Weow! Koohi.cafe - A WK friendly SRS [300 vocabulary lists!]

Thank you.

If I try to load the word 惕ć‚æ on this ā€œflfl-cliā€ page it seems to try to load every katakana word in existence and the page takes forever to load and eventually I have to stop the execution. The screenshot is only a partial a image because to capture the whole area was too large to upload.

edit: The book was shirokuma cafe.

Image of bug

2 Likes

What in Godā€™s name

Edit: nevermind, it has nothing to do with 惕ć‚æ and everything to do with the card afterward, which is blank.

Anyway, itā€™s fixed but Iā€™ll need to find something to prevent that from ever happening again.

1 Like

You work fast! Thanks as always.

1 Like

Update 9/29 - Extremely boring update

Iā€™ve updated the libraries that the website runs on. This is extremely uninteresting and means nothing to every single user unless it breaks the website.

Iā€™m prepping to try and upgrade to Vue 3 (from 2). I might not if it seems too annoying (it will definitely be a process).

After that, Iā€™m going to work on an Anki flip card mode.

5 Likes

Just a general life update. Iā€™m currently working a full-time and a part-time job and it kind of sucks. I am not a ā€œsigma grindsetā€ kind of guy. Iā€™ll be doing only content updates for a bit.

At the end of December Iā€™m planning on either quitting my full-time job or moving it to part-time so that I can ā€œgo back to school.ā€ By which I mean starting a metric ton of programming courses and projects. So at that point Iā€™ll probably do some crazy shit on this website under the guise of ā€œlearning data analyticsā€ or something.

Itā€™ll probably be on the scale of that time I randomly decided to recreate the entire website in Node in a month.

Iā€™ve noticed that my website has, in ways, fallen behind the curve of stuff people have innovated in the four years since Floflo launched so Iā€™ll be reflecting on whatā€™s required to bring it up to par. If anyone has any ideas that they want to throw out so they can marinate for the next two months, go for it.

If anyone has any sites that they think are superior in X way or have potential, feel free to share. Itā€™ll help me figure out specifically where I need to expand my skills in order to match.

10 Likes

10/10 Content Update

New anime (8)

  • 86
  • Arslan
  • Beastars 2
  • Fruits Basket (all)
  • Nisekoi
  • Tensei shitara Slime Datta-ken 1 + 2
  • Yuukoku no Moriarty

Iā€™ve also figured out how to make anime compatible with the readability formulas. So anime will have that from now on. On avg it seems to hover from 75-82 while books avg 60-75. Completely making these numbers up but yeah

5 Likes

Please all the take the time to you need. Youā€™re working for free to help strangers after all.

The best example of a competitor is https://jpdb.io/ that was posted earlier above.

jpdbā€™s design is a little more cohesive and it runs much faster. It also doesnā€™t require an email to sign up which I like (Although I understand the some of the many reasons for not doing that). I like that it shows you an example sentence with the card that can be easily changed or translated from a prebuilt list. I like the stats for each book too.

I donā€™t like that it takes two clicks to move the next card, and how slow it feels (time from clicking ā€œshow cardā€ to rating it is long), but since itā€™s anki style they show the ā€œbackā€ of the card every time.

Koohi has a better lesson creation and review process I think. You can add the words you want. jpdb makes you add all of the words at once which is kind of annoying and itā€™s also hard to remove known words quickly. Koohi does that well. Moving between reviews is faster too.

I started using jpdb in an attempt to try to learn some words for a separate book I was reading. I didnā€™t want that other bookā€™s lessons to ā€œpolluteā€ my current list. That said adding yet another place to do daily SRS was too much for me and I basically stopped using it.

4 Likes

So for when I come back to the site, Iā€™ve been thinking of adding a ā€œreview setā€ kind of idea.

So the idea is to split the dayā€™s reviews into more doable chunks (10-30 items per set, out of 170 items or however many you have for the day). The ideal size would be to have a set doable in one quick sitting.

The sets would be divided as granularly as possible based on the following kinds of criteria:

  1. Leeches
  2. Book/Book series
  3. Kanji/Vocab
  4. Specific Parts of Speech

So for instance, letā€™s say youā€™re doing 2 books. Book A has 20 cards (across kanji/vocab) and book B has 80 cards.
You might get the following sets:

All Books - leeches (4 cards)
Book A (20 cards)
Book B - kanji (15 cards)
Book B - adjectives (25 cards)
Book B - leftovers (30 cards)
Book B - leftovers (6 cards)

When you go to review you can:

  1. See all the available sets
  2. Choose one to do (or have it pick a random one)

Finished sets would stay in the review ui and you can quickly see what words were in them, which ones were wrong, accuracy, etc. Then thereā€™d be an overview for what was accomplished that day (so like: 40 cards reviewed from book A at 80% accuracy, 90 cards from book B at 90% accuracy).

