KameSame - a fast, feature-rich Japanese memorization webapp

Ah, my mistake; I didn’t mean that I had actually added it, but rather was expressing surprise that it accepted all kinds of alternate spellings that I hadn’t added, but wouldn’t accept ハンコ automatically like it did the others.

The alternate spelling thing – is it possible to add alternate spellings without getting the question wrong first? Last time I used the feature, it was frustrating that I basically had to get a “false wrong answer” on a question in order to put in the “correct” spelling.

You can use an undo if you don’t want it to count wrong when you’re adding a spelling or definition after failing.

Still loving the application! Two quick things:

  1. I was coming here to post a request for the “how many reviews in coming hours” feature, and saw someone else had posted it! I admit, i wasn’t sure about the feature when WaniKani introduced it, but it has changed the way I study, and I’m moving faster there as a result. Now that I can see when my “bulges” of review are coming, and can compare them to my work schedule, I actually set timers when I’m free – e.g., Oh, at 2pm I’ll knock out those 11 reviews, so i don’t have 11+another 20 at 7pm, etc. So it’s making me wish I could see “what’s ahead” on KameSame. Thanks for your note about adding it to the future list!

  2. This must just be me, or someone else must have posted about it. All sound for KameSame has stopped for me. I was LOVING this feature; it was really helping with my pronunciation. I would always click the button after I got an answer wrong especially. But some time ago, it just stopped. I think it was around the time you posted that you were suspicious that slimming the code might have had unintended impacts, but I could be wrong about that.

On the theory it’s just me, a few details: iPhone 5s, always use it via the Safari browser on my iPhone, and I currently only use KameSame for WaniKani words (though someday I will go after your full dictionary). In terms of IOS: 12.4.6.

Thanks again for the great app. It’s kind of amazing how you’re constantly updating it.

Hey searls, i would like to ask you something about the srs level time, but first of all and again, thanks you for developing kamesame, i use it everyday since we can put external words :slight_smile:

So, the question is, have you been considered reduce the time of each srs level in one hour? It’s really exhausting when this happens:


(the last one was 121 reviews)

I don’t know if it is on purpose, but i think, for example, if i do a review for an apprentice II word at 19:00, wouldn’t be better if the next review is the next day at 18:00 and not 19:00 again?

Yeah, I broke audio for some (not all) iOS devices for a period of about 2 weeks and fixed it last night. However, the API I used to fix the issue may require iOS 13+ – Try again?

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I wasn’t aware of people’s expectations about this until reading the thread about changing SRS timings in WK proper yesterday. I walked away a little frustrated, to be honest.

Clearly, there’s a group of the-more-engaged users who are driven to use WK because they can get the thrill of speedrunning from it. And the fact they’re also learning something is a fantastic happy accident. However, reading that thread there’s also a lot of inflexibility/rigid thinking about the way SRS timings are currently configured as being “right” based on habit or routine or just because it’s the way they are.

The reason KS has the timings it does is because I initially set them up to be what WaniKani reported that they were (and apparently the 1 hour savings thing was actually a bug), as I did additional research into the—more important than habits/routine—actual learning efficacy of those static timings versus other approaches (instead of dynamic ones).

So while I don’t plan on making the adjustment you’re asking for, one thing I am working on is developing a dynamic SRS timer that’s based on a combination of factors and statistics and then experimenting to see if it improves people’s outcomes. I ask for your patience in the meantime, but always welcome ideas

(By the way, if anyone reading this knows anyone working on a foreign language or linguistics masters or PhD and wants to work towards this, let me know!)

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Ah, that explains it! I can’t run ios 13 on an iphone 5s. This is from a website I googled to confirm:

“iOS 13 isn’t compatible with iPhone 5S, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus; iOS 13 compatibility requires an iPhone from the last four years.”

They are still updating ios 12 sometimes – maybe just for security patches? – so I just downloaded 12.4.7, but it didn’t help.

