Nakama Chapter 3 Vocab Now Available

Japanese Vocab Quiz now has the vocabulary and kanji readings from Chapter 3.

For me personally, this will be the first chapter where I get to test how well the site works for teaching brand new vocab (as opposed to my getting accidentally exposed to it as I was building/testing the site).

In general, I tend to think that nothing would come close to someone sitting down and making their own flash cards (whether physical or in Anki or similar software), and finding their own personal connection/examples/representative images for a word or concept. But ain’t nobody got time for that. Or at least I sure don’t when I’m having to cram a bunch of vocabulary for class all at once.

As of now, I tend to think of the Japanese Vocab Quiz site as being a place to try to brute-force vocab into your head… in hopefully an enjoyable enough manner. But still, I’m sure there are ways to improve the system, to brute force the learning in the most efficient way possible.

Things like Anki would use spaced repetition to be more efficient. It’s not a perfect system, but the ideal in a spaced repetition system is that you review a word right before you’re about to forget it. Then, you never forget the word, and you’re only reviewing it as often as you need to.

At this time, I’d far rather design something to make it easier to export the vocabulary to something like Anki, than to try to implement an SRS myself. But I’m sure there are still things I could implement in the spirit of SRS.

I’ve got ideas of things I could implement in the near future that are specifically designed for trying to brute force a brand new list of vocab in the shortest time possible. The problem is, a bunch of them would be non trivial to implement. The biggest thing I’d like to try is using audio to reinforce learning but that has both technical hurdles to cross and I’d have to figure out where to source the audio for a bunch of random vocab.

Someday…