[Userscript] Quiz pitch accent in lessons and reviews

[lake]

Hello! I’m working on a UserScript to practice pitch accent in WaniKani reviews.

It expects an apostrophe ' at the downstep in all of your reading vocab answers, and prevents you from answering without specifying the accent:

For example: 'いろは is heiban [0], い'ろは is atamadaka [1], いろ'は is [2], いろは' is [3] (odaka).

When you submit the wrong pitch accent you are gently corrected.

I copied the pitch accent data from Invertex’s Pitch Accent Info script.

My code so far is on GitHub here. You can install an alpha version here.

Is there any interest for this kind of script? What would you all want out of it?

I’d very much like to add a feature where an “incorrect pitch accent answer” reschedules the card deeper into the review pile, but still without marking it wrong. Can someone help me figure out if that’s possible / how I’d go about it?

[izzyfizz96]

I’d be interested, but since I (and I would assume many other WaniKani users) don’t have a lot of experience with pitch accent and would be pretty much guessing for all of them. Would it be included in new lessons as well? And by the way, where’s a good place I can learn some of those rules? I’d probably want at least a basic background before I installed something like this.

[seanblue]

This would probably be a good place to start:

Pitch-Accent Awareness Corner

As evidenced by a couple recent posts, many Japanese learners make it surprisingly far into their studies prior to the shocking discovery that pitch accent exists in Japanese, and that understanding how to acquire it correctly it is essential for speaking Japanese without an obvious accent. Whether or not to dive into this subject (and when) is apparently slightly controversial, but for those who have decided to take the plunge, here’s a place to share resources, strategies, and questions. I’ll…

[Kumirei]

Realy cool script!

[lake]

I highly recommend you install Invertex’s Pitch Accent Info script along with this one. It shows nice graphics of pitch accent in lessons.

[doublebassist]

Awesome. I’ve been wanting something like this for a long time. I’m glad I didn’t search for this last week. Can’t wait to try it out!

[lake]

Please let me know how you like it!

[doublebassist]

Seriously, thanks for writing this script.

Overall, I really like it. It’s a good logical way of inputting the accent. I finally feel like I am learning the vocab properly and completely now that I am quizzed on the correct the pitch accent.

I wish it had been around when I started. It’s been a bit tricky on reviews where I did not have pitch accent as part of the vocab lesson. My first review session with it was about 3x slower than normal because there was so much guess–>check–>correct. I imagine as I start to learn the material better things will go much faster.

In case you are looking to further develop the script:

One tweak I thought of:
It might be nice to have a way to skip fixing the reading once it tells you, maybe by pressing enter twice in a row.

Alternatively, it might be nice instead to have it just tell you you got the accent wrong, so you can choose to guess again (similar to how WK asks for the “on” reading of kanji) or choose to just press enter again to have it give you the answer.

Another tweak I thought of that would likely be harder to implement:

It would be nice to have some sort of statistics that track my pitch accent learning, %correct, and especially a list of leeches, perhaps accomplished by having a list sort-able by %correct.

Even just a list of which pitch accent readings were incorrect at the end of the lesson would be immensely helpful, especially if it could be cut and pasted into a spreadsheet.

[doublebassist]

首になる is missing pitch info [-1]. Seems it should be [3]

Wondering if i should start a spreadsheet with these kind of things.

[doublebassist]

After a week, things are much easier. I’m getting a good sense of the pitch patterns and can guess most of the ones I don’t know. it’s hardly slowing me down at all any more to input pitch.

[Saida]

Are you also practicing out loud every time?