Hey what’s up Wanikani, it’s me ya boi. Over the past year I’ve been working on an improved version of Floflo.moe, which was intended to ease the transition from Wanikani to reading.
The new website Koohi.cafe is intended to help facilitate learner’s first steps into consuming native Japanese materials by optimizing the vocabulary learning process. You can learn more from the feature list here.
Core Features:
Dynamically generated vocabulary lists from native novels: Words appear in the order they appear in the novel. No more guessing what words you need to know.
Word tracking across multiple lists: Any words you learn are marked and duplicates are removed from every vocabulary list, creating a tailored learning experience.
Vocabulary list filtering options: Set minimum frequency, multiple lists, filter out items covered by different WK levels
*New* Glossary Lists: super handy lists with all the words in a book. Use for word reference while you’re actually reading the book. Comes with features such as a search bar for jumping to words and the custom vocabulary interface for adding names.
A WK/Houhou-style SRS with customizable options
Add your own vocabulary/kanji
Built in dictionary search with pitch accents (on lessons page)
While I’m not using it much anymore because I already can read most of what I want to just fine without a dictionary anyway by now, floflo/koohi helped me a lot with getting to that point, so I can confirm that this is useful in case anyone is unsure about checking it out
You can put me down in the “I used this and like it” list of people
I started using it almost immediately after I got level 60 on wanikani to supplement my reading. At the start I had a pretty hard time reading, but fast forward to now and by the end of the books I read there’s not a single word in them I don’t know. Unfortunately I don’t know how many words I’ve actually added at this point (it was like 6000 something when I still used floflo), but the koohi statistics thing says a little over 13,000 non WK words known.
Definitely wouldn’t have been able to progress as fast as I did without koohi. Lots of time would be wasted looking up words as im reading (which breaks my focus and distracts me) and filling out srs cards manually. Would recommend to anyone who wants to get good at reading, which is hopefully like everyone reading this.
Ohh, you’re back! I’m excited! I can’t actually use Koohi right now though because my Japanese isn’t good enough to read books yet but I definitely want to!
I was about to ask: what is the best way for you (and anyone) to use the website? Do you learn the words much before watching/reading the thing you’re studying? And also, since it doesn’t limit max “lessons”, do you add large amounts of words or do you limit yourself?
If you don’t mind, I’m interested if you could guide me through your method and what works for you or didn’t work. Or even just a few general tips are very welcome, thanks!
Yeah of course, after a couple years of using it and refining how I go about it, hopefully there is at least one thing I know that’ll help you out.
So just to generally structure this, I’ll write out general things that I do and why I do them so you can decide if you agree with my reasoning and want to do them yourself.
Search the word in my book before adding it on some occasions: So this one is really only doable if you have the ebook imo, but it comes with a few benefits. To illustrate a couple, lets take one of the first words I learned on floflo: 素振り. This word usually means behavior or something, but it can also mean practice swinging. Rather than just going with “behavior” I checked in my book and realized that it was used by a girl practicing kendo. In that case, the reading is not そぶり but rather すぶり. Thanks to checking ahead, I avoided learning the wrong definition and reading for the word I was going to be coming across. Basically anytime I see a word that has a lot of very different definitions or even readings, I will check. The only con is that it can rarely result in spoilers and really requires an ebook.
Only add the words that you are going to do the lessons for that day: Its not a big deal if you go over a bit, but I would avoid putting like 100 words in your queue. The reason is basically what I mentioned last paragraph about how usually you have to know which definition and reading you want to learn for some words. If you add them too far ahead, you will end up forgetting which definition to use for some of them and it’ll just be an unnecessary waste of time. Been there done that.
Learn your x amount of words for the day and then read your book until roughly the last word you added: Two things here: Seeing words in context is important. Its important that after adding your word to your srs, you actually read your book and see how it was used, by what character, and in what situation. Secondly, I recommend adding words beforehand because you want to minimize interruptions while reading. You’re already going to be stopping to look stuff up, so theres no reason to pile more on top of that. If you add your words and then go read, around the time you are done reading the first review for those words will be coming up. Do those reviews and try to connect them to the sentence you saw them in to boost memory. If you can remember where you saw a word, your chances of remembering it shoot up a frickton.
Get used to making your own mnemonics: Its a bit of a pain, but you’ll get better and start creating your own patterns. I’ve gotten lazier with it since a lot of words I add are more obscure now, but at the start its important to spend a solid amount of time during your lessons to make sure you really understand stuff. Higher accuracy means faster reviews and less reviews to do, so its a worthwhile investment of your time.
