Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwrallie | Hacker News Reader

Spotted some typo (Nihnogo), so you might want to double check your spelling.

I'm not sure if it is a personal thing, but I would like to have an idea of your pricing before trying your app, and it was not clear from the web page.

This one might be subjective, but I've lived in Japan a couple of years and it is quite rare to hear somebody saying 見ましょう in the context of your example. I get the point is to teach the grammar, but if you claim your app lead people to fluency, there might be better examples to show up in your screenshots. Maybe I'm not the target customer, but I get the feeling I'll be learning more for passing the jlpt tests and less for the real world.

View on HN

If you're thinking about going to the theater watch a movie, yeah, 見ましょう is weird, but if it's Netflix or whatever, much less... I'm more weirded out by the 博ちゃん. Hiroshi would have to be very little to be chan-suffixed, or some other very specific circumstance.

chan-suffixed isn't really age limited - I have friends (both genders) in their sixties where everybody use a -chan form for their names. It's more about familiarity. Think e.g. "おばちゃん“。

Thus "specific circumstances". But that's quite rare to hear for adult males, and only from a limited set of people in that person's entourage.

There's no way I can pull up statistics, I only have my own experience to rely on. I know a couple of men in their sixties who only go by -chan, except in formal situations. And one woman who hates her given name so much that she only goes by a different -chan name, strangers and friends alike. As for "おばちゃん" about middle-aged women you happens to know, from what I see it's quite common to address nearby and not-so-nearby neighbours that way, though it may depend on where in the country you are, as is the case for so many practices elsewhere. As for -chan in general, with my wife's rather large network of friends and others which I have observed over the years, it starts out with -san but over time it always migrate to -chan, as their friendships grow closer, at nearly 100% for women and quite a few of the men too. And completely age independent. It's true that using -chan at the start is definitely a young person thing, but as described above it's not limited to that - it's just that if you don't know someone you only use it with children, or at least someone quite a bit younger than you. But there's no age limitation per se in it.

It's not really an age limitation, but it's much easier to use "chan" for kids.

Basically -chan for girls and -kun for boys is used pretty much automatically for smaller kids, even if you meet them for the first time.

For adults it's more complex, it depends how close you are, how that person is used to be called among family/close friends, etc.

Oh thanks! I swear I must've read that typo 100 times and never noticed it. Good point about the pricing and 見ましょう examples, I'll consider changing it to something else.

Chris, I'll second the pricing feedback. It sounded interesting, so I went to the App Store. FREE. Yay! But with in-app purchases. Oh. Okay, I guess that's how they all do it these days. Could mean you don't really need to pay for most features. Or you can't realistically use it without paying $2. Or maybe $200. Or maybe $10/month forever. Who knows? The App Store policy is to hide all but the initial price, so developers' policy is to make that zero and hide the actual cost in "in-app".

But, the website will explain what you get for how much, right? The website explanation is that you potentially get lots of great features, and if you want to know which features cost how much, go to the App Store and "buy" it for "free" and see what happens.

So, I figured maybe I would read some reviews. Later. Too busy now. If it was impulse purchase price, I would have just bought it, but I can't tell, so I'll put it on my mental "check it out someday" list. For now, I just shrugged and moved on, but since you're participating in the discussion here, and I'm a small dev too, I figured I'd just give you some feedback from the "usability lab", FWIW.

This is great feedback, thanks. I’ll definitely be putting pricing information on the website.

It’s not just you; at all - in fact; if I don’t see the price immediately; online, in person; anywhere - I’m uninterested and assume either you don’t think you’ve priced your product fairly; or you feel the need to psychologically manipulate people to stay on your website longer to seek more information, rather than being immediately upfront.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com