It’s not your fault I’m trying to avoid spending money on a new phone right now. :wink: But I am bummed I lost the feature, so I look forward to using the audio again when the "new phone " day arrives for me someday in the future, hopefully. :slight_smile:

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I’m sorry about that. It’s possible this won’t work but try again in ~10 minutes – I just deployed a workaround that may work for iOS 12 and earlier but I can’t test here

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In my humble opinion, the one-hour savings has been a useful bug/feature. On occasion, for whatever reason life decided to toss at me, I ended up late to start any particular review. That, or one of my review sessions goes over the hour. On WK, the words that I review in the hour past my normal review time are synced up with the next review session. On KS, without the hour of padding, reviews that I do past the normal time often end up rolling over into my morning/afternoon sessions, which I like to dedicate to the stuff that I’m learning rather than the stuff that I’m reviewing, if at all possible. There have been a few occasions in my time on KameSame where I would skip lessons for a day so that I can move a mounting number of morning/afternoon reviews to the evening to “reset” things. Not a big problem by any stretch, but definitely inconvenient.

My personal ideal, though, would be having the ability to schedule the reviews that cross the day border for a specific time the next day. Perhaps keep the normal intervals for the Apprentice items which are more likely to be forgotten quickly, and schedule the Guru+ items which are less affected by what time of day the review would take place. This would eliminate the need for the one-hour padding entirely, and is one of the very few things I miss from using Anki.

I have no particular opinion on the SRS intervals themselves, and would happily try out a dynamic SRS system. I would just like to ask you to consider a feature like review scheduling (and perhaps the -1 hour intervals as a holdover until your new SRS is ready).

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It’s a feature now. Bugs are either fixed or declared features, the latter being the case here.

P.S. WK apparently is also working on dynamic SRS…

Thank you for attempting the workaround! Unfortunately, it didn’t work, either last night, or this morning (after a phone reboot, just to be safe). I also confirmed it’s working perfectly on my laptop, to ensure I wasn’t just somehow being an idiot. :wink:

FWIW, I generally do my reviews first thing in the morning in bed (on phone) and during my public transit commutes, which is why I don’t have my laptop. With the pandemic, I’m currently at home and able to do somewhat more timed reviews in brief bursts (hence learning how useful the “how many reviews per hour” thing is), but when things go back to normal, I guess I’ll have to either not have the audio, change my habits somehow, or get a new phone. :wink:

I’m definitely not one of those speed demons. More like a turtle.

Again, I appreciate your efforts, and if you ever think of another workaround, I’m happy to try it out. You’ve built up this tool to the point that it’s clear once I finish with WaniKani (if not before I finish), I’ll likely be using KameSame for many years thereafter, to keep expanding my vocab!

my personal preference for SRS timings is actually a system that ends up being slower (overall) than either: kitsun.io’s “scatter” option, where it adds a random delta to the delay before the next review. the best part about it is that it avoids the problem of bunching all the reviews together just because you happened to learn them together. this bunching effectively makes me “cheat” by creating artificial relationships between words (i.e. having words that i learned at the same time appear in reviews at the same time), instead of mixing things up nicely. so the scatter removes this “cheating”… which means i end up learning things better.

i’ve found kitsun.io’s “scatter” feels nicer to use and spreads out reviews nicely, also avoiding the “250 reviews at once” problem. i think it’s improved my retention as well.

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I haven’t used Kitsun, but I am inclined to agree with this.

Thanks! I assume that means userscripts aren’t an option…? Well, I’ll just eagerly wait for the day that happens then :slight_smile: Thanks for the response, I’m glad I was able to explain why it’s useful

Do you know if there’s a way to add kanji/words to an IME…? There are several words in kamesame where the kanji it wants doesn’t come up when I type the reading. For example if I type かす for “to lend” then 貸す is not one of the options in the dropdown menu. I’ve resorted to just keeping jisho tabs open for the ones I have this issue with (three so far - 弾く and 履く also won’t come up) but if someone knows a way to get them type-able with my actual keyboard it would be great. I’m using the Microsoft IME that was built into the settings on my Surface Pro 6

貸す will definitely be in your IME. You can just keep pressing space to get more options.

You can indeed add words to an IME, but I don’t know how to do that on Windows. Anyway, it will have all the words in KS already, so you don’t need to worry about it. Again, it’s just a matter of pressing space enough times.

Hi, I am doing both wanikani and kamesame since I started. I use all default settings so that means an item will only end up in kamesame after I guru’d it in wanikani.

My current level status:
Wanikani: 14/60
Kamesame: 41/100

If I continue like this I will be level 100 in kamesame before I finished wanikani…?

Should I be worried or is this normal behavior?

I think it’s normal. It seems to use an exponential relationship in KameSame levels, so it might be the other way around.

… should I know what that is? Is that a WaniKani thing?

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