This site is a proud member of the geekring! Check some other geeky websites here!
I have made the website I wish existed when I started learning Japanese.
Each learner has their favorite method. Mine is massive input and massive fun. I have tried Spaced Repetition Systems but found them boring and I have some doubt about their efficiency outside the psychology research lab.
I found one of the main drawback of these systems to be their lack of speed. By the time you review 10 words in you favourite SRS you could have read 10 full sentences that exposes your brain to both vocab and grammar.
I earn a living analyzing data and am pretty familiar with machine learning.
What we call machine learning consists of optimizing some very simple function by showing it a ton of data. It turns out that these function are able to find patterns fairly efficiently. I believe the human brain is able to do the same.
More here.
Thanks to Twitter for sharing its emoji font.
Something I learnt doing this project is that emojis are specific to Operating systems.
Not all of them have all the emojis available. Different Operating systems also means different user experience.
This is the Twemoji github repo.
Thanks to /u/morgawr_ for his negative but constructive feedback that gave me some food for thought.
Thanks to /u/Kafke for praising this project when it was still in its infancy and who I have considered for a long time my 'audience'
Thanks to mariekobayashi for helping me so much with the proofreading
A massive thank you to Gorbit99 from Wanikani forum for taking the time to read the first four parts of the site and to write very helpful comments.
You can contact me on Github by opening an issue or making a pull request to the repo.
You can let me a comment on Wanikani,
A language learner forum
and my reddit username is Wooden_Train1033.
I have been thinking a lot about whether or not I would accept contribution in the unlikely scenario where someone wants to contribute. If you want to fix some minor issue with the HTML or one of the numerous Japanese mistakes, feel free to do it.
If you can create some content that I would be happy to publish on this site, then you are skilled enough to have you own site. If that ever happens, I'd be very happy to exchange ideas and help you as well as promote your site whenever I share mine.
This is a personal project and I want to be free to make any decision I want. Accepting contributor would also make questions regarding IP rights complicated.
Everything on this website is published under the following license.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
If you like my work and want to buy me a coffee click here.
I share this project on reddit/r/learnJapanase from time to time and some users have let me very nice comment which are a great source of motivation :
- Dude, that website great. It's way more fun for a beginner to learn Japanese with those easy examples. It has some errors though. You need to collaborate with somebody who knows the language better (preferably a native). I hope you'll keep updating it.
頑張ってください！[/u/T0mmy_]
- Keep at it. From what I've seen, it's brilliant. [/u/RoundCat]
- "Love it. This is exactly the type of content I've always wished for. Makes language learning easy, fun, and streamlined and gets you reading and enjoying content ASAP. Only change I'd make is to make an actual story out of it." "This sort of thing is what I always dreamed about. When I took my Japanese class oh so many years ago, it was the typical stuff, and then at the end I'm like "okay time to read some japanese" and of course that was a joke because I couldn't manage to read anything not even little kid stories." [Kafke]
- Man this is seriously high effort, thanks for the hard work!
Do you plan on making more of these? [/u/Froggyfrogger]
I have had the chance to feature on the front page of HackerNews here
"I find this approach fascinating, it's simple yet so intuitive! I hope you keep going."
ad404b8a372f2b9
Wanikani's community has received my project more positively than reddit here .
I got so many nice comments that I am not going to copy them all. Here is a sample :
- "Good stuff. I did the Rosetta Stone course a few years back and I honestly think I would have just preferred to go through this instead." RoseMuncher
- "The colours and pictures are so beautifully chosen, Drdru. I will enjoy looking at that. (I already enjoyed the cat getting its comeupance). Thank you for sharing the link!" Epona
- "I think this is genius! I can’t give a beginner’s perspective but it seemed super fun." brkmkrz
- "This is brilliant. Genuinely fun and enjoyable. The tongue-in-cheek-ness really propels it along. I’m really very impressed.
My daughter, who is 7, is currently at the age where you see a lot of the picture-instead-of-word reading exercises in her native language, so I know how useful it is. I really like this approach for learning foreign languages, because it makes the process so much more fun.
Great stuff. Keep it up." Sporadic
Amazing! I was just teaching my son using LLPSI this morning (if you know, you know) and started pining again for something like it in Japanese. So I decided to browse again for about the 20th time in the last 5 years.
I am delighted to find this project. What a Godsend! I am also thankful to the link to that new youtube channel Comprehensible Japanese (another thing I have tried and failed to find in the past years).
By the way, according to a possible hint in your text, I live just one town away from you (me, Neyagawa-shi). Funny old world, anyway.
[...]
Well done again. My son (7) was reading it also. Think he liked it.
I think Familia Romana was not well known until Luigi Miraglia started to recommend it. Eventually some Japanese teaching influencer could recommend your work and too. There certainly is a gap for a Japanese book that proceeds intuitively without L1 translation. People are always asking what is the best book for Japanese. The real answer is there are no excellent ones. So your project looks important.
notamonkeymate
/u/notamonkeymate Here
I usually don’t like self-promotion, but in this instance, I’ll let it slide. I WISH I had this resource when I started learning Japanese. I’ll definitely recommend this to some of my friends :)) u/Amatasuru-Chan Here
I have made an RPG inspired Graded reader and redditors like it
- Well, I agree. It feels like something hard to pull off, and I was surprised when I came across some interesting approaches in japanese, which do feel kinda smooth.
Heres just one example:
https://drdru.github.io/stories/intro.html
[u/UndeniablyCrunchy]
Thanks for reminding me, it was the first site that I used for reading Japanese! jrmr50 (2022-07-29 on Bunpro forum)
I just want to let you know that this is the one of the most brilliant things I've ever seen in comics. Ngl I'm really jealous I didn't come up with this lmao. Can't wait to see how this turns out! powerplantanimations (2022-07-25 on tapas forum )
I was fortunate to come across your site linked in a comment, and I love the emotes and the silly stories. I was having so much fun that it didn’t even occur to me I was reading so much in Japanese! hiwamari (2022-07-20 on Wanikani forum)
Holy, i found it lurking in Github and was about to stream playing it to learn on twitch. Good job there.
I was looking for something easy to play and read on stream, i was using a OCR to play other games, but this i can use Yomichan so it's perfect. Haven't started it yet but will soon, it's wild that you're doing something like this on web tech.
[u/mTbzz]
This is a natural approach resource someone designed for japanese, which is really cool because its the first of it’s kind I’ve seen for an asian language (I would love more nature approach/comprehensible input resources for languages like japanese, chinese, korean etc). I’ve explored this site and truly it is comprehensible input if you can read kana. Its a wonderful resource and I’ve been going through it to see how much it teaches - I would be in heaven if a resource like this ultimately aims to cover as many words as Le Francais Par Le Methode Nature does. In my dream world many languages would have a resource that covers as much as that book ToT. I’m really excited by the project below, and I still would desperately love to figure out how to make a similar resource for chinese one day.
https://rigelmejo.tumblr.com/post/680794287889350656/some-cool-resources
That’s really cool, huge thanks! You should consider getting a Patreon account, because what you are doing – is exactly what many learners need: an interesting beginner-friendly reading resource!
Trunklayer on wanikani forum
I'm passed the point where this is useful for me, but I've run into your page a number of times and I love the style. My 4 year old had fun reading through some of it with me months ago. Thanks for making such a fun resource.
https://old.reddit.com/r/japaneseresources/comments/ybdbhi/drdrus_lab_learn_you_first_350_words_by_reading/