I mentioned this in my welcoming post, but I thought I’d mention here that 10fastfingers.com is a great site to test as well as compete with your typing speed in different languages. There’s not much people using it right now for Japanese, but I thought there’d be a lot more competition if I mentioned the site here and gave some info about it. It does require an IME, you have a minute to type, and your score gets submitted if it was fast enough and had under twenty mistakes.
I have been using this for years for English and now started using it for Japanese and I think it can also be a good source for learning some new words. Not very many, but if you keep doing it, you memorize them pretty easily. There’d also be quite a big gap for trying to do the advanced test. (Which chooses from a pool of 1000 words instead of 200 in the normal test.)
A thing I wanted to ask was, is this beneficial to learning the language in some way? So far, I believe so because of many words I didn’t know getting put into the mix. However, it really only helps with memorizing readings, so I was wondering if this was possibly creating a negative effect the understanding of what the words mean.
Also, I just thought of it now, but you can also create your own tests. In my mind, I can see how we can put all of Wanikani’s vocabulary in them and share them. I think scores can be set for those as well. If anybody actually cares about this site, THEN we could discuss that. Thoughts?
I’m pretty sure that learning the reading will make it much easier to learn later on, even if you don’t know the word yet.
The test looks pretty cool, I’ll try it out! I’ve been working on the game Kanjiroids for the past week that also involves typing fast in Japanese, maybe you’ll be interested.
Yeah, I named it Kanjiroids and it doesn’t even have Kanji yet
Did I do the shameless self-promotion thing right?
Thanks! I think there’s a couple of key press combinations that you may want to include. I prefer cya and cyu over cha and chu just for consistency. Also, what are your plans for that game? It was pretty engaging for the couple of minutes that I played it.
I had cha, tya, and even chya, but I had no idea cya was an option too! I added it, and cyu and cyo as well. Thanks!
I have lots of plans - in rough order of priority: lives, high scores, katakana, Wanikani-integrated modes for the kanji and vocab you’ve learned on here, maybe even non-Wanikani modes for kanji, vocab, and sentences.
Also, thanks to you, I finally fixed the IME on my desktop. I’ve been using my phone and Google’s input test website to type for too long
I tried out Kanjiroids. It’s a great concept - I love it. Some small things that would be great to see:
When I correctly type a character, I’d like the colour to be different to when I fail a character (it reaches the bottom). Currently both make the character turn red, but perhaps making it green when you are successful will make more sense.
When I fail a character, it would be nice to see what the correct answer would have been. An example is the character ぢ, which I have never typed before, but had previously learn to be pronounciated similar to じ. I had to search google for the correct way of typing the character, when I would have preferred the game to notify me.
I was making a little vocabulary game in the Unreal Engine a year or so ago and had a friend of mine test it out. He complained he couldn’t get any ch or sh words to work.
Evidently “shya shyu shyo, chya, chyu, chyo” work on some IME’s as well. /shrug
Doesn’t work on mine, but he complained to me, so I put it in. lol. Figured I’d mention it just in case.
I agree, I need to figure out some sort of differentiation. Green for success would be a good way to do it!
Definitely going to make a game overview screen at the end that will display the missed items and their correct answers. I have to implement lives first though so the game can actually end. Just added lives!
Do you think that it should also display the correct answer somewhere immediately after an item reaches the end?
It could be a nice feature. If someone doesn’t know how to to write a certain character, they’d have to fail it every time it comes by. They’d only know the right answer from the game-over overview.
If it displays the answer for a failed word upon reaching the bottom, they have a chance to learn on the fly and keep the game going when that same kana/kanji appears.
That’s what I’m capable of. I barely know a lot of the words, though, so my score doesn’t matter much. When I was first trying it out I was missing more than 15 words each test. Today I got lucky.
The website also allows you to embed custom tests into html. Are you able to see if putting this into code would work? I put all of the vocabulary (except the words with tildas) into a typing test and I’m wondering if someone could compile a number of these into a webpage somewhere.
Edit: Okay, so I tested it myself and I guess there’s a limit to the size of that text. Other than that, it does work.
You probably hit the URL length limit. As long as the webpage supports POST requests, a way to get around that is to have a form that submits the parameters in the body of a POST request and redirects the result to open in an iframe. I can test it out on my website sometime
If someone doesn’t know how to to write a certain character, they’d have to fail it every time it comes by. They’d only know the right answer from the game-over overview.