Gou Ninja 2021 updates (Learning mode, unit limits)

Japanese Language
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Hi all,

It’s been about 5 years now since I created Gou Ninja: http://gou.ninja/

Description from the original 2016 thread:

As I’ve been learning 日本語, I realized one of my biggest stumbling blocks with listening is parsing numbers. Yesterday I built a little drilling game that generates random numbers (with counter units!) and says them with text-to-speech, then prompts the player to input the number. I have already found it pretty handy and wanted to share it with you!

It’s an imperfect tool, but despite that I’ve been surprised how much people have used it! I recently had a teacher who is using it for her class reach out and request some features, and so I made time for a few updates.

First off, I added a new “Learning Mode,” which does the following:

  • hides scores
  • disables the timer
  • slows the speech to half speed
  • adds a manual “Repeat” button to the top

Since the game can be difficult for new learners, this lowers the barrier to entry and hopefully will help beginners train their listening at their own pace.

I’ve also added a few additional counters, and added limits to some of the counters where it makes sense (i.e. 月 will only generate 1-12, instead of months that don’t exist like 629月). The huge numbers on units like 月、時、歳 that you would never encounter in the real world was definitely the most common complaint, so hopefully this fix makes it a bit more practical to use!

Unfortunately, the speech synthesis API is still spotty on Firefox… you may need to use Chrome or another compatible browser to use the site. And, as a reminder, you don’t have to input the units, just the number itself is fine!

Thanks all for using Gou Ninja over the years!

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This seems like a useful tool, thanks for making it. I recommend making it clear what it actually does in your post though, so people don’t have to find your original post from 5 years ago or click the link to find out.

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Thanks for the suggestion! Since the site does get users coming from elsewhere, instead of going into how it works here, I just added a “How To Play” screen on the page itself.

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That’s a good idea too. I was more pointing out that you don’t even say it’s a tool for listening practice for numbers and counters. You can kind of figure that out by reading everything in the post, but a simple description of what the tool is for near the link should get a lot more people willing to click the link.

If I hadn’t bothered to look up your original post and find out what it was about I wouldn’t have clicked the link myself, since I would have had no idea if it would be useful to me.

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Fair enough, added a pull quote in the original post!

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