
Show HN: Learn Japanese through classic short stories - njrc9
https://languageinmotion.jp/
======
kevining
Love the idea behind the site! As an intermediate level Japanese speaker I
think I could benefit a lot from it, but I had a few suggestions.

1 - Consider having one story from each difficulty available for free. The
free intermediate article is a bit daunting for my current kanji level. I
would be interested in signing up just for the beginner articles, but probably
not without a preview.

2 - If time permits, consider having a button which can display a translation
of the entire sentence. Satori reader has something similar and it's very
useful when there's unknown grammar

Hope the site takes off, I would love to use and support it in the future.

~~~
nv-vn
As someone with very little knowledge of the language, I definitely agree with
your first point. It's hard for me to figure out if the product would be
useful for me at my level since there's no "Easy" book available for free. I
imagine that for an advanced learner it would be similar not knowing whether
there's actually any new knowledge to be gained at their level.

~~~
fuzzythinker
Actually, there is a book marked as "Easy" for free [1], it's 5 pages.

[1]
[https://languageinmotion.jp/library/10](https://languageinmotion.jp/library/10)

------
kaishiro
I haven't been able to dig terribly deep into this, but I find this
fascinating. I've been learning Mandarin and Japanese on and off over the
years, and this is always the sort of thing that I wished I had.

The other was word for word translations of popular TV shows _along with
cultural notes_. I remember watching a show called My Own Swordsman (武林外传)
pretty regularly while living in Shanghai, and while I could follow the gist
of some conversations, so much of what made it funny were cultural puns that I
just couldn't grep.

Still enjoyed watching it though.

~~~
wodenokoto
These things have existed in print as "graded readers" for years.

------
fizzbatter
This is nifty. For absolute beginners, do you[1] recommend any resources?

Though, the pricing confuses me a bit. It mentions ¥1,000/month for all
content, is that a comma in the American sense (¥1000), or a decimal (¥1)?
Apparently in USD, that is ~$150 vs $0.15.. one is insanely expensive _(in my
opinion)_, the other is insanely cheap. Pardon my ignorance :)

[1]: You, being the author.. or anyone i suppose.

~~~
njrc9
Thanks for taking a look at it –

Regarding resources for absolute beginners, I haven’t read it myself, but this
book [1] takes a similar approach to my site, but since it has full English
translations of the text it seems like it could be useful to beginners
(however, it looks like you still need to understand basic grammar and
vocabulary).

As to pricing, the comma is in the American sense. So that would make it about
$10/month.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-into-Japanese-Literature-
Cla...](https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-into-Japanese-Literature-
Classics/dp/1568364156)

~~~
fizzbatter
$10/m? I must have really messed something up. I somehow got $150/m o_O. $10/m
is much more reasonable, thank you

------
zumu
Very cool project. I've been thinking about doing something like this for
years.

However, I must ask, is there an option to display the definitions in simple
Japanese/use the app entirely in Japanese?

Seems to me if you're reading short stories, you probably shouldn't be
translating words to English.

Also, do you explain the nuances of the kanji themselves? There is a lot of
connotation(?) not provided by the definition.

~~~
njrc9
Thank you very much for the input!

> Seems to me if you're reading short stories, you probably shouldn't be
> translating words to English.

Definitely, Japanese that is as nuanced as in these stories does not translate
very well. To try to overcome that, the definitions are always shown right in
the context of the text and each definition includes all alternative meanings
of that word so that puns and nuances are preserved as much as possible. This
seems, for the moment, the best compromise between accessibility to English
speakers and honoring the Japanese text. However, if you have any better ideas
of how to approach this I'd be grateful for your input!

> However, I must ask, is there an option to display the definitions in simple
> Japanese/use the app entirely in Japanese?

Right now there is no option to use the app entirely in Japanese or to display
definitions in Japanese. That is something I had not thought of, so thanks for
the suggestion! To begin with, I’m going to work on refining it as it is in
English since I figured that what keeps people from breaking into Japanese
literature is largely the intimidation of a page of completely Japanese text
(e.g. navigating Aozora Bunko for the first time).

> Also, do you explain the nuances of the kanji themselves? There is a lot of
> connotation(?) not provided by the definition.

Right now there is no explanation of nuances of the kanji themselves (only the
words). That is another idea I had not thought much of! Thanks. I’m hoping to
get more feedback from users and to find out how they use it and what they
might find lacking. This could be one of those lacking features.

------
fuzzythinker
Besides reading, being able to speak and pronounce the text would be extremely
helpful in learning a language. If I'm paying $10/mo, I would expect that
ability to be added.

~~~
njrc9
Thank you for the feedback. I’ve deliberately not attempted to teach grammar
or pronunciation with it since I’m aiming for people who already understand
those things (i.e. intermediate learners) but who need help to go from
intermediate to advanced Japanese (mostly a matter of building vocabulary) and
for which there do not seem to be many educational resources. So right now my
foremost goal is to get more books published to broaden the vocabulary
presented in the books. Hope that explains its approach!

------
coroxout
This looks very cool. I'd love to see something similar for other languages.

How do you envisage the fluency colour coding being used?

~~~
njrc9
Sorry for the late reply, but thanks very much for the feedback! Yes, doing
the same for other languages is something I’ve thought of too. If I knew
German, for example, that’d be great fun (thinking of using works by Goethe
and Nietzsche). For now, this is a one-man show so I’ll have to keep my focus
on just Japanese.

> How do you envisage the fluency colour coding being used?

The color-coding is just to visualize your progress if you are recording how
well you know words. Red indicates words you don’t know or haven’t recorded
anything for. Each time you click “Got It” for a word, the color will be
updated to a new color: red -> brown -> yellow -> light green -> green (green
indicates you know it completely; clicking “Know It” will make it green
immediately).

