Manga Kotoba: Manga Frequency Lists and Stats

[mitrac]

@ChristopherFritz

But I’m also starting to get to learning new vocabulary with kanji I don’t know, so I’ll want to figure out how I want to craft flash cards for kanji soon.

It did prompt me to start thinking about that again as well. I’ve not had good results in the past with learning both a new word and new kanji at the same time.

I have anki set up so that I have a furigana type card, a kanji reading vocab type card (and a third kana only type card).

• When I learn new words where I don’t already know the kanji, I put them in as the furigana type so that I see the kanji and furigana on the front.
• If I learn a word and I know the kanji, I’ll add it as a kanji card (reading on the back, and I must get it + meaning to get correct).
• When I study a new kanji, I’ll search my existing cards, convert them from the furigana → kanji type. I’ll reset the progress of a few of them to capture the readings, or where I think I might need extra practice.
• I track known kanji on Colburn’s Kanji Study app, and it’s really easy to create custom lists for my target kanji. And then when I click on the kanji, it references it’s entry number in KKLC where I can look up a mnemonic, etc.

This works swimmingly and I feel like attaching kanji knowledge to known vocab like this takes a trivial amount of time. Basically just the time for me to read its entry in KKLC and update my cards.

My anki template is not beautiful, but here it is if you’re curious.

What I'm going to try with the data from your site with regards to kanji learning

1. Target a certain number of words/cards to create over the weekend, that I know I can easily study throughout the week, e.g., ~40. Use my furigana card type unless I already know the kanji, in which case it will be the kanji card type.
2. Separately, copy the next 10-15 unknown kanji to a custom list on the Kanji Study app. Over the course of the week I’ll study these kanji and upgrade known words from my furigana → kanji type.
   • Choose kanji for which I already know some vocab. That might mean not taking the absolute highest frequency kanji right from the start, which is fine. By week 3, some of the words I entered in step 1 will be familiar and ready for the kanji study / upgrade to known kanji status.

It sounds complicated written out, but at an intuitive level, it’s pretty quick and I’m pretty sure quicker than brute forcing all of it. Of course there are some exceptions to this. There are a lot of words where I already recognise the kanji in many words, even though I haven’t studied the kanji. And I suspect I can go straight to step 2 for those kanji, even when they are in new words. I have a pretty low tolerance for leeches, so I think I’ll be able to tell within a 3-4 weeks max if this is going to work or not. And then I’ll be really curious how the reading experience goes.

@ChristopherFritz

(I also want to come up with some way to “undo” a click immediately after, but I’m not certain the best way.)

sounds tough, but would be really convenient!

@ChristopherFritz

I have plans for other ways to see volume-level progress for whole series and for volumes with statuses (once I get that implemented), but for now you should see progress bars on individual volume pages. If you don’t, then that’s something I’ll need to investigate.

oh right, that’s a bug then. I’m not seeing that on Chrome or Samsung’s browser. Here’s what I see on Chrome, which looks just like what I saw on my phone (Samsung):

The known words/sentences seems to be missing then.

@ChristopherFritz

For me, the volume vocabulary page shows my progress as 9% higher

That would be comforting if my volume vocab goes up by that amount, I would feel relieved!

I don’t manage to go very deep into marking a lot of the 1-2 instance frequency words as known, so the best I tend to get for a very easy read is 65-70%. So for me right now Frieren (series) is at 44%.

So far if I get a score over about 55% on your tool, I find the reading very approachable - keeping in mind, I’m reading with furigana, so there are a lot of words I know that I’ll read in the book that I didn’t mark as known on your tool because I don’t know the kanji yet. And a lot of the lowest frequency words are pretty common and I’d probably check off a good number as known if I could be bothered to do that.

@ChristopherFritz

Somehow, my known words percent for this first volume is 7% higher (read: easier) than for Frieren’s first volume.

Based on what you’re saying, I think とんがり帽子のアトリエ will be higher for me than Frieren as well. Right now とんがり Volume 1 is at 55%.

