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The Future of Jalup – Part 5 — 39 Comments

  1. Probably wild dreams and/or outside of the scope of Jalup, but this is what I’d love to see one day:

    1.
    A platform that provides jalup style i+1 cards, derived from the most frequently used words found in whatever media you’re reading/watching/listening to.

    Basically a database of cards that are all linked through their dependencies. You input/select the source text and out comes a crafted set of new cards to add to your deck, perfectly matched to your interests. Do this with your immersion library and you can majorly increase the percent you understand. I guess at the expense of making everything else, relatively, sound harder…

    Source text is not as hard to find as you may think. Ebooks and subtitles are available. Anime remakes of manga often follow word for word. Legality and copyright are probably the main issue here.

    I’m basically doing this at the moment though a variety of tools and Manan and The One decks as sources for cards. Though things aren’t linked so I’ve got to do things a bit manually.

    2.
    Immersion SRS app. I’ll often listen to something every day for 5 days, then totally forget about it and never listen again. An app to listen to things in SRS style could help. I want to listen to new things lots, and old things not so much but still occasionally. Could possibly be done with smart playlists in iTunes or other player?

    3.
    Movie/etc non-dialogue trimmer tool. Immersion with people speaking, not endless gun fights. Some movies have a lot of non-dialogue. I’ve been doing this (somewhat) manually with subtitles, Excel and some audio editing software but it’s a bit of an effort.

    • Thanks for your suggestions!

      1. Copyright is probably the struggle with this. Independently people can probably do it without any worry, but to make a product that encourages people to do that might not go so well. Also, the Morphman plugin can help with the i+1 thing

      2. That is actually really interesting. Will try to think up some possiblities.

      3. This would be useful. I wonder if there is a way already to do this with an app like Wavepad. I know it trims silences, but I wonder if it can also trim non-talking noise?

      • 1. I’ll check out Morphman. I’ve heard of it but never really understood how it works.

        2. I played around with smart playlists a bit but never found a player that supports both AND and OR operators. If you have support for that, and you can keep track of how many times a track has been played and when it was last played, you can make something work. Here was my general idea:
        If playcount = 0–5: Add to playlist
        OR
        If playcount = 5–8 AND lastplayed = >1 day: Add to playlist
        OR
        If playcount = 8–9 AND lastplayed = >3 days: Add to playlist
        OR
        If playcount = 10 AND lastplayed = >5 days: Add to playlist
        OR
        etc etc

        3. My method uses the timing code from subtitles to trim out the non-dialogue. Basically I input the subtitle timing code into a spreadsheet that does some trickery, exporting a list of the timing for the non-dialogue. This list I import into some audio editing software, which I then use to cut out just the non-dialogue leaving pure dialogue. Each individual step is relatively automated, but still a bit of a hassle! Maybe one day I’ll work out how to join it all together.

      • I’ve actually got #2 “Immersion SRS” working exactly as I wrote above. If anyone’s interested I can write up the basic idea of how I’ve done it. I’m on Android and it involves a few paid apps (GoneMadMusicPlayer, Tasker and AutoInput). These apps are super useful though, especially if you’re interested in doing any other Android tweaking.

        • Nice. I think a guide on how to do it (with the paid apps you are using) would definitely benefit a lot of people on Jalup. If you think you have the time and can write up a short guide on how to do it, I would happily post it on the site.

          • I don’t think my current implementation is worth an article yet – I’ve realised a bit of an issue of the amount of tracks is small. I’ll write something here when I get a chance, with what I’ve got working at the moment, and keep searching for a better solution.

            • Thanks for the update. No pressure or anything, so if you can’t figure out something that works well that you feel comfortable sharing it’s okay.

  2. Let me assure you that to me Jalup Immersion has A LOT of value. Creating cards of my own has always been a huge chore that puts quite a dent on my motivation. That’s why your decks are a godsend that save me a huge amount of time. So continuing JALUP Immersion in the future would be very much appreciated.

  3. One thing I think would be really cool is Jalup Stories Intermediate (or even Advanced too). I bought Jalup Stories Beginner and enjoyed them so much. They were such a confidence boost, finally something I could read, fully understand, and enjoy. Now that I’ve finished Jalup Intermediate, I kinda miss to have something like that.

