Hello
I expect you have seen the latest, excellent Tofugu Japanese Learning Tips video about making connections between language items.
Making Connections, Making Japanese Fluency.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTlAy_gkyCc
EDIT (Jul 28 2015): There is also now a Tofugu blog post about the same subject.
I really like this exercise, but I don’t like having a bunch of actual record cards all over my studio. I made this userscript toy so I can play language connections fridge magnet poetry on my WK dashboard.
I had some fun using it so I have tidied it up and added some features and put it on Greasmonkey - Thanks to my colleagues on Slack for testing it and making suggestions (and pointing out typos).
It picks sets of random cards from sets of language points.
You can have multiple sets and drag the cards around within their set or between sets. Double-click a card to delete it. Copy the text from all the cards in a set in one line. The dragging function stops you from selecting the text on the card so there is a [c] button to copy it. Use the button to delete a whole set.
It comes with a small set of language points in the code, but using the buttons at the bottom you can save your own lists of things into it (input them as comma separated lists), which are saved to your local storage so stay there for next time.
That’s all it does, picks a bunch of random things for you play around with. It applies no rules to the things it picks, so one time you might get five nouns in a set, but that’s good because then you can go and see if there are connections between those nouns without having to use any particles or verbs. As Koichi says in the video, it is just as important to find that there are no connections as to find that there are some. Then if you find there are no connections between your five nouns, keep them, make a new set and this time only add some particles. Then, can you connect the nouns you have using your new particles? Or maybe add a few verbs. Can you use these verbs to modify the nouns? The possibilities for falling down rabbit holes of research are … a lot.
You can add a bunch of sets and make a Haiku.
If you want some adverbs, or maybe some past tense conjugations you can add them, either in the custom section or wherever you want.
It applies no sanity checking to the input because you can put anything you want in as CSV. You could use it to decide what to have for dinner.
Get it from Greasy Fork if you fancy it:
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/11137-wk-language-point-connector-cards
Tested in Greasmonkey and Tampermonkey on Linux and Windows.
[SCREENSHOTS]
Select sets of cards.
Drag them around (The cursor is a hand when you are over a draggable card but that didn’t show in the screenshot).
Drag within sets
Drag between sets
Copy the text.
Input your own lists of items.
Versions History.
0.1.0
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/11137-wk-language-point-connector-cards
Immediate additions/fixes to do:
* Remove “Clear” button and add to main set.
* Make it possible to drag cards into a newly created empty set.
* Multi set copy text.
* Ad-hoc single item entry field.
Possible future updates:
* Have it able to read a selection of your unlocked vocab from the WK API.
* Save your current sets between page refreshes and in jStorage so you can come back to them.
* Drag reorder whole sets