@ChristopherFritz

Since I use Mokuro for reading, the lack of furigana won’t get in my way, so I’m interested in seeing how the two series (and their respective reading paces) compare for me.

That will be interesting! I’m kinda wondering if it will be easier for you then? Perhaps the Natively difficulty rating is related to the lack of furigana.

This will be my first book club without furigana, so it will stress test my half-hearted starts at some non-furigana reading. I’ll be relying on my own wits and google’s kanji recognition with my S-pen. It works well if the manga has very clear text. So reading in the Harta magazine has been convenient that way. But if I stray into something with lower resolution it gets cumbersome. This is going to sound silly, but I enjoy reading paper so much more, that I like to keep enough friction in my digital reads to keep pushing me towards the strategies that force me to learn kanji. Otherwise my motivation to learn kanji falls away and I fear I’ll forever be stuck reading only up to the 3rd grade level on paper.

@ChristopherFritz

I look forward to the day when I add filtering series by whether they have furigana, so I can easily compare my stats for series without furigana. (It’s on the to-do list…)

I agree, that is an interesting distinction!

How do you mean comparing your stats, though? Since the system kinda forces a no furigana approach to marking a words as known. For kurifuri I had two accounts, one where I marked words I knew even if I didn’t know the kanji. My stats for the same series between the two accounts were quite a ways apart! But as my furigana vs non-furigana vocab sizes converge I’ve dropped that distinction and I’ve started fresh on manga-kotoba with just the “I’m going to learn to read without furigana” mindset.

[ChristopherFritz]

@mitrac

oh right, that’s a bug then.

So, consider this.

When viewing a volume page, code runs to see if the user has an entry in the “user volumes” table for the volume.

Is not, it creates one.

But imagine this.

Rather than checking if the user has a volume entry, or checks if any user has an entry.

So if I have an entry already, it won’t create one for you.

That would be quite the oversight.

And if such a thing happened, maybe it would be fixed now?

@mitrac

That would be comforting if my volume vocab goes up by that amount, I would feel relieved!

It’s interesting just how much of a variance one can have between a whole series and a single volume.

Many times, the numbers will be about the same between a single volume and its series.

But sometimes, for a series like this:

…you find a volume like this:

(That’s 13% higher!)

But that suggests there’s also a volume like this:

(…and that’s 6% lower.)

@mitrac

I don’t manage to go very deep into marking a lot of the 1-2 instance frequency words as known,

There’s really no incentive for this because of how little it impacts the progress bar, especially if you’re only seeing a series-wide progress bar.

When a series has 35,000 words, who wants to spend time marking “I know this 1-frequency word, and I know this 1-frequency word, and…” when you can instead be creating SRS cards for those 7-frequency words?

Even considering a volume with 2,000 words, each 1-frequency word accounts for a mere 0.05% of the overall progress bar.

And, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

The site is designed to allowed manga readers to focus on high-frequency words.

But sometimes it’s still fun to look through 1-frequency words and knock out a few “I know this” items.

(Not to mention the excitement when I got レンタルおにいちゃん volume one down to fewer than 100 unknown words, meaning all unknown words appear on one page.)

@mitrac

This will be my first book club without furigana, so it will stress test my half-hearted starts at some non-furigana reading.

Although the very first manga I ever read didn’t have furigana (took me several months!), I do tend to stick with manga that has furigana.

The main exception currently is ハナヤマタ, which I somehow reached 80% known words with minimal effort to SRS words from the series:

With Mokuro, it’s easy to look up the furigana/meaning of words even if I actually can read/know them from kanji alone. So I like to read ハナヤマタ with Migaku disabled and see how far I can get before I have to do lookups. I do still have quite a few to do, but sometimes I’m able to get through a whole page without any lookups.

Then I head over to Shadows House and I’m looking up words every other panel…

@mitrac

How do you mean comparing your stats, though?

Consider the “browse” page, but being able to hide series with furigana, so everything you see is series that lack furigana.

I only mark a word as known if I can read it without furigana, even if it’s for manga that has furigana.

This means if a series lacks furigana, my percentages are accurate.

