KameSame - a fast, feature-rich Japanese memorization webapp

Because of the way the SRS works (unless KameSame has added SRS jitter while I’ve been away), your items fall for review at fixed intervals from when you last reviewed them (including the first time you saw them). So, if you add 100 new items in a sitting, and every time you review them you get them all correct, these items are going to glob together forever. If the SRS intervals mean that they also line up with another glob you studied on another day, they can really mount up, which sounds like what is happening to you.

One solution would be to deliberately only clear some of your reviews and spread them out over time, but I think this kind of undermines the point of having an SRS. I think the better option is to think about how many reviews you’d like your workload to peak at, and then tailor the number of new items you add every day.

I think KameSame uses the same timing chain as WaniKani does (@searls, is this still correct?) and I believe, this has nine stages (with the first ones having less than a day between them). As a result, once enough time has passed, and if you never make any mistakes (not true for me) every day’s reviews would be made up of X items last seen four months ago ready to go from enlightened to burned, X items last seen one month ago ready to go from master to enlightened, X items last seen two weeks ago ready to go from guru 2 to master, etc, etc. Your daily review count should hover at around 8 times your daily intake count.

(If this is wrong, I would appreciate being corrected on it as I have been using it to mentally model my own review load.)

Finally, the suggestion I actually came here to post - the addition of study lists was a really cool feature… would it be possible for individual vocabulary item pages to indicate if they’re a part of one or more of those lists? (Curious to see if “連合国軍最高司令官総司令部” is in the N1 list :wink: )

@searls, just saw your latest post - I think it gets the message across, although I wonder if it would be better to just rip the band-aid off and say that these features are premium now (say, through Patreon) but are also open to the general userbase for now? Can’t quite put my finger on the issue, but there’s something about the “if” that I think might still lead to that kind of “I had it for free / now you’re taking it away” complaint.

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I don’t think 連合国軍最高司令官総司令部 is on the list, I couldn’t find it on the source anywhere

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I would happily pay for KameSame, at a similar price point to WK. Autoplay audio would be great to have (I came to this thread looking to see if it was available)

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Thanks for the one of the greatest educational app, Justin!

I am experiencing some problems with iOS/HomeScreenApp.

After saving it to the home screen the apps works as intended just fine for some time (days/weeks). Then, at some nasty day, it logs
me out, and I am not able to relogin back, until I delete the app and resave it anew. The app & login are working smoothly all the way in Safari browser. Here are screenshots - no “wrong
password” message whatever, just empty login
screen. Any ideas?

Yeah, thanks for reporting this. Unfortunately, it is absurdly difficult to debug what’s going on because the Safari remote debugger doesn’t work in saved-to-homescreen apps. After talking to some experts that specialize in making progressive web apps (PWAs) work on Apple platforms, they kinda shrugged their shoulders to say it’s a long-lived bug in how cookies are stored and once they get corrupted all you can really do is delete and reinstall (which is what I’ve been doing once a month for the last year, it seems like—sadly)

:sigh: Okay. :slight_smile: I suppose your already tried to put a test button with clearCookies, clearLocalStorage etc. on the front page to see if it helps to reset the app. If not - I would be happy to help testing, it looks it happens more often than once a month on my device ".

Is that not a screenshot of Flaming Durtles…?

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I am an idiot

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Nah, you’re good, mate, happens to everyone. (But you might want to go to your other post and replace KameSame with Flaming Durtles.)

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Nice website! I like the Wanikani-esque navigation and being able to study specific N-level sets.

I do have a few suggestions re keyboard shortcuts, not sure how easy those would be to add

  • make the shortcuts just letters without ctrl modifier once an answer has been given. It would be a lot easier to press (pressing ctrl+something is a bit painful on my macbook as that’s non a commonly used shortcut on a mac, on mac the apple key is usually the ctrl key on windows)

-change the play audio shortcut to ‘j’ (like in Wanikani) instead of ‘p’. Also a good shortcut because the right index finger is already resting over ‘j’ in a 10 finger typing starting position

-maybe making shortcuts configurable is the best way to go about preferences like this, so that everybody can tune this to be optimal for them.

-lastly, adding a setting to auto-play audio (like in Wanikani)

Also think autoplay audio would be good or better shortcuts for it (hence my post about it after checking it out briefly).

If this was priced at Wanikani level’s I’d be hesitant to subscribe long-term, because WK is where I’ll be doing most of the learning and could not justify a subscription at the same level.

