KameSame - a fast, feature-rich Japanese memorization webapp

I don’t necessarily ask for jisho integration, but for words where there’s several possibilities with the okurigana (近づく, 近付く) or also words where you can omit an okurigana in the middle of the word, and WaniKani only has one right answer, in these cases it would be nice to not get marked wrong. I don’t know if it’s worth looking to jisho for these cases because they do list them, or just enter the possibilities manually on your end for tricky cases.
I think you said something before about tackling these cases, so if there’s a fix on the way already don’t mind this. :slight_smile:

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not the most important thing but a feature request: being able to purge kanji items from reviews. at first i figured i’d study them as well but i actually prefer doing vocabs only. why? mainly because it’s a pain to always have to select the right kanji when entering the onyomi. typing the kunyomi for, say, 命 gives me the right result immediately but i guess that defeats the purpose.

otherwise i still enjoy the kamesame experience immensly, especially after the recent updates. as someone who paused doing WK (without vacation mode) for quite long time but having over 1000 burned items this is a great way to refresh these (besides the amazing burn manger script of course).

Right, that is the only vocab in the entire corpus that uses full-width numerals.

I don’t think Jisho integration would magically save you in these cases, because AFAICT it doesn’t publish any kind of API with this sort of “data cleansing”.

I think you’re describing two different problems, both I’ve got ideas about:

  1. substituting hiragana in part of a word and using kanji in the rest. If we count the hiragana-only answer as correct, should we always mark a mixture correct? I don’t think so, because in many cases it would be Very Wrong™ to do so arbitrarily. But in cases where it’s typical to omit some of the kanji, I think we should have built-in synonyms. WK in general leans reallllly hard into always basing vocab on kanji, even to the point of befuddling my Japanese friends who’ll often have never seen WK vocab words in kanji before

  2. for words where there are just multiple ways to say something, like vinegared pickles, it seems like in addition to the WK answer of 酢の物, maybe we should also accept 漬物, since I hear that one with about 10x the frequency. I think the best solution for that is also official synonyms.

Kamesame is a free app, though, and I’m not especially eager to be the arbiter of either identifying or moderating blessed synonyms for all 8500 items. I think starting with user-defined synonyms makes sense as a first step and then once we have some data to work with I might figure out a way to promote them to “blessed” to automatically score others correct.

Yeah, I understand. Again, personally I find immense value in the kanji-only cards because it’s way more challenging to pick them out without the context (a 3 kanji jukugo compound can often be a subconscious crutch, never really requiring you to remember the third kanji very well because of the added context of the other two)

Anyway, now that we have a search feature that lets you find items, it’d be pretty straightforward to add a “remove this item from my review queue” button. That’d only solve this on a onesy-twosie basis, and you’d probably wind up just having to click them in the review summary page to nix them.

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Oh wait, I think I see. I entered 2011年 when KameSame expects 2011年, right?

The Japanese IME I used on Linux never offered anything besides 2011年 and kanji, I figured macOS would do the same. My bad~

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Yes, that’s right

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cool, that sounds perfectly fine to me. i doubt a tool to mass-remove items is really that necessary. … and maybe i’ll see the value in learning the kanji items as well sometimes … :smiley:

I wasn‘t trying to say you should add other, completely different words as synonyms for every single vocab entry, because that is just too much
work, I can see that. But maybe there is a way to also accept for example 追付く, 追いつく instead of just 追い付く as WaniKani spells it. Just randomly allowing any mix of kanji and hiragana might be a bad idea.
But especially for low level vocab where the other kanji of the compound word might just not be learned yet, it is kind of annoying to get marked wrong when you pick the first version proposed by the IME. I don‘t know how many of those words come up in WaniKani in total, maybe it‘s much more than I am thinking and I‘m not saying you should spend hours adding them manually. But at the moment I can‘t think of a reasonable workaround.
Probably just sticking to the version with more kanji is better, but for some low level words where the other kanji just wasn‘t learned yet that strategy might not always work.

Right, I think that the fact that WK (a) in general justifies all vocab based on kanji, even when that kanji usage might only be of etymological interest in a certain compound today and (b) does so inconsistently based on what kanji have already been introduced at a particular level, from KameSame’s perspective this is sort of just “bad data”.

I think a user synonym system is the first step and once we have some of those generated, a way of promoting those to blessed alternates so others don’t get them wrong is best.

I thought you were only referring to user synonyms for English translations like in WK, but that does indeed sound like a good idea.

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Are there any plans on changing the look of the ui?
You mentioned in the list of third party apps that the review module works better and more reliable than both kaniwani and wanikani, and while that may be so they both look a lot cleaner/modern than this (and tbh for me its important).
Aside from that, and the lack of built in ime (which wont be added from what i gather), it is a really nice tool!

I guess we all have our own aesthetic, but I prefer the simple, minimal, flat design of KameSame to either of the other two. At some point I’ll probably pull in a designer to fine-tune & and add custom icons where I’m currently using emoji, but I would not expect a radical shift in approach.

The big problem I have with both WaniKani and KameSame is that they perform and layout very poorly on phones and pretty poorly on tablets. Neither supports a responsive layout (instead having the default user agent just lay out the full page as if on a desktop and shrink it down), which makes it generally clunky to use, especially for an app with a handful of interactions that are repeated by users tens of thousands of times. WK also ensures focus (and therefore, soft keyboard) is carried from review to review, but for some reason doesn’t do this on lessons. Other flashcard tools like Anki and quizlet are similarly clunky, even their native iOS apps.

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I implemented this today. Should be going live in the next few minutes:

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iOS 12 Beta 3 really wrecks the focus/zoom behavior of the quiz review and I’m not sure what the cause is quite yet. I’m going to wait for the next beta release before investing too much time into debugging it.

Just pushed a nice quality of life feature: any WK meaning synonyms that you’ve entered will now count as alternative matches. That means in the following example, where I’ve made “summary” a meaning synonym of 総括 in my WK practice…

… then responding 総括 when KameSame wants me to input 大略 will result in alternative match instead of beign counted wrong

This is something I’ve been wanting to add since day one, because I enter synonyms for about one fifth of all WK vocab.

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I discovered a minor issue during reviews.
When I select a number of reviews to do it stops before that amount is reached. Yesterday I did my reviews on my laptop and I has 37 reviews, but before i finished all of them, it gave me the review summary.
It seems pretty random, but i think the first 20-25 or so were in one batch and then the last 10-15 or so ended up having to be finished in 3 turns.

I assumed it was a glitch and paid no attention to it, but i just now had 3 reviews and did them on my pc (different computer) and after the first two it gave me the review summary and made me do the last one alone.

Not sure if this is an issue you’re aware of, but I want to let you know so you can look into it if needed.

I just came to write about it too! I have the same - slightly annoying. From 100, I got to do 62, then from 38, I got to 26, then from the 12, I got 6, from 6 - 3, and finally from the last 3, I managed to go 2 and the last was on its own.

For the rest I am enjoying KameSame a lot! Thanks for making it!

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Sorry to both! I’ll look into this.

no need to be sorry, we’re not entitled to anything :stuck_out_tongue:
I’m already grateful you’re sharing your work with us