    I also imagine Jalup Stories Intermediate wouldn’t be as hard to create as the Beginner version, because there are 1000 extra vocabulary cards to work with while creating the stories; however I understand it would still be pretty exhausting on a creative level.

    I guess it didn’t have enough of a following to motivate you to try and make an Intermediate version, but who knows: it’s been a pretty long time since that, Jalup users are different and 10€ was a pretty low price tag.

    Maybe trying to make Jalup Stories Intermediate at 20€ would still be a really nice deal while keeping a fair price (in my opinion), and you would get double the earnings.

    • Yes, Jalup Stories – Intermediate and beyond is on the agenda of things to start working on.

      The creativity is the hardest part, because it’s really fiction writing, which isn’t my specialty. But I’m going to start brainstorming in the near future.

      • Oh, that’s a really nice thing to hear! It wouldn’t have to be fiction though; maybe for Intermediate, but for Advanced you could do some simple essays about more mature themes. Maybe that would be easier for you to do? It would still be pretty useful reading material, and it would be a great way to ease learners their way in newspapers, no-fiction books and so on.

  4. I have no original ideas this time, but I’d like to chime in and say personally I’d love to see Jalup Situations expanded further. This is currently where I see the most progress. It’s really awesome to be able to systematically practice listening comprehension without having to struggle with vocabulary at the same time.

  5. My Ideas (most of it are probably not good but here we go lol)

    1. More Jalup Stories. For me, Listening and finally understanding Jalup Beginner Stories I felt was a turning point in my Japanese and I really owe a great deal of my progress to it. Jalup Situations of course is all good and all but I feel like (at least for me) I tend to remember words when they’re attached to crazy situations lol. Just seeing the vocab/grammar used in the JALUP Decks in crazy situations seems to make it stick for me lol
    2. More information in certain cards. For someone who is currently halfway in the Jalup Intermediate Deck I think it would be really nice to have certain cards extended with more sentences. For example, if I don’t get the word 状態 in a deck. Maybe have further sentences that are outside it or Japanese Media associated that use this word in action (or conversation examples) so we can get a further sense of it outside of the deck.
    3. Jalup Q & A. I think it would be really cool if beginner/intermediate (of course this applies to advance people as well) could ask questions and adam answers them in English or even Japanese (with English Subtitles with Japanese Transcript).
    4. Being able to click on a word from Jalup Listen or/and Yuki and Adam show and have simple Japanese Definitions linked to the Jalup Deck + further Sentence Examples (outside of the deck) with associate Japanese Media (or made up conversations etc).

    Anyways I’m sure there’s more ideas but those are some that I thought would be pretty cool.
    I’m sure there’s more ideas on my head but those are just some that I think would be really helpful.

    • Thanks Bon for the ideas!

      1. Yes, more stories :)
      2. Interesting concept. Maybe as part of the audio series, we can discuss some of the more complicated words from the decks.
      3. This was actually tried in the past (we had a full Q&A forum here on Jalup) and unfortunately didn’t catch on.
      4. So you want the Jalup NEXT linking from inside the Patreon platform :P But we may try to do some kind of linking from the Jalup decks to these audio series. Just need to figure out a way to make that happen.

  6. If this is a double post, I’m sorry.

    First, I would like to say that you have a lot on your plate Adam, and it seems to me that 1 man can only do so much (which you are doing an admirable job of) and you may be stretching yourself thin based on the many ideas people have and the different things you are producing. One thing that I really think might help is a poll article with all the options you are considering and people can pick the one they are most interested in. This way you can assess what is most wanted by the most students and is beneficial to you too.

    Second: I’m all for more Jalup situations. Hearing the words you’ve learned over and over is great, especially when native material does not garuntee that. I would prefer the conversations to be a little longer though.

    Third: More Jalup stories sounds great, but is understandably difficult.

    Fourth: I think Jalup immersion is a great concept but personally I would prefer to see the immersion deck cover more advanced immersion. The reason I feel this way is because I feel there is far more beginner and intermediate material here. But, that is perfectly understandable because there will always be more beginner interest vs advanced.

    Fifth: I love the Jalup listen series idea. It will receive my full support.

