Does anyone else find the narration too fast to follow? I’m at chapter 20 of Kiki-Mimi Radio and I’m learning a lot. If I read the text, I can understand the gist of most sentences with only a few lookups. But when I hear it, it’s too fast. I feel as if the voice actor reads for a regular audience rather than for beginner learners. For contrast, I really like the way the podcast “Japanese With Shun” is read: slowly and with a pause after each sentence to give you time to process the grammar.
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I think it’s because it’s the case ^^
But you can set the reading slower if you want, at the bottom of each page
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I actually just starting using Satori Reader this weekend. I read chapter 1 & 2 of 壁の穴 (Hole in the Wall) and I actually really enjoyed mostly being able to consume the content but also the story itself wasn’t bad. I decided to try the free month and see if it’s worth it for me after that. I’m aiming to read about a chapter a day, or more if I’m feeling the capacity. So far, enjoying it, and I’ll be reading chapter 4 of that series today. I’m hoping to come back in a month and will report on my personal experience.
If it’s helpful at all to anyone else, I’m halfway through N4 on Bunpro.
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I can’t believe this was right in front of my eyes the whole time!
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In my experience, something that has helped is going back and forth between reading and listening, then repeat. It’s really tedious, so I totally understand not wanting to do something so boring. However, this technique is helping me understand podcasts better. I personally don’t see an issue with slowing down the audio at first to make sure you’re hearing things correctly, but I know that other folks disagree and would suggest listening at 1x speed all the time. But I mean the thing is you need to build up to where you can actually start to understand, right? IMO as long as you’re building up those “hearing muscles”, and continuing to challenge yourself a little more each session or so, you’ll do great.
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Here’s what I’m trying to do now:
- Listen at 0.8x to the entire episode (this way I can at least understand something)
- Go back to 1x, and for each sentence: listen once or more, read in depth, then listen again.
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Sounds like a solid plan. I’d be interested to know how it goes for you after a little while!
And in case it wasn’t clear, yes, the narrator is too fast for me too. For now. 
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Thanks for the thread! I’m starting to test the Free access today. I’ve been reluctant to even try it in the past, as materials designed for learners (e.g. graded readers) usually bore me to tears, and I can’t force myself to read them. But the framework included in Satori Reader and the integration with WK kanji knowledge certainly makes it more attractive.
I like that it has a guided tour if you sign up… going through that now. Not sure I’ll be able to stick with YAA (yet-another-app), but we’ll see 
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FYI in addition to being able to control the speed, some series are slower/ faster. Kiki Mimi is one of the quicker easier ones if I remember right. Hole in the wall is slower, for example. The plus side is, from listening to several series now, I can 100% say my listening comprehension is way faster. I think I first noticed that around 6 months after doing at least 1 a day. keep it up! It gets easier!
Cool, enjoy!
I hear you! Most people agree, seek out a story based mostly on interest and a bit on level, and go at a pace you enjoy. A month is plenty of time to see if it works well for you and if you like the writing style!
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There’s a new Story on Satori Reader 
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Looks like it took the place of the Nutshell Grammar / John and Friends biweekly updates (which had more recently just been John and Friends while Nutshell Grammar is on hiatus).
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I’m enjoying it. Just finished the first episode of the Mouse in the wall story. It is apparently the easiest story, and at my level was just about the right challenge level.
I’m using Bunpro for grammar and am at mid-N4. But I can tell I need a lot more reading practice to solidify grammar concepts.This type of more traditional story is a nice balance to the very casual text we see in the ABBC.
Definitely the narration, built-in context-sensitive dictionary, and line by line translations/notes set this apart from the other graded readers I’ve tried.
So far so good…
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Hi!I am trying to get into Satori reader.
Not to be annoying but is there anyway to disable this dict popup so I can use Yomitan instead?
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Hmm… you might have to explain what you’re hoping to get from Satori then.
What you’re proposing would totally defeat the purpose of Satori as it is conceived. The definitions in Satori are chosen manually, not automatically, so you’d be downgrading. Why bother with Satori if you prefer yomitan? Also, it would mean you would skip the underlined glosses where tricky phrases are explained, another key benefit. So I can only guess either you don’t have a good handle on what the value of Satori is, or maybe you have some other use in mind?
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I use Yomitan on other texts and I must agree with @mitrac here. Satori Reader only display the right definitions for the given context, so I see no use for Yomitan here.
For example, when you click on a particle, SR will give you the right meaning for it in the context, while Yomitan will give you all its meanings. I find it much more useful to have the Satori Reader meaning directly. This way, I can observe the sentence structure more carefully as I do not have to waste time on trying to guess the right meaning of a word from a huge list given by Yomitan… Spending more time on learning and less on deciphering, I think this is one of the purposes of the app (and so far, it works for me ^^).
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you might have to explain what you’re hoping to get from Satori then.
Literally just stories to read at my level that are engaging.
I want to use app-based dictionaries like Yomitan so I can control SRS card creation, I suppose if I was confused and wanted to see the exact phrasing I could just read the box.
update
I actually worked out how to do this and disable the text box. You can use the ublock origin picker tool to create a filter to specifically block that text box from appearing
Now you’re free to hover over / click any text you want without the lil box appearing
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Wow interesting! Glad you figured it out!
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I would also suggest against Yomitan for Satori Reader, the grammar notes are 75% of the reason why I use Satori Reader, the stories and the voicing is the other 25%.
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Ah yes sorry I was very tired last night. I meant something like uhm…
Use Yomitan to use SRS cards in Anki (just because I know Anki very well and have customised it to be perfect for me), but if I get confused by a meaning / grammar point disable the ublock filter and use Satori if that makes sense?
I love the idea that the notes are specific, that’d be very useful. But admittedly if you are a bit weird like me and want to use your own SRS it does get in the way…
This is just like a “best of both world” scenario. It’s a bit awkward to stop ublock, I actually use Chrome for Japanese and Firefox for English.
So I’m thinking block all Satori reader features in Chrome that make Yomitan annoying to use, and use Firefox to get specific info.
I can even create a card in yomitan, and then just copy any interesting info over from firefox 
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I actually use Migaku for what it’s worth, but most people know Yomitan. Migaku is destructive. It reads the text on the page, and then replaces it with its own text.
it does this to hide Kanji you already know or add pitch accent colouring (just two examples… I’m sure there’s more features but this is all I use it for 
)
Because it’s destructive, sometimes on sites (like Satori or Mokuro Reader…) it breaks so so much
So that’s why my option of “just nuke the satori reader features” seems a bit silly. You should see how broken the site gets when you use Migaku on it, Satori reader does not like it 
PS: Yomitan is not destructive, it reads the text as-is on the page and checks that against a dictionary and then makes a popup. So Yomitan works on far more sites than Migaku does
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