Don's Japanese Conjugation Drill

That’s pretty neat! However, of the 10 questions I did, 8 of them were trick questions (correct answer same as the question). Either I’m really lucky, or you might want to check your random number generator. :slight_smile:

@AnimeCanuck, you don’t need to know Class 1/Class 2 (sometimes known as Ichidan/Godan, or Group 1/Group 5, or by some authors, Group 2/Group 4, and no, I probably haven’t lined all those up correctly). Don doesn’t quiz you on that; it’s just a filter for which verbs are chosen.

So go ahead and check them both, and then use our new tri-form method to actually answer the questions! (I got 8/10 right, but the 2 I missed were both typos…)

Like, knowing what you’ve said, I got #5 right as well:

What is the negative form of 休まなくて?
やすまなくて

… And when selecting the text, I noticed your nice hover-over feature for the kanji. That’s cool. ^^

But still, I want to say I could’ve answered that differently, but since it’s already non-polite, and you specifically had the note of “we use this version of negative て form” (instead of the one I use/see the most)… I can’t… @_@ Still feeling mostly lost.

Well, it’s not quite at that level yet - but it’s approaching it, so congratulations.

@jstrout - Hrmm… *shrugs* it may have been someone else who posted that in your thread. For a few of the longer posts, I merely skimmed. It’s true, some I just know by the sound of them, because I’ve done lots of listening.

Three tasks?

It should be 50% on average for trick questions. (I might reduce that though.) It’s JavaScript’s built in random number generator so it might be producing Handel’s Water Music for all I know! :wink:

The point is that there’s a 50% chance that a change might be needed. Without it you can shortcut the process of understanding the given conjugation by performing the change that you expect to come up given a particular question.

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[witch’s cackle] Three tasks you must do…

Seriously - For each question you need to do three things to answer correctly with conviction:

  1. Understand the conjugation given in the question. (e.g. polite, negative and past)
  2. Possibly make a change to that form (e.g. negative → affirmative)
  3. Produce the conjugation using the possibly modified form. (e.g. polite, affirmative, past)
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Keeping everything you’ve said in mind about how your script/program/site functions, I’m going to attempt another group of 5 and see if I can do better than 2/5. Still keeping trick questions off (which still had the same answer as in the question 2 or 3 out of 5 times, even with tricks UN-checked!)

*smiles at this*
Okay, so to me, 2 and 3 are the same. Basically you mean “understand” and “do it”. To over-simplify. Which still doesn’t necessarily mean your system isn’t ambiguous.

(But then, Japanese is ambiguous… so maybe this is like a weird mental exercise to just be more aware of ambiguous-ness when dealing with the language… *frowns oddly in thought*)

Attempt 1:

Attempt 2:

I did better… #2 is a verb I just don’t know… and I should’ve known better with #5… But even though I knew it was “to add”… I never went back to 足す to get the ~して… I tried doing it directly, which worked for question #3. I also just really am not familiar with the ~なくて… ^_^; So that’s a section of Genki for me to look at again…

… All this only after all of your explanations, @doncr.
Also, when I clicked “start over” after the first attempt, Trick questions were checked - is that the default - or was I mistaken and had clicked it back on when checking if other types had special messages/exceptions (since ~て did, I poked around a bit before the first attempt). If it’s the latter, then I apologize for what I said earlier (as it was based on incorrect information).

EDIT: Maybe it will be more clear if you state “you will only need to make one change”… unless that is not true, and sometimes you might need to make 3 changes?!

That’s pretty sweet, thanks a lot! Though I have to agree that the “What is the plain form of” threw me off a bit, because I assumed it meant dictionary form for some reason lol. I’ll just use the excuse that I’ve learned the term ‘short form’ for ‘plain form’ in my Japanese class haha.
Either way, now that I know what is asked of me, this is really useful! Love the furigana hover option for words I don’t know yet. Thanks for the hard work :slight_smile:

You can hover over kanji to reveal the kana required. This is true even for 来 for cases where it has a different reading that is dependent on the particular conjugation.

