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.
kevining: That is a very good point about having free access to a book of each difficulty level. You are absolutely right, since with only an intermediate level book available for free, subscribing is a gamble as to whether there are books suitable for you (definitely don’t want to put people in that position).
I’ve updated the site now so that you can access 3 books (1 of each level) for free.
> 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
This is definitely something I’m thinking about. I toyed with the idea of translating each page myself and making that available at the bottom of each page. But scrolling to the bottom of the page is a hassle so I’d want to figure out something more integrated.
I also wasn’t sure how useful whole-sentence translations would be since I figured people using this would probably already have a good understanding of grammar. But perhaps these books are advanced enough to warrant whole-sentence translations regardless? Thoughts?
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
How do you envisage the fluency colour coding being used?
> 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).