But for series with furigana, my percentages are artificially low because there are words I can read/know only because of the furigana (= I don’t know the kanji).

This means the browse page mixes correct and artificially-low percentages.

Aside: If I had foresight, maybe I would have made it so one sees words with or without furigana on the frequency list depending on whether the series has furigana, and marking it as known from a manga-has-furigana list does not mark is as known for a manga-lacks-furigana list. But I think I’ll just stick with how it is now, because I’m lazy.

I do think overall it’s better to avoid marking a word as known if one doesn’t know the kanji, as that helps make it clear what extremely common words one still needs to learn the kanji for, even if they can ready it with furigana. But that does “break” one’s progress stats by keeping tehm artificially low for series with furigana.

[mitrac]

@ChristopherFritz

And if such a thing happened, maybe it would be fixed now?

It appears such a thing may have happened and is fixed now!

@ChristopherFritz

It’s interesting just how much of a variance one can have between a whole series and a single volume.

And to your example, Frieren volume 1 shot up by 11 points to 55% compared to the series (44%)! Which from experience is fine for a book with furigana.

@ChristopherFritz

But that suggests there’s also a volume like this:

…

(…and that’s 6% lower.)

Whelp, in my excitement of book 1 having a higher score I didn’t really think that through to the logical conclusion! I had been thinking the effect of the series being lower than volume 1 was due to the stack up of unique words used once that I’m less likely to know compared to the cross over (across volumes) of common words that I know relatively more of. And that may well be part of it, but glancing through Frieren, volume 1 at 55% is an outlier, most are around 44-46%, close to the series average. Volumes 3, 6, 8 and 9 look to be the tough ones for me with 3-5 percentage points below that. Volume 9 is a 39%er, 16 points below volume 1! Which is fine since reading volume 1 will teach me loads of the words I don’t know in vol 2 and so on, so I’d think by the time I get there, volume 9 will be well over 55%. Maybe I’ll track a before and after for each volume and the series as I go through. It’s easy enough and would be interesting!

@ChristopherFritz

Even considering a volume with 2,000 words, each 1-frequency word accounts for a mere 0.05% of the overall progress bar.

On the other hand, let’s say of those 2000 words, 1000 are used once, and I know half (500), (which for an easy manga has been the case), then that would be 25% progress on the vocab.

I just checked out とんがり for that. Looking through the last page of single occurrence words, IF I knew the kanji, I’d know more than half of those words… that will be s long tail of kanji, although many looked quite common that I almost know, so there is hope!

@ChristopherFritz

The site is designed to allowed manga readers to focus on high-frequency words.

At first I was sceptical of that due to the long tail of single occurrence words (easily the largest category by frequency if they are grouped together as an unknown unit!), but now that I’m further along, I’m seeing that it’s often quite easy to guess isolated unknown words due to the redundancy that happens in narration.

@ChristopherFritz

(Not to mention the excitement when I got レンタルおにいちゃん volume one down to fewer than 100 unknown words, meaning all unknown words appear on one page.)

I agree I’d find that oddly satisfying!

@ChristopherFritz

But for series with furigana, my percentages are artificially low because there are words I can read/know only because of the furigana (= I don’t know the kanji).

This means the browse page mixes correct and artificially-low percentages.

Aside: If I had foresight, maybe I would have made it so one sees words with or without furigana on the frequency list depending on whether the series has furigana, and marking it as known from a manga-has-furigana list does not mark is as known for a manga-lacks-furigana list. But I think I’ll just stick with how it is now, because I’m lazy

OK that’s what I thought. Hmmm… I would have thought the implementation would be simplest to mark reading and kanji known as two separate properties on the word (globally) and have two progress bars furigana / no furigana. Kana words get an automatic double tick. Then you just decide which bar is more relevant to the work in question. BUT I should point out I don’t think it’s worth the effort either.

