Visual Sentence Composer for Japanese | Hacker News Reader

Visual Sentence Composer for Japanese

japanesecomplete.com

35 pointssova19 comments

It's hard to imagine who this is for. If you don't already know the words/particles involved, the sentences coming out of this would be gibberish. And if you do, aren't you pretty likely to have access to an IME?

Also a couple of the words in the mockup aren't actual words. Not sure if that's supposed to be intentional.

Actually an ad for the composer TBD.

Anyone paid for Japanese Complete? How was it?

Here's my popular review [0] from 5 months ago. Maybe it's improved since then (I still get e-mails even though I complained. System flags them as spam at this point.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24026775

Just a reminder that Duolingo teaches you Japanese for free.

It'd be more accurate to say "Duolingo gives you some Japanese-themed activities to play with, for free".

Nah, I actually think it does teach you Japanese.

I had Japanese lessons for a year at a language school, with teachers, tests, etc... and I have continued my studies using Duolingo. It is useful.

Duolingo barely scratches the surface, and at the same time, in many ways, hinders progress for beginners (I've seen people struggle with things they shouldn't have to struggle with). I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Duolingo is pretty bad to learn japanese. They did adapt how it works for the specificities of japanese, but it's still pretty bad. It's fun to use, to learn some words, but I wasn't learning to speak/write japanese with it. I'm making far more progress with books like Genki, which is a shame because Duolingo is fun to use.

Duolingo is pretty bad to learn any language.

I've seen one friend who was learning French (non-Québécois) exclusively via Duolingo use "bienvenue" instead of "de rien".

> I've seen people struggle with things they shouldn't have to struggle with

Could you give some examples? I've never used Duolingo for very long, but I had the impression that they were making things too easy, especially with multiple-choice/sort-the-words questions where you can often guess the correct answer.

The translation exercises are terrible and should never be used by anyone not specifically training to be a translator. I’m an intermediate learner and I almost always can identify exactly what the phrase should mean, but when I try to write the English sentence more than 80% of the time I will phrase it differently than they do and get it wrong.

Translations make me spend time worrying about how EXACTLY the original translator phrased it rather than focusing on the contents of the sentences.

Note that grading of translations is impossible for them to do without a model that maps arbitrary English to a semantic representation.

I believe IBM actually implemented something like this as part of their "Watson" efforts, but there's certainly not a public solution around.

That doesn't mean it's impossible to offer useful translation exercises, though. It means it's impossible to use a computer to grade them. If you, as the student, are willing to ignore whether you get marked "right" or "wrong", you get the full value of the instruction -- you make the attempt, Duolingo tells you what the sentence meant, and even though Duolingo can't tell whether your sentence meant the same thing, you can.

Duolingo can be pretty bad but when I use it I still take notes with a physical notebook and that makes a world of difference.

I also use it slowly, read the words aloud, vocalizing everything being said.

HelloTalk and HiNative have been the best “free” resources that I have found for learning Japanese from Japanese natives, and exchanging your own language with them in turn.

For paid resources iTalki has worked well for me.

in exchange for viewing ads (and probably user data).

I have a pfsense firewall with pfblocker and I see exactly zero ads in the website.

Of course you won't see ads if you block them. Duolingo still shows ads to users without ad-blocking firewalls or ad-blockers on their phones. You may even be violating Duolingo's terms of use by blocking ads.

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