words that we want to learn ourselves and help our users understand. So, instead of expanding out to 10000 words or something, we want to spend some time improving these slowly over time and build some content to improve this set of cards.
Redesign: You may have seen that we’ve been releasing redesign updates over the past few weeks quietly. We’ll keep doing that quietly as we find more areas that we can improve in terms of design.
Ideas for Things to Come:
We’re currently still exploring a few ideas as to where we want to expand next. We would love your feedback and input on some of the ideas below:
Adding Keigo Forms to Verbs Module: We still need to find a better way to programatically include the keigo forms into our conjugation tables.
Verb Conjugation Drills: Now that we have the data for all the different verb forms, we think that building verb conjugation drills that accompany the Genki textbook progression might be a good idea. You’ll only be tested in verbs that you learned in or before the chapter where you learn the verb form.
Adjective / Adverb Conjugation: Japanese is a special language wherein there are adjective conjugations in addition to verb conjugations. While the conjugations are straightforward, I have not seen a tool that consolidates all these forms.
Genki Kanji + Jouyou Kanji: One of our users suggested using our current data for Kanji practice. We don’t want to replicate WaniKani or Kanji Koohii or any mnemonics-based Kanji learning tool, but I feel like there’s a resource we could build with the data that we have. It would simply be practicing vocabulary all using the same Kanji and testing Kanji-to-hiragana.
Other Textbooks: We think the next popular textbooks in the series are ‘An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese’ and ‘Tobira’. We don’t really know how popular these are, so please let us know if you are currently using or planning to use these textbooks.
As usual, please leave a comment, email me at hello@ripiito.com or message me at /u/explour if you have any questions, comments, or anything else you’d like to say.