Let’s say it’s possible to mark a word as tracked where the reading is known but the kanji is not known. Then that functionality already exists anyway

I’ve just started using the tracking feature to mark words that I’ve just put in srs, and also words I know but not their kanji. This will start to give me a better idea of number words I’m recognising in a furigana vs no furigana work. And for a no furigana work, then I known my tracked words are in the crosshairs for learning kanji

[mitrac]

And a couple of potential bugs

Shows a reading without the number (just kyuu). That’s in Frieren 4

And I found an entry for 百分 that just showed the reading fun. That was in Frieren 2 I think. Normally the reading and definition match the kanji number, but I noticed some numbers get left off the reading and definition. Not a big deal but wanted to let you know

[ChristopherFritz]

@mitrac

And I found an entry for 百分 that just showed the reading fun.

I don’t know offhand how the reading on these is coming up without the number part, but because the English also excludes the number, I’ve settled on blocking them site-wide as I find them.

Maybe that’s not the best solution, but I think it may be better than having to separately mark that one knows ５級,and 五級 and ７級 and ９級 and 七級…

(At the same time, if the full reading is there, I’ve been not blocking then. Can you tell I’m making up the rules as I go?)

[mitrac]

@ChristopherFritz

Maybe that’s not the best solution, but I think it may be better than having to separately mark that one knows ５級,and 五級 and ７級 and ９級 and 七級…

(At the same time, if the full reading is there, I’ve been not blocking then. Can you tell I’m making up the rules as I go?)

okay, I agree I like your solution to mark the counter as known and then block the number + counter combos. In that case, I’ve seen enough of the numbered instances make it through that I didn’t realise they were being blocked. Not a lot and not for every number, just a few exceptions where the number and counter made it through, but not to the extent that it was cumbersome. I had kinda wondered in the back of my mind why I saw some and not a lot of others, so that makes more sense now.

[ChristopherFritz]

My current weekend’s work is Anki integration:

Super-early screenshot.

I don’t plan to use Anki for vocabulary myself, as Migaku’s card creator is too good for me to move away from, and their SRS system hasn’t presented any issues for me. (I do plan to use Anki for kanji cards, at least until Migaku gets some kind of implementation of their Kanji God Anki add-on into their new extension. But I want to work out vocabulary support first.)

Even if I won’t use Anki integration for vocabulary, if I want this site to be friendly to people who do use Anki, it’d be good to have integration available.

And I feel this will bridge the gap between the old site having SRS built in, and Manga Kotoba not having it at all.

At the moment, I’m not planning on having the site track one’s cards created in Anki or user progress in Anki, although this is possible to do.

There’s also the question of whether to have a “create Anki cards for all words in series/volume” option. This is technically doable.

The integration is still in early development, so not yet available on the site.

[mitrac]

@ChristopherFritz

My current weekend’s work is Anki integration:

this. is. so. exciting!

As a default - I like your card (the only request would be to show furigana or the reading somewhere on the back).

Just in case a basic template is helpful:

Front template

<div class=big>{{Entry}}</div>

Back template

<a href="kanjistudy://word?id={{ID}}"><div class=big>{{furigana:EntryFurigana}}</div></a><br><div class=left>{{Meaning}}</div>

Furigana is entered in the field EntryFurigana like this

集[あつ]まる

@ChristopherFritz

At the moment, I’m not planning on having the site track one’s cards created in Anki or user progress in Anki, although this is possible to do.

That would be more of a “nice to have” for me at least.

@ChristopherFritz

There’s also the question of whether to have a “create Anki cards for all words in series/volume” option. This is technically doable.

I personally wouldn’t use it. I’ve found putting just a bit of thought into my deck as I build it is essential to its success later. But I see plenty of people doing bulk import, so maybe that would be popular later.

@ChristopherFritz

The integration is still in early development, so not yet available on the site.

[ChristopherFritz]

@mitrac

the only request would be to show furigana or the reading somewhere on the back

That was a bug that it wasn’t showing.

Current Front

Current Back

(The individual user will of course be able to change the look, or use their own card template so long as it has certain fields, all in Anki.)

@mitrac

I’ve found putting just a bit of thought into my deck as I build it is essential to its success later.

It’s the same for me, but I know that’s one thing people like JPDB for.

