You can now import your burned kanji from WaniKani by providing an API token.
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Hello, the website looks promising, and adding kanjis seems to work but does it do anything yet? I mean what is the point of adding kanjis? Someone mentioned look up on click but that doesnāt work for me? (either on Firefox or Chrome)
On a related note, a page describing the features of the site would be nice.
Also, a rather annoying thing now is that whatever I am reading does not get saved, so I have to search the book in the list again every time.
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Hello and thank you for supporting Yomi.ai!
Adding kanji manually and importing your burned WaniKani kanji allows for you to make quicker decisions on what you may want to read. This is most visible in an authorās page where you can see on a glance what texts have what amount of (un)known kanji and kanji compounds.
We havenāt released the lookup function yet. We are still havenāt built consensus on the UI yet and none of our current solutions seem good enough just yet. But the feature will come sooner than later.
So will a bookmark feature that letās you save where you left off, or just passages that you want to keep around for reference.
You are also right in that a page describing the features would be good - especially since we think its absence is contributing to having our numbers of signups lower than projected. Then again, features are being added and improved quickly. So far, we had 57 deploys for the front-end and a few dozen on the back-end as well in the last two weeks.
Our next planning meeting is tomorrow, and I will make sure to take all of our user feedback and try to pin-point which of our planned features need prioritized attention now.
Thanks again!
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Thanks for the answer. Iām looking forward to see how things turn out! Keep up the good work.
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Looks good.
But Iām not sure it worth money, while there is Japanese.io.
The only one killer-feature is āRecommendations for texts based on your known kanji.ā, but manā¦ Iām not sure. Am I wrong and missed smth important?
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You can also get recommendations based on your known vocab on floflo.moe (but primarily for books you have to pay for, so itās not quite the same I suppose?)
Thank you for your feedback.
I can only talk for myself here, but I find the comparison to a tool that has been around for three years - while we launched not even three weeks ago - to a certain extent motivating. Whether it is worth money to you or anybody, that is not something that I can answer. As you have looked through the information on our website, you surely noticed that you do not have to pay money to get some basic functionality and you are invited to pledge what you want (with a minimum of one dollar). For that, you get access to a service with (at this point) daily new features and access to the team who wants to create the undisputed number one resource for Japanese-learners and their reading needs. There are many good projects and tools that were created by combining two core features of two products and combined into one. And thatās fine. Many good tools came out of it. We donāt define us through features; we define Yomi.ai by our love for the language and our commitment to sharing the joy of reading Japanese by enabling learners to explore, comprehend and learn.
We just pushed a change to the front-end that has progress indicators for the text youāre reading. If you have a chance, could you provide some feedback?
I had a quick poke around:
- I like that it only shows how far you are, and how long is left in the section.
- It would be nice if you could see how far the bar is supposed to extend.
- I might be alone in this, but I think itās good to indicate how many parts/paragraphs there are in total, somewhere (even if itās not actually in the progress bar).
- It would be nice if you could quickly skip to particular chapter/part/para without needing to abuse the address bar.
Stuff unrelated to the progress bar:
- Some stories have a load of tiny paragraphs, which makes for a lot of clicking.
- Somewhat related, this was pretty confusing as a first page.
- I mentioned abusing the address bar earlier
ā¦if you put in a part number that doesnāt exist you get this:
You should probably return some kind of error instead. - The āErrorā¦mehā page could do with a proof read, e.g. āThe title oculd not be found.ā, āteam (at) yomi.ai.ā, āin private window moveā (my brain is too spent to read it all).
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Hi reader,
I hope you are doing well. This has been quite a week, hasnāt it? When talking to peers, I notice a shared sentiment that this past month feels like a decade of oneās lifetime. This past week also was quite eventful. Not only did we celebrate earth day (indoors), this Saturday is apparently World Penguin Day. Hereās a photo of me and Gatz, when I visited him and his family in Long Beach what seems now like a decade ago.
Furthermore, World Book Day flew by on Thursday. Books are used to share knowledge, art, and wonder, and are often inspirational and encouraging to pull through.
Osamu Dazai, you might know this great author through some of his works hosted on our site, wrote āeverything passesā in one of his books. We hope to help you get through this pandemic by keeping you engaged with our growing set of readings and keeping our lines of communication open to you.
This week, we focused on many features that require readers to be logged in. Automated bookmarks were a big one. However, the heat also got to our developers. So for a few hours, we had the bookmark link visible for not-logged-in users; which did not make any sense. A few UI fixes, plus the ability to add kanji while reading a text by clicking on them were other noteworthy developments. Weāre happy to serve our readers who also have a WaniKani account by providing an easy way of importing thousands of āburnedā kanji and vocabulary.