    Sixth: I would personally like it if the immersion series could cover an easily accessible videogame (like Monster Hunter World or something) but of course that’s a bit ludicrous considering you’d have to play it….or would you? I’m currently playing that game and could capture every word that I think could be used and send the list via email. I’ve already begun that process. I don’t have time to make cards, and you’re a pro at it. But this preference is probably not in line with other people’s.

    Seventh: I believe Jalup NEXT is amazing (the card linking feature is incredble, and is better than cramming all the definitions into an Anki card definition). Since it is required to make the expert Ultimate deck, I’d say that after the expert audio preorder is finished (it WILL succeed), then you should do a preorder for Expert next cards to be finished.
    I have more ideas, but I’ll leave it at this for now. Sorry it’s so long-winded.

    • Thanks Andrew!

      Stretching myself thin is my job :) But for this type of post I’m thinking long term. I’m not going to be able to attempt everything immediately, but the ideas settle in my mind and over time can turn into all different things. I do like the idea of doing some kind of polls for this type of thing in the future.

      For Jalup Immersion in regards to difficulty, I’ve been pondering about moving it from manga to other material (possibly novels, drama, variety shows, newspapers, etc.) This could lead to more advanced vocabulary. The hardest problem with video games is it limits the access of people who want to use the deck with the actual source material. Manga was chosen first because it’s incredibly easy to get a free sample (that I can link) from the publisher. So I need to think if people still would want the deck if they had trouble accessing the source material.

      And I agree about the NEXT linking vs the Anki cards.The Ultimate versions were created for the people who absolutely wanted to keep the Anki features, but still get a taste of Jalup NEXT linking.

      • Newspapers for immersion series sounds awesome.

        Before I forget: I think adding a “level for understanding” to each Jalup listen post would be very useful/motivating/good feedback. Just like the great list you have that shows what level you need to be to enjoy or understand immersion material.

        Ex: Jalup listen episode 20 – Level 30-35

  7. Jalup Expert Audio:

    I’m really glad to see that you are trying to make this happen, because I think it is a really good thing to create something like this with audio for advanced learners, but I just don’t have any money to spare right now to support the project, so 応援していますが、あいにく支援はできません。 Also I don’t own Jalup Expert. BTW, is there a sample deck for Expert? I looked at the sample for Advanced, and there just wasn’t much of anything that was new to me, so I’m kind of curious about what the level is of Expert.

    Stories:

    My first thought was to wonder who writes them, because my personal preference is generally to use materials created by Japanese people if I am going to invest in Japanese-language resources (not just because of the naturalness of the Japanese but also because Japanese culture and attitudes come through in learning resources created by Japanese people, among other reasons). However, I think that your customers are your customers because they don’t mind using Japanese-learning resources made by a non-Japanese person, so I’m pretty sure you can just throw this comment out the window.

    One thought that might be more helpful is, what about adapting Japanese legends or folktales to an intermediate level? That might help with the dilemma of trying to come up with what to write. Along similar lines, I’m not sure how copyright would work, but would it be possible to use some old, public-domain children’s stories or something and adapt them to use only vocabulary from JALUP intermediate?

    Also, I don’t know whether or not this would work with your format, since I don’t know how the stories are presented, but would it be possible to present a very short word bank (maybe 2-5 words) of specific words used in that story that aren’t in Beginner or Intermediate? みんなの日本語 does this for their reading passages: the passages will often include a few new words, for example, proper names, or some other specific vocabulary, just for that reading passage, but everything else is vocabulary that has been presented previously in the book. If it’s a very small amount of new vocabulary, that isn’t particularly taxing on the reader, and it would probably greatly expand your ability to have stories about a variety of topics, since it allows you to include things like 十二支 or 鞍 that tend to crop up in stories but that otherwise aren’t very frequently-used words.

    Learner stories:

    I’ll email you about this later.

    Other ideas:

    I was going to suggest “scripts taken from authentic conversations with a Japanese person” but what you are doing now with the Adam and Yuki show covers this. Nice mind-reading. (笑)

    • You could use one of the tests Adam made to test your level. Then you will know where you are at. Expert is level 40+( or rather, will put you at that level area)

      • Found it, thanks.

        At about 80% comprehension of the level 80 material (but with a lot of unknown words), I suppose I would be somewhere around the low to mid 70s?