The idea is to accomplish the following:

  1. Encourage users to do a meaningful chunk of work within a sitting and not feel intimidated by the total number of reviews (esp true for people who donā€™t review every day)
  2. Allow users to focus their studies on what interests them at the moment (ex: you can leave book A to rot if you donā€™t care anymore)
  3. Group words into groups more thematically meaningful than the current kanji-vocab distinction

Anyway yeah just brainstorming

6 Likes

Just wanted to say thank you for making and maintaining such a cool resource!

3 Likes

Thanks. Iā€™m extremely excited to come back next month

4 Likes

Three day work week secured bois. Iā€™m back on January 3.

5 Likes

Enjoy your time off! :smiley:

1 Like

Just saying (again) this site is super usefulā€¦I love it and Iā€™d like to have time to use it much more

1 Like

Okay Iā€™m back. Iā€™ve taken a 3-6 month period with reduced work hours to ā€œgo learn stuff.ā€ This means that Iā€™m back on development for Floflo/Koohiā€™s yearly ā€œf*** this website, Iā€™m going to break everything I spent the last year attempting to stabilize.ā€

In this post I will be talking about plans for me and also the website. It may get slightly technical. You may or may not find it boring. Every section will have a summary: the SUMM will avoid any technical speak so that normal people and/or skimmers can read it.

1. Overhaul w/ Emphasis on SEO


When I swapped over to Koohi (a single page application), I had no idea what I was doing. The website has been almost completely invisible on Google because I didnā€™t set up SEO correctly. At the time, I ignored this because I didnā€™t even know how to make an SPA and that was enough for me.

However, over time the lack of SEO has made it impossible for the site to grow organically. It is, for all intents purposes, invisible except for when Vanilla or someone tells people on this forum that itā€™s cool.

SUMM: You literally cannot find this site on Google and that is bad. The following sections outline plans to fix this.

1.A Blog


The first thing Iā€™ll be doing is creating a blog. I miss doing posts and find the work somewhat soulless when Iā€™m literally just going full code monkey on the site.

The blog will cover topics related to both Japanese and coding. I donā€™t believe Iā€™m a crack coder or (even a very good one, to be honest), but I think I have hit a point where I can explain my thought process and be confident that Iā€™m not wrong (even if not optimal).

Like how Floflo was the application that I wish that I had when I was learning Japanese, the coding articles will be the kind of articles I wish I couldā€™ve read when I was learning coding.

Theyā€™ll be focused on solving specific problems ex: ā€œHow was the v2 api designed, what was introduced to the new api and why?ā€ ā€œHow do we do dictionary word lookups?ā€ And then the lessons from the articles will be abstracted out so that they can be used on other peopleā€™s projects.

Japanese articles will be the same as usual - opinions, stats (I will be gathering new data), resources, etc.

Iā€™m planning on using a headless CMS (sanity.io) and maybe NEXT.js or something.

SUMM: I will be (re)creating a blog. It will be hosted on its own subdomain. It will cover Japanese and coding, and its goal will be to pull in traffic from Google towards the main application.

1.B Main App


The main application is in an alright state. Planning on overhauling it a bit.

Appearance-wise, I would like it to look less sterile. Maybe just reintroduce some colors or something.

One of the biggest things Iā€™ll be doing is rebuilding using Vue 3 and a state management library (Vuex). Vuex simplifies the process of passing data to child and sibling components and means that I donā€™t have to start crying into my hands when I decide itā€™s time for the 1500 line component to be split into different pieces.

This should make the app easier to expand. It should also make the app more debuggable (aside from the host of new bugs that will introduce xd) since you can do time travel and snap shots on the app. Also since the state is only mutatable in predictable ways (ex: ā€œADD_A_WORDā€), you can be sure that thereā€™s something wrong with adding a word, not adding a word on X page using Y method.

SUMM: In order to handle the SEO thing, it will have a host of new features. For example, the book and dictionary pages will have to become fully fleshed out. This means individual book pages, individual series pages, individual dictionary pages. All of these should be discoverable on Google.

2. Application Overhaul w/ Emphasis on Context


Even during Floflo, we knew that there was significant overlap between certain kinds of content. Consuming content that was related made it easier to improve your reading because you could spend less time learning words in isolation and therefore spend more time reading.

Previously, this was only available by using same-series books, but the next overhaul will expand this.