Have fun: Read shit you wanna read. Don’t even bother worrying about what will be the most beneficial for you. You might feel some obligation to start with something easy or something that isn’t a fantasy with a lot of “weird” vocab, but at the end of the day you’re gonna learn all the same words eventually. Read what interests you and you’ll naturally work harder and pay more attention, so your studies will progress faster.
Understand that reading at the start is going to be hard no matter what
Rather than type a paragraph, heres a picture from my journal when I started 3 years ago
61 goddamn days to read my first book and I added 1160 words to my srs. All those words were from the frequency 2 list (meaning they appeared 2+ times in the book.). But notice how the second book took far far less work. Things get a lot easier really quick, you just gotta put in work.
Final notes: This has all been preferential, but this last part is especially preferential. Personally, at the start I learned everything in the frequency 2 list. After a few months, I started doing the frequency 2 list and overlapping frequency 1 lists between your book and the next ones you wanna read. Once you get to the point where there are like less than 400 unknown words in your book TOTAL, I recommend learning every word you don’t know in the book.
I appreciate so much that you took the time to write all that! All of the tips have been very useful to me. And wow, the picture really shows a massive improvement already. I was doubting if I should use it or Anki instead, but now I will give it a go for sure. We’re starting Kimi no Na wa with the intermediate book club mid February so it’s perfect that there’s one list for it. And I’m also interested in Shingeki no Kyojin and Neon Genesis Evangelion, so I have fun for a while. I also didn’t know you could manually set it to the frequency you want, so that’s really handy as well.
In that review I highlighted words I didn’t know on the first page and last page of the book. You can see the difference that those 61 days made.
START:
Mmm after maintaining it for two/three years or whatever I got burned out and needed some alone time. But yeah, I guess I’m ready to revive the mental anguish of being publicly responsible for its development again uwu
Damn, this looks pretty good. Will help streamline vocab beyond WaniKani. Maybe WaniKani+Koohi+Imabi+Anki+Native content is the true stack for learning Japanese.
I’m having a lot of trouble trying to use this, and I’m not sure if it’s broken or I’m just doing something wrong.
For the record, I am viewing the site on a Windows laptop with a small screen (13") using Firefox version 84.0.2.
Here’s what I tried:
“Learn” > selected “Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei” from dropdown (since I happen to have it on my ‘to read’ bookshelf) and clicked “Generate”
Clicked “add” for 7 words and “trash” for 1
Clicked “Practice”, there was nothing there
Clicked “Manage”
Selected first 3 words from list, clicked “Quiz”
Completed quiz with one wrong meaning
Quiz results popped up, and could not figure out how to get the popup window to go away (there was no ‘x’ and clicking outside the popup did nothing). Eventually closed the webpage and opened a new page.
Clicked “Manage” and noticed that the 2 items I got right were no longer in the list, while the 1 I got wrong was still there.
Issues:
There seems to be no way to see which words you clicked “trash” on. If you accidentally said you knew a word, there seems to be no way to undo that. If I remember what the word was and search for it on the “Manage” page it will show tagged as “known” but the only option then is to delete it, after which I would have to search for it again to add it to a list. Even a reset did not make these words show up again for me when generating a new list. (aside: “trash” seems kind of a weird choice for “I know this”)
Cannot see any way to exit out of the quiz results popup
Similarly to point 1, there seems to be no way to see vocab words already in the SRS system. Once you get them right on a quiz you no longer see them in any list.
UI for selecting words on the “Manage” page feels mobile-friendly but awkward on PC. I feel like a more speadsheet-style view word work better. (I’m imagining hundreds of items here)
Yes, if you get them right they go into your srs queue. Otherwise they stay in your lessons.
If you click trash on a word in a list, you can just click the back arrow to go back to that word and click the undo button.
I trashed, and then went back and marked that word as unknown exactly as you described, and they properly showed back up on my vocab lists. I’m not sure what you did, but if a word is not showing up on a vocab list that it should be on, you either ignored it or still have it marked as known.
Recently added was an exporter that allows you to see all your words. Its in the dropdown menu by practice
Personally I’ve never heard of anyone having hundreds of items in their manage tab. In that case I could see how it might be inefficient. The most ive had in like 3 years has been 30 something maybe
I also didn’t know you could manually set it to the frequency you want, so that’s really handy as well.