[mitrac]

ok, wow, it looks perfect then!

@ChristopherFritz

It’s the same for me, but I know that’s one thing people like JPDB for.

That was the case I was wondering about as well.

While we’re on that topic, I have been trying to figure out why I got so excited by kurifuri and manga-kotoba but am a bit meh about jpdb (despite wanting to like it). So with manga-kotoba, even before I had a good use case (I didn’t read much manga until recently) there were enough things I could do to be curious and click around and see if I like it, and I think I must have gotten some tangible benefit even though I wasn’t really “using” it, if that makes sense. I spent longer with jpdb trying to like it and use it, but ultimately it didn’t feel like a good use of time and I let it go. Hmm… I think you’ve managed to avoid a lot of friction in the way the user interacts with the site, and for me at least, just wanted to let you know that might be more important than I would have realised. Just food for thought really.

[ChristopherFritz]

I’ll admit, one of the driving factors in my design is “be more user friendly than JPDB”.

I don’t mean for that to sound as a negative against JPDB, as I don’t know if any other site does what it does.

For my part, I’ve made plenty of bad user interfaces in my day, and I’ve also developed user interfaces that have to be usable for anywhere from ten to potentially 50+ co-workers. Over the past 15 years, I’d had to shift from “this interface will only be used by me, so it can be clunky” to “co-workers at another site will be utilizing this, so it needs to be straightforward to use” and “co-workers will use this application all day, every day, so it needs to be as simple and streamlined as possible”.

@mitrac

there were enough things I could do to be curious and click around and see if I like it

The advantage of the KuriFuri site is it being all in your local browser meant you could even play around with it without creating an account. But the site also came with limitations that Manga Kotoba is able to work around precisely because it requires a user login.

I think the progress bars also play into it. One you click on a few things, and you see progress bars have gone up, it’s enticing to click on more things and have the progress bars go up more. (I still need to implement having them go up immediately upon marking a word as known.) Then add in seeing the progress bars going up on a bunch of other manga that you have no interest in, but still it’s progress bars going up…

There’s also the difference in information density. For example, comparing these:

Mine of course has less data, so when I find ways to get more data into the view, it will risk becoming less user friendly.

My coming-sometime-in-the-future toggle-able alternative view for volumes also will suffer if I add more data/stats to it:

It’s certainly not easy to get all the data in there and keep it user friendly!

[mitrac]

How interesting, glad I mentioned it! It’s been a puzzle to me but confirms something I’m starting to see again and again that good design matters a lot.

@ChristopherFritz

One you click on a few things, and you see progress bars have gone up, it’s enticing to click on more things and have the progress bars go up more. (I still need to implement having them go up immediately upon marking a word as known.)

I think you’re right! And as long as that core is kept, even if data expands out a bit more, the user has some immediate easy anchors to get a visually interesting interaction and reward.

@ChristopherFritz

There’s also the difference in information density.

Definitely another big one, I’m starting to pull out some specific things you’ve got: just having a picture of the book cover and some colourful bars, and a visual “what is my next action” makes it more interesting. You also collapsed a lot of redundant text which makes it easy easier to parse.

@ChristopherFritz

My coming-sometime-in-the-future toggle-able alternative view

I don’t see the value of this one yet. It added in redundant text but no additional status right? Ah except for the progress swirl, hm…

And a thought about logins,
I don’t remember what the joining process was like on manga kotoba, is the simplest / immediate stuff available without a login? I thought perhaps it wasn’t. I remember a friend saying he had a similar problem with user logins, people don’t want them. But his site. (AI powered game) needed it. Somehow though he found a way to make it possible to start without a login (saved in browser), but made it clear you need a login to potentially avoid losing everything, and to use different browsers. Then when the user creates a login the progress is no longer browser only. I think there might be some major downsides, risks, I don’t know, but he said that was game changing for engagement.

[ChristopherFritz]

@mitrac

I don’t see the value of this one yet.

One “issue” with my current design is having different views in different areas:

Of course, not all views need the same information.

Pros to the alternate view (as an option) would be:

• You can see progress across volumes (which can also be worked into the table view).
• Provides a consistent view with the “browse” page.
• Works better on mobile devices than a wide table.

@mitrac

is the simplest / immediate stuff available without a login?

Without a login, you can view all the vocabulary lists, but you can’t mark any progress:

You also lose seeing longer English definitions, which I could add in if I wanted to store the toggle state (between short versus long) in the browser for users not logged in.

(And yes, I do need still to fix the table corners formatting on Firefox…)

@mitrac

Somehow though he found a way to make it possible to start without a login (saved in browser), but made it clear you need a login to potentially avoid losing everything, and to use different browsers.

Here is what is technically possible to implement on Manga Kotoba:

This is what’s technically possible for me to implement, as it would be the same as the Kurifuri site, although it would be a bit limited.

Doable: Mark known words, and have them auto-hide from frequency lists when viewing them.

Issue: Because pages are paginated, but the non-login functionality would work per-page, not every page would have exactly 100 words on it.

The old site got around this by having the whole frequency list on one page, which is okay for a single volume, but is really bad for a whole series frequency list, especially when I have 20+ volumes.

Issue: Cannot provide progress information.

The old site go around this by having the whole frequency list on one page for vocabulary stats, and by in the background downloading large “words per-page” lists to calculate sentence stats.

If Manga Kotoba gained any popularity, I’d at least consider adding a Javascript layer to mark words as known, then have that import into a user account when logging in.

@mitrac

but he said that was game changing for engagement.

Absolutely.

Right now, Manga Kotoba relies on people utilizing it for the frequency lists, then being curious about the tracking functionality (if they’re even aware that there is such functionality).

Of course, it’s also likely that anything requiring users track their known words is doomed to fail for many potential users because they don’t want to have to mark all their words as know.

This is the primary reason I never got into using JPDB. It’s too cumbersome for me to add known words.

And any solution to track one’s known words likely will not be compatible with the next site that works by tracking one’s known words…

[mitrac]

@ChristopherFritz

One “issue” with my current design is having different views in different areas:

oh I see, and of course you have different size displays to worry about. I should have been able to figure that out!

@ChristopherFritz

Without a login, you can view all the vocabulary lists, but you can’t mark any progress:

right, and then you have these unique issues you’re describing about how to get the frequency info across. This is fascinating stuff how it all comes together. In another life I’ll be a programmer

@ChristopherFritz

The old site got around this by having the whole frequency list on one page, which is okay for a single volume, but is really bad for a whole series frequency list, especially when I have 20+ volumes.

I remember the loading actually! It’s so interesting to know the reason for it.

@ChristopherFritz

Right now, Manga Kotoba relies on people utilizing it for the frequency lists, then being curious about the tracking functionality (if they’re even aware that there is such functionality).

That’s interesting. Ok, I’m trying to remember how it went for me in case that’s helpful.

Summary

I just have vague memories of the beginning. Maybe it was last Jan-Mar or April that I first tried kurifuri (not sure).

First I was intrigued because you share really useful stuff on here, so there was definitely an element of, well, obviously this will be very interesting. And I wish I could remember my first impression and why I went to kurifuri. Reaching way back, either I went there because of 小さな森のオオカミちゃん, or a different link - in any case seeing the cover gave me a familiar reference point and was crucial to my early interactions.

It definitely was fun to click on a bunch of words and feel like, well isn’t this great look at the bar going up! We humans are so easy to please. And then clicking around on other series to see what their frequency lists looked like.

It was definitely more of a fun / playful interaction in that I wasn’t planning on studying vocab from it. Despite that, I did a before/after comparison of my stats on reading 小さな森のオオカミちゃん. And that was very fun! I guess this is kind of the opposite of your intended use, lol, but I got a big kick out of seeing that I had absorbed all but a handful of 3+ frequency words just by reading them, looking them up once, and probably encountering them again in the book or in other reading.