Perhaps tiers that only offer specific features Wanikani does not have (like custom vocab lists) for a lower price could be an attractive option for existing WK users.

I would buy a subscription for KameSame if it had a level-based system to complement WK’s levels, but for all the relevant vocab that’s not kanji-based (or just not in WK’s roster). Would be cool if I could pace KameSame alongside WK.

As it is right now, I will probably take a break from WK when I have all the N5 kanji and go through the N5 vocab on KameSame (and N5 grammar on BunPro), but I’d rather do it all in lockstep to have a reliable long-term schedule.

So, on one hand I do wanna use this so I can work on vocab that doesn’t use kanji, but it’s kinda weird looking at the N5 vocab list and seeing a bunch of kanji I haven’t learned yet. So I’d like to either only go through the N5 vocab that doesn’t use kanji at all or at least filter out those words that use kanji I haven’t guru’d.

I’d say just deal with it. It gives you a head-start on some of the kanji, which makes WaniKani easier later, and it lets you learn common words that you otherwise would have taken a lot longer to learn.

Also, I’d recommend using the top 10k words deck instead, the JLPT decks have a bunch of rare vocab that wouldn’t normally be used, and sorting by frequency means that every word you learn from it (provided you turn off shuffle) will the best word you could have learnt at that point. My only problem with the deck is how it has each month and day as separate vocab, but it’s only 43 extra words so it’s not that big of a deal.

is there a way to set Kamesame to be able to study just my leeches from Wanikani? I have a lot…

Under ‘Study WaniKani Items’ in the lessons tab, select ‘lowest % correct’ from under ‘proritize lessons by’. Also tick that box if it hasn’t been already.

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Great post! Will definitely try this kamesame. Thx for posting.

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@searls Thanks once again for all your work. On converting to a paid app, as I’m a current patreon supporter, I certainly don’t mind swapping to a subscription model. Just please offer a “lifetime” option like WaniKani, if you can.

On features, I feel like I have such great coverage between WaniKani and KameSame, but there’s one additional gap I’d like to cover (or maybe I’m missing an obvious way to do this now). I wish KameSame had another mode where the only thing that was offered was the AUDIO of the word, and then you had to type the meaning in English.

Maybe this is a strange request, but I’m finding my reading of kanji is getting stronger and stronger, and my ability to type in a word using hirgana, if you provide the English word is good. But if I only “hear” the sounds with no visual or meaning prompts, my mind doesn’t seem to “translate” that into meaning. Sometimes I find I have to literally type the hiragana to jolt my mind to realize what the word is. So it seems like this “translation” is another separate skill.

With all the sound files, words, Kanji you have pulled into KameSame, it seems like this could be another whole mode by rearranging what is offered (sound) and what is accepted as an answer. But I may be WAY off both on how hard it would be to pull off, and whether anyone even needs it (other than me).

It just seems like I hear about a lot of people who can read/write well, but still can barely understand spoken Japanese and I wonder if it’s partially related to this gap?

Any thoughts welcomed. :wink:

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This is absolutely on my roadmap. In late-2019 I rearchitected KameSame to be able to handle recognition flashcards in addition to production, and when I did that I made sure to make it easy to add new quiz types (like listening). There’s obviously some UI work necessary to make listening quizzes work well, but the biggest challenge is that there are so many homonyms that even if you can pick out the correct pitch of a word it’s possible 20 or 30 other words have nearly identical-sounding pronunciations, and it may become very easy to get overwhelmed with alternate matches against other words with the same or similar hiragana readings.

This is also a feature I don’t think I’d turn on unless I had a subscription system in place. Autoplaying audio is something lots of people want, but would start driving up my hosting costs significantly if I were to enable it right now.

Still on a development hiatus for now outside urgent fixes. Hoping to start work again later in the fall or early winter!

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That’s fantastic! Happy to subscribe if you get to it; I do think this whole additional way to learn could drive subscriptions due to its potential value.

On the homonyms, maybe you could offer buttons for “hints” when needed, maybe the hiragana, or the Kanji as options. (with whatever necessary impact on XP or other measures).

Great app, and just keeps getting greater! You know I love it because, Patreon support aside, I finally bit the bullet to get a new phone specifically so the audio would work for me again–at least it was the straw that pushed me over… (The issue we discussed upstream.) :wink: