Yeah, far more Larry and Curly…
I guess all the moe is in manga form, where you can actually see the moe.
I remember looking at this site some time back but giving up because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to use it. I’m sure it’s useful, but no matter how much I tried I couldn’t seem to find my way around. I still can’t. I use WK and Bunpro every day and have no problems with them, they feel easy to use, but for some reason I can’t figure out floflo.moe. But after reading this review, I’ll go back and try again.
If you need any help, feel free to ask any of us. I think it is a lot more intuitive now than it was before, but any of us will be glad to help you figure it out if there are any unclear bits. It really is pretty awesome so it is worth figuring out probably.
I agree with @TamanegiNoKame that it got better for basic book lists.
However, the alchemizer has turned a lot of things into a mess.
There’s a guide, though, on the front page of floflo. It did help me back when I started. (I haven’t read the new version that is supposed to reflect the changes that happened to the website, though)
Thank you so much!
When I checked it out before I couldn’t figure out how to use it either. I think it wasn’t obvious enough that you had to supply your own book. It should just straight up tell you that on the first page.
Fair enough, as some similar programs do actually provide the text you’re reading. I’m pretty sure I thought the same thing at first, actually.
Thanks for the clarification!
Other than seeing the name here and there on the forums, I’m not sure exactly what this is, and I too don’t really know what exactly I would do with this. Most of the books I have are physical, but a long time ago I bought the first volume of キノの旅 on ebookjapan.
Does the fact that I own the digital version mean I can plug it into this or something and make flashcards out of the vocabulary automatically?
Or am I just not understanding it.
I’m pretty sure someone will better explain this but from my understanding, you use a purchased copy of the book (physical or otherwise) along with Floflo by adding the kanji available to your lessons list and reviewing them as you read through. Vanilla used a physical book he was highlighting stuff on.
And I see @seanblue replying so he should sort it out. :3
@Leebo Floflo only has a small selection of books because Raionus has to purchase each book digitally himself. He then extracts the words and word frequencies from his copy so users can study them in the SRS on his website. The idea being that you can learn the words ahead of time so that when you actually read the book you can read it more smoothly. It doesn’t matter if your copy is physical or digital.
As I said, the selection is limited. But he adds more every month based on donator votes and the more users and donators he gets, presumably the more he’d be able to add.
@gojarappe Meanwhile I held off on responding because I thought you had it covered.
No, unfortunately the wordlists are only for a set list of books (that is expanding gradually). I prolly should have listed that as a catch, but as it has all the stuff I want to read already, I didnt really think twice about it lol.
Essentially the goal of the site is to be able to say ok, here is a list of all the words in this book that you dont know, and how many times they appear. And with a single click, you can add the words of your choosing to an srs system pretty much exactly like we have here on WK. A lot more efficient than making flash cards manually as you work through a book, and you can better choose which words to spend your time learning. Thats all it is ultimately.
EDIT: pretty much just repeated what sean said because I didnt read his comment before posting, whoops :x
I already own one of the books on the list but couldn’t really get through it! I will start flofloing today!
While I really like the idea (and the website), the try I had with it left me somewhat mix feelings. It’s really personal, not a critic of flofloe.moe, just my experience, but may be some people had the same.
I used it for a 12 episodes anime with freq>=1 (that alone was a really bad idea). My problems were :
- A few words/expression where ill parsed and I end up learning words which wasn’t there (the parser has changed thought so it might have been fixed/improved)
- I spent a LOT of time filtering the words I already knew (WK level do not reflect my vocab accurately)
- I spent much of my time learning words which had no relevance in the story (like TV show running in the background or some character with an elaborate way of speaking, saying nothing of importance). I ended up working to understand uninteresting sentences that I could/would/should have skipped.
- I found it way harder to learn vocab out of context, compare to learning them while encountering them. Founding out the meaning of a word after wondering what it meant in a sentence is really great for retention, give you a story with it.
- I had to wait a month before watching the show (time learn and guru them all)
In the end I preferred sticking with adding words on the go. It’s really easy to do with Houhou (+ don’t add a new SRS system for me), and I can add word I found fun/easy/interesting to learn (it’s unlikely I’ll never see 弱肉強食 again but I’m glad I learned it). The obvious drawback is staggered reading and not knowing when I should learn a word I’ll end up seeing often.
My take is that flofloe.moe system is not suited for anime (should work waaay better with novels) and that freq>=1 is a waste of time. What frequency do you guys use ?
Yeah, I haven’t used it for anime, but I can imagine it would have a lot of drawbacks. To be fair though, it was always intended for books and anime was only added experimentally because people kept asking for it.
The frequency I use depends on the book a bit (not that I’ve read anything huge). But yeah, usually 3+.
I also find this, so I just use it that way now. Rather than pre-learning words, I use floflo as a much quicker dictionary while reading, and then add the words which are worth learning.
So, I also add words on the go, which gives me context for the words as well.
While I mostly use it for books, I also did (and watched) Noragami. My plan was to watch with the subtitles, so that I could have the text and use my usual approach.
My plan got destroyed by the fact that the DVDs I rented from Tsutaya do not have subtitles (deaf people do not have the right to watch anime it seems). Instead I watched the first episode once, added all words I could recognize, then watched a second time (much easier due to repetition plus new vocab), caught a few more words that I added as well, then added words I found interesting and ignored the rest.
I did all that at frequency 2 or 3. (Can’t remember)
I’m usually using frequency 2 for books.
The problem of floflo not knowing your vocab progressively disappeares as you interact more with it. I don’t trash that many words theses days (finished a couple books in there already though)
I’m only going to try floflo once I’m at a higher WK level
At the moment I don’t really know enough to read anything
That’s a really good idea. Typing all the words do take some time and hinder the reading, especially when there are no furigana.
Yep, I’ve found it works really well for that.
Editing to say that I do think pre-learning does work better once you (a) know lots more kanji and (b) are good enough at Japanese / know enough vocabulary to be tackling the more substantial books (which is not a stage I’m at yet ). The harder / longer books have a far lower density of hiragana-only words, so you’re mostly dealing with kanji-based words. Their meanings are therefore easier to remember because the kanji give you information, which is even better if you know lots of kanji already.
I still prefer the ‘dictionary + post-learning’ approach right now though. I’ve only read the first chapter of Kiki so far, but I didn’t even notice it didn’t have furigana because floflo made it so convenient ^^