Will 2020 be the year of an EtoEto Update?

I was mostly being silly, but money can help a lot of problems like this. Not immediately, but if you have money you can hire more developers, planners, content creators etc. Get training on better web development work flows etc.
Also usually with more money there’s more time to work on projects that aren’t currently producing money.

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This is undoubtedly the biggest issue, and I can understand the worry. If I remember correctly that’s why they lowered the price on WaniKani a couple years back. The shear abundance kept getting in the way.

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Since people are talking about solving this problem with money, I feel the need to reference Brooks’ Law, which states, “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”

This has been known for some time in software development thought not necessarily by management. Basically, it’s important to remember that software development is a creative enterprise. So unlike a situation where you can hire a horde of people to produce one thing in a factory, software developers must each be creative and also work together towards a common goal. But the person(s) leading the project must know what that goal is.

So if I’m late writing my second novel, the follow-up to my blockbuster debut, the publisher won’t say that they’ll send in three more writers to help me finish it.

And I think the problem with EtoEto as far as I can tell is that the final conception hasn’t been determined. In other words, the problem is likely more a lack of inspiration rather than resources.

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Good point, it could take much longer to catch people up on the work that already exists, get them into the work flow, and teach them the type of content they intend to make.
I acknowledge that when writing a novel especially its hard to invite someone else in on a project, but programming is at least a little different.
Chances are though that you’re right, that they are deep into the project and it would only slow them down to bring new people into the mess.

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So what exactly is EtoEto supposed to be? I thought it was just a textbook, or is there more to it than that?

It’s supposed to be a sort of interactive textbook-like program. The original concept was to have 3 sections, for beginners, for intermediates, and for advanced, and have SRS built in, community integration with user comments on grammar points etc, where people could ask questions and get help from other users. The advanced section is the only one that seemed super fleshed out in the closed alpha, with a focus on shadowing, and reading. There are a lot of texts that are awesome for advanced users, my personal favorites were folktales spoken in different dialects. I personally think that was very well done, so I’m a bit sad that no new content has been added for a long time (in the alpha at least). Who knows, maybe 2021 will be a year of miracles.

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It doesn’t need to be a lack of inspiration, that’s also not the impression i get from Koichi. Rather, as Koichi said himself, a chosen design may end up not working out as well as you hoped once it’s implemented, and if you have the time and money and care about quality more than a quick buck, you’ll revise your design and then implement it again, which takes time.
Final Fantasy XIV was completely shut down and redesigned, because it was a mess at launch, which the head of the team publicly admitted and apologized for. Then it relaunched a few months later as A Realm Reborn, and it was critically acclaimed and is now loved by many fans.

Other than that, i completely agree with your post, well said (=

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And likewise, I agree with what you said. Perhaps “inspiration” was a poor way of expressing what I meant to say. It was a clumsy attempt to sum up in one word the idea of knowing what the final product should look and work like.

To expand a bit further, I remember Koichi saying something like (and this is from memory; I’m too lazy to go back and look for what he actually said) what they’d been working on ended up being a bit underwhelming in practice (just another online textbook) because they are aiming for a resource that will do for general Japanese learning what WaniKani does for kanji learning. Which to me means using gamification to motivate users to progressively get more and more advanced in a real and measurable way, more effectively than other resources.

So it seemed to me that while Koichi and the team have some good ideas, they aren’t (or weren’t) at the stage where they really knew what the final form would be and it was just a matter of filling in the programming blanks. In other words, more work needed to be done on the blueprint before much construction could begin.

At least, that’s the explanation that makes most sense to me. I’m as impatient as everyone else. And it looks like the project has been in development for at least seven years now, I’m sure with periods where that development is less than active. Also it seems clear at this point since they announced it too early, that Koichi is shy about making any further estimates of ETAs and setting expectations at all.

I’m hopeful that they’ll release it (or at least a beta version) in the next few years, but for now I’m just happy that they haven’t announced that it’s dead.

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I think you pretty much summed it up, the other big thing is that Koichi wanted to change the driving focus from grammar to listening. He wanted to create something that didn’t already exist, a gamified srs system for listening and conversation.
To quote Koichi, " EtoEto would [now] be for speaking and listening, primarily, and the goal would be to get you to spoken Japanese fluency as quickly as possible. Trying to teach reading, speaking, and listening all at once was too much, and no matter what I tried it resulted in a mediocre product and experience. After a lot more research, thinking, and talking to people, I finally came up with a way to make EtoEto audio-based, as well as very unique when compared to other audio-based learning methods out there."

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Maybe Bunpro had a similar effect. Because that’s already WK for grammar, and came out during EtoEto development.

Thanks. I’d forgotten this bit. I hope they’re making progress. It seems like the right approach because teaching grammar is, I believe, little help on the road to fluency, though it can help for other things like passing the JLPT.

Listening and speaking on the other hand are essential skills.

That’s… interesting. So you think you can learn grammar better just by immersion? For example, that 〜ようとおもう means “i think i will…” or that “~かもしれない” means “might/maybe/probably”, or that から as “because” places emphasis on the cause, while ので as because places emphasis on the effect or sentence as a whole?
I agree that the feel for grammar has to be solidified by immersion, and that memorizing a complex grammar point doesn’t mean you can apply it without thinking about it, but i believe the importance of grammar study is often underestimated, and that practice/immersion will be easier if you’ve learned a grammar point by theory (or even SRS) before.

Yes.

Obviously there are different ways to learn a language, and many of them are effective for different people. I am personally a bigger fan of the “comprehensible input” method of learning, and yes, I think that’s the best approach when the goal is fluency.

It is, after all how we learn our native languages. We don’t get grammar lessons as babies, but somehow manage to speak grammatically. I think this the ideal way to learn any language.

But I’m not criticizing anyone else’s preference. If learning grammar first is what you prefer, then that’s perfectly fine. I’ve certainly studied my share of Japanese grammar, and I even enjoy it if it’s taught well.

I think the reason why some Japanese language learners believe that the only way to understand something like ~かもしれない is by studying the grammar as translated into English (or whatever), is because there are so few resources that actually teach the language organically using comprehensible input. I believe EtoEto is (or will be) an attempt to fill that hole.

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ah, that’s interesting, thanks for the reply. Yeah, i don’t doubt that comprehensible input works, and that it depends on the person, but i wonder how effective/efficient it is.
I think it would certainly take me ages to get even close to what the grammar points i mentioned mean by immersion, without having studied them. But the internalizing, feel for it and nuance will certainly come that way.

So I’m betting on a private alpha being available in 2025.

We’ve already got a private alpha. Did you mean beta?

Of the new one as well? Didn’t know that. A wider private beta then, sure. :stuck_out_tongue:

Seems like it’s in Omega… :stuck_out_tongue:

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Is there even a new one? I’m having serious doubts at this point. The old closed alpha has been abandoned for like 2 years.

If you or anyone is interested in seeing comprehensible input in action, I recommend this video which is quite long (about an hour), but really shows the process of someone getting fluent in a new language (Arabic in this case) within a year using comprehensible input methods.

Note that “fluent” in this case doesn’t mean the same as “perfect” or that one speaks and understands at a native level. It also has nothing to do with literacy. Just that one is able to hold conversations on a variety of subjects with a wide range of people.

I’ll add that it’s a language learner’s curse to never believe ourselves to be fluent in an acquired language because we’ll never speak it as effortlessly or as correctly as the language(s) we learned when we were young.

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