        So if Expert only takes you to level 40+, that leaves me in the same place as before: I think it’s a good project and I’m glad somebody is doing it, but it sounds like it probably wouldn’t be useful to me. But at this level there’s no excuse to not use authentic native materials (which is what I am doing already anyways).

    • There isn’t a sample currently, but I will add one in.

      I write the stories, and then they are edited by a native Japanese person.

      That’s an interesting idea about using Japanese folktales and creating an easier version of them. A lot of stories are public domain so I don’t see a problem.

      There actually is already a short word bank for each story (exactly around 2-5 words) of words not introduced in Jalup Beginner but explained for the stories. It was the only way I could actually create the stories. So I will continue this trend into Intermediate

      Thanks for the ideas Amber!

  8. Hi, i really started to love jalup. It‘s a great learning ressource. I started learninv with it half a year ago, but had to start cause of time reasons. Now i wanted to restart and use jalupnext again. I had the following problem: i‘m not able to reset my progress in a deck. Is there a way to do that? I want to restart the kanaconquerer to get back into the hiragana and katakana.
    If it‘s not possible to do yet, i would like to give this as an idea for future updates to the jalupnext client. It can be usefull to reset certain decks if needed.

    All the best,

    Max

  9. Is there an dictionary index of all the words that appear in the Jalup Decks? Genki has a dictionary at the end of each volume, and I always liked going through it for fun (I like dictionaries). A Jalup Deck J-J Dictionary would be nice to have.

    • That’s an interesting concept. I guess I could make a separate file (like a spreadsheet or pdf) of all the definitions found in the deck. This is something I’ll look into. Thanks!

  10. What about a J-J deck focused on idioms? Like, a sentence describing what the idiom means and in Japanese? It seems to me idioms are learned after a lot of studying due to there complexity. Also, all resources on them seem to be in English?

    • Try doing a Google search for 四字熟語 or 慣用句 and you can find some J-J resources, for example,

      http://www.kanjipedia.jp/sakuin/yojijyukugo/%E3%81%82 (四字熟語)

      or

      http://web.ydu.edu.tw/~uchiyama/data/idiomlist.pdf (慣用句)

      The later doesn’t really have explanations, just readings and example sentences, but if you want an explanation in Japanese of any particular idiom, you can find that by typing in the idiom you want and の意味 or something like that in the search bar.

      Also, if it is particularly ことわざ that you want, then same as above, if you do a Google search in Japanese there should be plenty of J-J resources out there.

      The problem with all of the above, of course, is it doesn’t give you any sense of which ones will be most useful to you because they get used the most often; that’s something you can probably only get through massive exposure.

  11. What about a file that contains a bunch of things that the average person would think sometimes throughout the day? Like, a word doc )because I couldn’t see it working well as a deck). I believe you once did an article on thinking in Japanese and I thought it was an awesome idea. I thought maybe a list full of things one may think through the day could be made and used to practice thinking in Japanese. I thought of making my own, but my producing of Japanese is still weak because of the focus on input, and I don’t want to make mistakes.
    For example, who doesn’t think on occasion:” I’m soooooo tired”, “I’m sick of this”, “I wonder what time it is…”, ” I can’t remember what I was doing…” and so on.

    Anyways, just an idea!

    • I can’t remember which article that was in, but I know what you are talking about. It’s an interesting idea, so I’ll add it to the list :)

  12. Oh, I realize that there is a bit of a list in that post. I just thought maybe a large list or something.maybe it’s pointless though since it should be unique to each person?

  13. How about something for learning news? Like Jalup immersion news or something? It’s a super tough beast!

  14. Okay here is an easy one. Being new to Jalup and using it for the last couple months I have really started to enjoy and learn from the articles posted every week on the front page. It contains some great wisdom and the comments add a ton as well. There should be an easier way to see the old posts!

    Right now you can hit more at the bottom and see a few more and then… that is it, the button goes away. I found a back way by typing a wrong url and then going month by month in the archive. There is some valuable stuff in there! I am fine doing it this way but you should really make the more button continue and show as much as the user wants. If there is some other easier way I missed it so someone else probably will too :)

    • I originally had the ability to scroll through the pages of past posts by date. But I found people preferred having all the posts organized, which is why the Walkthrough was born and all the other sections of the site on the menu bar. Almost every past post on the site is organized in some way in these different sections.

      So you might want to have some fun going through the entire Walkthrough :)

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