2.A Genre Lists


So one issue is that categorizations for content does not currently exist. I will introducing user voting so that we can categorize things by genres and tags (ex: romance, action, isekai, etc.). I cannot catalogue this by myself and I wonā€™t try.

An automated process will use this information to manufacture ā€œgenre listsā€. These will serve as something similar to the core 6k but for specific genres. They will contain 1) a word list and 2) a catalog of books used to comprise them. Words will be organized by frequency.

In addition to word frequency in book, you will also be able to see how a word ranks within your chosen genre lists, meaning you can determine if a word will be useful to learn based on the genre youā€™re focusing on.

The catalog will help you find a next book to read thatā€™s has a genre similarity (and therefore probably a word similarity).

SUMM: Allowing users to tag books by categories/tags. Frequency-based lists will be created based on the books that belong to a tag. You can use these lists to find books with overlapping vocabularies, making reading new books easier. You can also learn from category lists directly.

2.B Sentences


In order to facilitate reading, Iā€™ll be emphasizing context sentences in the next iteration of Koohi.

Weā€™ll be doing this by leveraging Tatoebaā€™s corpus to create automatic context sentences. You will be able to lock in useful example sentences for specific cards.

In addition, Iā€™ll also be introducing a parser (yes, failed to do that last iteration). The parser will automatically create a list out of text. Anything that you add from said list will have the sentence it belongs to added as a context sentence.

SUMM: Adding Tatoeba corpus for context sentences. Adding a parser which will create lists from text. Context sentences will be gathered from said text.

2.C Review Sets


Talked about this here: Weow! Koohi.cafe - A WK friendly SRS [300 vocabulary lists!] - #550 by Raionus


Anyway that pretty much sums up the plans. Currently working on step 1 and reworking the API so that itā€™s flexible enough to do what I want.

19 Likes

I dont know if you are oppen to suggestions, but going to post them just in case,

Hi, just started using the website like 2 days ago, and I have a few suggestions that I have been writting over this days

Everthing has to hight of font weight, I would recommend reducing it the ones at 700 to 500, and the ones in 500 to 300, from the test I have done, just look for example at this, is impossible to see it right
image

Some letters with lots of stroke you canā€™t see the strokes because of the hight number font-weight has

In the lection seccion, when you click in the quiz buttom to learn new words, the word should be a lot bigger to obserb better the radicals and strokes of the kanji
image

Also, the rest of the info would be nice if it could be a litter bigger, but the main word should definitely be bigger and idealy, centered

Also a feature when we can train items that we just learned or have a SRS wait time below 1 or 2 days. I need to force brute it lots of time before I can remember it usually, even more without mnemonic or radicals, so it would be userfull to be able to train items you are having problems with or items you just learned (biggest issue, I already need somethign similar in wanikani to learn some kanjis, and they have mnemonic and radicals, so here is even worse). I usually after learning like 20 lessons in wanikani, quiz myself on it like 5 times all the items, so something similar to that would be great

The Schedule, it would be great if instead of soon, we could get how many hours until it, Even better if there was a table with all the upcoming reviews next 24h or one week, but at least it would be nice to have a concrete time for the next review

Its cool that we can exclude the wanikani level when generating lists, but it would also be userfull if we could include those vocabulary as learned, so if it appears in a book, it shows you the stat of how many words you know correctly. While it would be enought to just enter the level manualy in the case previusly mentioned, I know it would be possible to automatize it, since bunpro has it automatized using a wanikani api key

And of course, if you could get something like radicals for learning the kanjis, would be great, but I guess this is asking for to much

Personally, I give it the next priority, as more important something to train new items, then wanikani vocabulary count as learned on stats, then maybe font and other style things.
But do whatever you want, is still your app, this is just a list of things, that I, as a new user, think would make the app better

1 Like

This would be so helpful!

1 Like

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Iā€™ve been asked by many people for more detailed scheduling info and I think itā€™s high time it was added. Training mode sounds useful and could definitely be included in the next iteration.

Kanji stroke order drawings could be included and I have a database for it just figuring out how to implement.

Radicals I do not have any info on but many sites have included it so obviously the information exists somewhere

Yeah itā€™s a nice feature. I nearly had it implemented last iteration of Koohi but couldnā€™t reconcile some key differences between my personal computer and the computer my actual server was running on :cry:

2 Likes

Developed a style to help me see clearer the words, posting it here just in case someone else find it helpfull Website Themes & Skins by Stylish | Userstyles.org

1 Like

Small ā€œbugā€ that Iā€™ve noticed here and there. (I havenā€™t noticed any pattern)
Occasionally example sentences can be repeated several times like so:

Thatā€™s all for now. Thanks as always.

1 Like