I’m not sure I understood what the difference was swapping from kurifuri to manga-kotoba, but I quite happily made an account to find out what the future looked like. And then seeing lots of features being added and then a load more manga was magic. That’s around when I wrote on here and put manga-kotoba on my radar of - useful tool!

100% the easy single click to “know” a word kept me coming back. I didn’t consciously think about it as a reason not to use JPDB, but after this discussion about friction and design, and going back to try again,
yes that is definitely it. Not enough visual reward to drive curiousity, and way too cumbersome to get my known words in there. It’s amazing to me that one more click can matter so much!

Anyway, that was long, and I hope helpful. But if my rambling is taking up too much of your time no need to respond!

[ChristopherFritz]

@mitrac

I remember the loading actually! It’s so interesting to know the reason for it.

The loading always bothered me because I knew there was no practical way to get around it without breaking the progress bar functionality, or getting really complex with downloading data in the background and overflowing the user’s browser’s local storage with data.

Well, no practical away aside from story user process on the server, of course.

@mitrac

And then seeing lots of features being added

And if time + laziness don’t get the better of mine, I may actually finish implementing some of them before jumping into starting more…

@mitrac

and then a load more manga

Now totaling 1,403 volumes across 382 series!

(The series count is what makes it feel small.)

[mitrac]

@ChristopherFritz

Well, no practical away aside from story user process on the server, of course.

of course, of course

@ChristopherFritz

I may actually finish implementing some of them before jumping into starting more…

… it’s really fun to see this unfold live

@ChristopherFritz

across 382 series!

(The series count is what makes it feel small.)

it might seem small compared to all manga in the universe, but …

[ChristopherFritz]

@ChristopherFritz

My current weekend’s work is Anki integration:

The dashboard now includes a link to a thrown-together settings page:

(Note: “Anki Version” should read “AnkiConnect Version”. This will be fixed on the next move to live.)

Selecting “Enable Anki Integration” adds an Anki column to the vocabulary lists. (Not yet supported for kanji lists.)

AnkiConnect requires adding Manga Kotoba’s URL to its settings so the site can communicate with it:

Then select the icon in the Anki column to add a card to Anki (requires Anki to be running):

An existing Anki deck and model can be used so long as the model has the necessary fields and the names are set in the settings. Otherwise, a model and deck will be generated when adding a word.

[mitrac]

Very exciting! I’ll give it a whirl when I’m back on my desktop after the weekend and let you know!

[mitrac]

Ok, I got it to work!!

In order to get it to work, I definitely needed the screenshot to set it up, so maybe that should go on the settings page:

@ChristopherFritz

AnkiConnect requires adding Manga Kotoba’s URL to its settings so the site can communicate with it:

I managed to set it up, add words to an existing subdeck (need to use a :: double colon and then it finds it!). And the tracking feature worked. So no bugs, it seems to work as intended! Very fun, thanks!!!

Sorry it took me a while.

because my flow goes manga-kotoba list -> Kanji Study App -> Anki

It seems I have successfully moved most of my Japanese learning processes to my tablet as intended. I’m trying to do less hobby stuff on my laptop to get a better work/life separation

So one question is, I can imagine people would want to add words on mobile, and then presumably that requires different integrations? Sounds tough with all the platforms. Maybe pretend I didn’t bring that up.

It also made me realise, most of my flow is now using manga-kotoba to track known words so I can choose target kanji and words to study. But because learning them is a later step, I take my list and work through it with KKLC and the kanji study app, meaning I add the words to anki mostly through that app. I wouldn’t have planned it that way, but so far it’s organically grown into two nice activities:

• browse words on manga-kotoba (I’m finding this in itself is starting to make many words memorable), email myself a list
• import my list to Kanji Study and gradually knock them off as I review them in KKLC

Other ideas… the more valuable I see this, the more ideas I get…

• Option to view entries (words, kanji, readings) marked as known (greyed out maybe?) in line with the frequency information
• Option to view entries in order of appearance (while also still showing # occurances), essentially allowing anyone to read along with the list like the book club spreadsheets
• Be able to request books (payment). I’m not quite ready for that, but let’s say there is only one volume and I think I need support for more volumes, it might be nice to know I could get that. I’m not sure if you’ve thought of that, but it could be a way to monetise it, ie, some volume info is free, and other info gets unlocked with a one-off payment or something

Nice to have features

• be able to preview a range, and see which of the highest frequency words are introduced
• Dashboard / single click to current volume being read (rather than by way of series)

Potential bugs that I don’t remember if I saw in your list. Not complaining, just making you aware just in case this is a guest account thing and you are seeing something else.

