KameSame - a fast, feature-rich Japanese memorization webapp

Thank you! A really helpful app

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Oooh, can’t do it from my phone then, at least not with the full width way :slight_smile: Am really enjoying the rest of the site, it’s a really great way to solidify knowledge!

Hmm, any phone should be able to produce these characters. Email me howdy@kamesame.com with the exact text your phone produces so I can investigate please.

Any progress on that Forgot Password reset flow?

Additional Suggested feature:

  • support of federated identity based logins, e.g. a “login with google/facebook” button.

Sorry, I’m probably not going to do this.

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I haven’t had a chance to improve much in KameSame the last few weeks, but I wanted to show this little workflow off for anyone who’s using KameSame or interested in it:

tl;dw If you ever find yourself kicking yourself when you miss a burn run, starting a one-off lesson for that word in KameSame is, I’ve found a fantastic way to cement your memory of that word because you’ll see it a half dozen times in the next week in KameSame while the memory is still fresh of having blown it in WK.

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Really like it so far.
I noticed it counts 見つける as wrong, because it wants 見付ける, but みつける will be accepted. I think the first should probably be counted as correct too.

Yeah, this is tough because I’d have to go through and analyze every single word to figure out what the onyomi for each character is in every word and figure out what is valid.

For now if you dont know all the characters in a word you can answer with only the reading and it’ll pass

In this case it’s not that I didn’t know the character, but the former one is actually the more commonly used form.
I know the latter one is what WK expects, but there are probably a few more examples where the WK form is chosen to teach the readings, but is not the most common written form.
I understand it’s not easy to do this programmatically, but I don’t think that’s needed. You don’t need to accept every combination of kanji/hiragana on every word, just the most common one if it doesn’t match the WK one.
For example jisho.org lists 見付ける as an alternate form of 見つける, and not the other way around. So this could be a way to check with a script. It’s not really that important though, I won’t make this mistake again anyway :wink:

P.S. I noticed some slowdowns lately, it seems this is getting more popular than you expected? :smiley: I, for one, stopped using kaniwani in favour of this, it’s so much better. Thanks for making this!

Yep, but even to get to the point of accepting alternative “spellings” at all will require me to first implement some kind of input mechanism for specifying those. I know I don’t want that responsibility if I can avoid it, and I don’t want to crowdsource it either (because then I’d have to moderate what users enter), so I need to figure out how to proceed.

Heyo, I’m a Community lurker and very rarely contribute, but I just wanted to voice my appreciation for KameSame. It’s perfect for me when I’m at 0/0 in WK but have the time and urge to study more Japanese. I’ve also found that it makes it much easier for me to think in Japanese already and even appears to be improving my speed in WaniKani.

I appreciate all the work and keep it up!

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Aww, thanks!

By the way, I just pushed up some pretty significant changes to improve performance and behavior when the app is being used under subpar conditions (either when your connectivity is poor or the server is slammed). These include:

  • Repeating requests every 3.5 seconds instead of every .1 seconds. People on latent connections were effectively DDOS’ing our poor single-core Heroku instance
  • Redirecting you to a loading screen between answers. This is a little kludgy, but it will prevent accidentally submitting an answer twice and make it abundantly clear that you’re waiting on the server instead of just waiting around wondering if you didn’t hit enter hard enough
  • Sometimes on VERY poor connections, results would come back out of order and you’d get really weird behavior like old answers popping up several cards after you’d cleared them. This change should ensure the flow from card to card is consistent and linear.

Separately, before tackling any new features I realllllly want to fix this bizarre and frustrating bug in the latest versions of iOS WebKit. If any of you are web developers and have ideas of things I can try based on the site’s markup or CSS, let me know! https://twitter.com/searls/status/1022829648005263361

Edit: I should also mention that I plan to make the “loading” stuff only fade in gradually if things have been loading for more than a quarter-second or so, because right now on a fast connection you’ll just see a sudden flash of gray & text, which is definitely jarring

Edit 2: Okay, I fixed the flash and now the loading accroutements will only appear after about 1.5s delays

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Quick usage update: we now have over 500 users who have started learning over 40,000 items in KameSame :hugs:

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So, what is your recommendation for people who have forgotten their password? There seems to be no way to recover.

E-mail howdy@kamesame.com from your login e-mail address and the password you want to set (sorry, I know this won’t be encrypted as a result) and I’ll set it manually for you.

Big update today! I updated the original post with this synopsis:

Major Update #2

The most common large feature request so far in this thread has been the ability to create custom strings that KameSame will mark correct, just like the Meaning Synonym feature of WaniKani. In KameSame, I’m calling these “alternate spellings” instead, since they’re not synonyms so much as other acceptable ways to type a word or phrase.

Here’s a demo of how to use that feature from the item detail page as well as while you’re studying:

This feature also supports “official” spellings that I’ve manually marked as correct and will immediately apply to everyone. If you have any suggestions for official alternate spellings, please let me know (here or at howdy@kamesame.com) and I’ll review and add them. So far I’ve added a couple obvious ones: 見つける (for 見付ける) and 子ども (for 子供).

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By the way, thanks to the alternate spelling feature I just shipped toady I was able to make 2011年 an accepted alternate spelling of WaniKani’s 2011年 card. Hope that’s helpful to you!

cc/ @Leilaure

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Ah, there appear to be two "two"s:

ニ and 二

I typed the first one but I was failed:

Great app otherwise!

Thanks! I’m not sure about the backstory of that character, but I’ve made it an official synonym in the app. Thank you!