from Hacker News

Show HN: Learn Japanese through classic short stories

by njrc9 on 7/30/16, 8:27 AM with 16 comments

• by kevining on 7/30/16, 7:51 PM

  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.

• by kaishiro on 7/30/16, 4:41 PM

  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.

• by fizzbatter on 8/1/16, 1:42 PM

  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.

• by zumu on 7/30/16, 11:54 PM

  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.

• by fuzzythinker on 7/31/16, 9:22 AM

  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.

• by coroxout on 7/30/16, 8:43 PM

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

  How do you envisage the fluency colour coding being used?