Is the % known sentences updating correctly? Something just seems a bit off, but maybe because it doesn’t show the effect of tracked vocabulary. (is that intentional?)

On the kanji readings page, sometimes there are kanji that show up without a word link (see below for The Chef volume 1). It looks like it’s missing the information that should be pulled in, but it realises the kanji is there.

I hope that’s useful, I thought it might be nicer to collate all that instead of sending them one at a time throughout the week. This is really fun, it doesn’t cease to surprise me, thanks!

[ChristopherFritz]

@mitrac

So one question is, I can imagine people would want to add words on mobile, and then presumably that requires different integrations?

AnkiConnect isn’t available for mobile devices, although there is at least a re-implementation for Android that I haven’t tried out. If developed correctly, it should work with Manga Kotoba without any extra effort on my part. But I haven’t looked into how the Android project works. I do know Android makes it a bit difficult for applications to communicate with one another by design (for user security reasons).

@mitrac

browse words on manga-kotoba (I’m finding this in itself is starting to make many words memorable)

I’m constantly asking myself, “Do I actually know this word I’m seeing on the site, or do I just recognize it in context of the site because I keep seeing it here?”

@mitrac

Option to view entries (words, kanji, readings) marked as known (greyed out maybe?) in line with the frequency information

This is on my “to consider” list, so maybe I’ll work on getting it added. It’s simple enough to add; mostly I’d just need to update the Javascript so rather than removing an item marked as known, it changes the style.

@mitrac

Option to view entries in order of appearance

Another item from my “to consider” list, and entirely doable at the page level (but not the panel level).

Question then: show repeat words, once per page? Or only on the first page of appearance?

@mitrac

Be able to request books (payment).

Another item on my “to consider” list. But this would be a bit expensive because it would mean paying me the money to buy the book and then a little extra for the time and effort involved in extracting the data to add it to the site.

Price would be less the cost of the book if I were provided with the Mokuro JSON files.

Price would be even less if I were also provided the Ichiran output files in a specific format based on a Python script I would provide.

@mitrac

ie, some volume info is free, and other info gets unlocked with a one-off payment or something

So far I’m of the opinion that if a volume’s data is available on the site, I want it to be freely accessible for everyone. Monetization would thus be in adding specific series/volumes to cover the cost and time involved in adding them.

@mitrac

be able to preview a range, and see which of the highest frequency words are introduced

A range of what? May be something doable, but for page range I don’t have a good mapping for page numbers.

@mitrac

Dashboard / single click to current volume being read (rather than by way of series)

Can you expand on this a little?

I do want to add volume-level reading status, then the dashboard would let you see the volumes you’re reading similar to the Tracked Volumes page on the old site:

Side-note: +1 sentence progress is in the works for Manga Kotoba. I wrote and optimized the SQL queries just the other day.

@mitrac

Is the % known sentences updating correctly? Something just seems a bit off, but maybe because it doesn’t show the effect of tracked vocabulary. (is that intentional?)

I did some improvements on this, but there’s more to be done. I can write a bit about how it currently works later if anyone’s interesting in knowing the inner workings.

@mitrac

It looks like it’s missing the information that should be pulled in

I haven’t yet looked into this, but I’ve been wondering what’s causing it.

Edit: Cause found and resolved. I was missing a user ID constraint on the database query, which is why it didn’t occur for me on my local build (fewer user accounts populated) versus in live.

All bugs are useful to have mentioned, by the way! Even if I internally am aware of them, because some I may not be.

Side-note: Over 150 volumes added in the past two weeks, and over 100 more being added this weekend.