Oh, it’s supposed to not change the options when you start over. That’s under control of your browser (at least I don’t remember fiddling about with them directly.)

So with て form, it will include negative て forms if you have “negative” checked as well.

It is true that that you only have to make one change. I considered making it do more than one but I think it would only increase frustration and not actually improve the learning process.

You’re welcome. Thanks!

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I discovered that earlier, said it was cool! (It was useful for me to attempt that unknown verb, whatever it means… still haven’t looked it up on Jisho yet…)

I think it would be nice if it did sometimes require more than one change - although in that case, maybe the question would need to be more obvious. Not sure.

Isn’t short, plain, and dictionary all the same thing? Look at this post of Don’s: Don's Japanese Conjugation Drill - #8 by doncr
飲む is 飲む. *tilts head*

  • There seems to be very little variety in vocabulary;
  • looks like “ゆうめい” is not considered to be the same as “有名”:
  • same thing with “おもしろ〜” and “面白〜”:
  • something seems off about this…
  • 50% chance of trick questions is way too high, it feels more like 100%;
  • shouldn’t 〜じゃない be an acceptable plain negative form of a na-adj?
  • “plain” normally means “short”, but when a verb is in passive form, it actually means “active” for some reason?

Well, kinda I guess. 見なかった for example is a short/plain form, but not the dictionary form since that would be 見る, if I’m not completely confused now.
I guess I didn’t word it correctly earlier and left out half of my thought process haha. The site asked me to put 見ませんでした into plain form,. I figured it meant dictionary form (because I only learned the term short form for what it actually wanted) so I entered 見る instead of 見なかった.

I was having the exact same problem! (See: most of this thread.) But in fact, Don just means for us to make only one change… so if it’s past polite negative, it needs to just be past negative. (Instead of actual plain form which would in fact be casual/dictionary/short form.) Hence all of my confusion, and apparently yours.

As I’ve been saying, the instructions aren’t clear enough… But he says it’s intended to frustrate us.

If you use “non-polite” instead of “plain” wouldn’t that cause less confusion.

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Yesss, I read that. I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who was confused by that tbh haha. It would be nice if Don would include more than one change in the future, maybe as an option to turn on and off. But for now it’s a good way to review the basics.

I guess the frustration part isn’t too bad, keeps you on your toes. Certainly works for me…

The little variety in vocabulary is deliberate (though I might add more all the same.) I’ve done just a few examples of each class so that the user gets to learn between ichidan verbs and godan verbs instinctively.

好きだ is actually broken (I have encoded the kana reading by hand for each word) - Thanks for pointing that out!

Will investigate the other two (even though they look correct in the source file at a glance.)

About the feeling of 100% - I might dial it down to 25% so that it feels like 50%.

Yes, I should add multiple answers for ~じゃない. Thanks again.

I actually had it as “non-polite” at some point but another person that tried it out a while ago pointed out that it might gain support for respectful or humble speech.

“Dictionary” form is straight out because that implies the form you’d find in a dictionary.

“Short?” hmm. is that not just a synonym for plain here? (I am open to suggestions!)

Had the same problems as people above at first, but they’re easily solved.

Seems like you need to use your own ime to turn your answers into kanji.

People like @AnimeCanuck having trouble with what it’s asking: I think the best thing is to just turn the ‘trick questions’ off and you’ll be fine.

@doncr Thanks for sharing this. Only ‘problem’ I’ve had was the same thing as others of ratio of trick questions being very high. I’m not entirely sure what they’re there for anyway… Maybe you could have them turned off as standard and clickable for people who do want them? Otherwise, very useful little drill!

Edit: I actually like the ‘frustrating’ aspect of it. It does make you think quite hard about what it says and what exactly it’s asking you to do. The ones I’m getting wrong at the moment are just out of not paying attention - which is both frustrating and good because I have a habit of skimming stuff whenever I’m able and I ought to be paying more attention to these things.

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