Features that are available also for readers without an account include progress indicators in texts and shareable links of specific paragraphs in texts.
We further switched our provider for sending out automated emails, which enables us to onboard new readers more cost-effectively. These savings will allow us to scale other infrastructure easily when needed, so your experience in using Yomi.ai will not be negatively impacted.
Our next planning meeting will be on Monday, the 27th of April at 9 am Pacific Time. Let us know if you want to participate.
Read on!
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I read your post about NS in other thread. Iām also developing a tool for my personal use; but the more I develop, the less time Iāve to learn Japanese ^^ I would rather pay for such service
So far, none of this competing services implemented anything I could code in one day o.O
( reader tools, including Kitsun, LWT reader )
Iāve a visual novel (I know the import feature for your service is upcoming.), it has 30k lines of Japanese script. Since Iām not proficient in Japanese (nor in other language XD), itās mentally taxing to read and enjoy a native material. This is what I do instead, first I parse the book and look for wordsā first appearance in the text. My novel only contains 5k words (run through two different japanese text parser), so Iāve this screen
Itās more manageable, if I have to go through only this word list; the first word is éå½. I managed to lookup the first half of the novel this way and make my personal dictionary (before Iām burned out ); the first half contains 2500 words, 700 words were unknown. Reading takes lots of time, the lookup for unknown vocab takes even longer; if I try to read a book from the first page to the last page.
The idea is, once Iāve done with wordlist, I can export it to any program. ( I connected this to Anki in my case, so I didnāt have to invent any new storage system. : P ) If Iāve time, I can create mp3 clips, repeat these clips in Gradint (shadowing tool). All I need a sane reader tool, and other programs can handle the rest, I can create my personal course without paying anything (besides the readerās fee).
Once Iām done with my repetitions, reading a novel second time is much easier, since I know most of the vocab already. But without prior knowledge, the current reading tools are not helpful (for me).
I wrote this, because you mentioned āglaring mistakesā in the other thread. Sometimes itās difficult to figure it out, if Iām doing it wrong, or these tools are not saving time after all.
I donāt know Yomi well, but I wanted to share my frustration with other reading tools with someone, who is developing the next ānextā service.
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Thank you very much for laying out your approach and your insightful post overall.
Would it be helpful for you to be presented with a handful of unknown words with their Japanese definitions and concise example sentences, before reading them in the text? For any word that you donāt know yet while reading, would it be helpful to have a definition appear when clicking on the word and also how it fits grammatically in the sentence? How important is audio for you? May I ask what you use for mp3 creation - and how satisfied are you with the result?
I hope weāll be able to lessen some of that frustration soon.
Hi reader,
I hope you are doing well.
We just wanted to give you a quick update on what we have been working on this week and what our rough plan is for the next week and the month at large.
Earlier this week, we implemented the change / forgot password functionality.
We also started reaching out to our network to help us with assessing reading comprehension by coming up with (optional) quizzes for the texts. Speaking about texts. We are preparing to switch our data and data delivery model for the readings and author data. We wrote our author data to the new database yesterday. We put some footage of that event on Twitter.
So whatās next? Throughout the month of May, you may see a lot more texts to choose from. While we increase the available number of readings, you will also see speed improvements particularly on any authorās page and their available readings. We do not have a timeline of when quizzes will become available yet, but we are optimistic that we will make good progress over the next week towards that. At this development speed, it looks like we will not be waiting until the end of June to switch to the subscription model. All current supporters will be able to enjoy all features until the end of June and will have discounts on the regular subscription price afterwards, if they choose to continue to support us. More on that at a later date.
Our next planning meeting will be on Monday, May 4th at 9 am Pacific Time. Let us know if you want to participate via Zoom.
Read on!
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I donāt mean to spam this thread, but thereās an important update.
We added over 5,000 new readings.
We replaced our previous authors page with a readings page that has all 5,651 texts listed (searchable).
I felt this was a big enough change to announce this here already. It also gives the people, who maybe are on the fence of signing up as a supporter, an indicator of how quickly we are moving along. Because I previously stated that we will move to a subscription-based model by the end of June, I want to make clear again that this will be most likely happening much sooner. Supporters will still be able to use all the features until July 1st and then receive rewards based on their contribution and time of sign-up.
Hi reader,
I hope you are doing well.
Another week zoomed by. We promised last week that you would see a lot more titles to choose from throughout this month and indeed, we increased our offering to 5,651 readings. That also came with adding a lot more authors, so we switched out the authors-page with a readings-page.
While not without issues, we consider it to be an important step to ease the discovery of great content.
In a week from today, we will also have a meeting to get us closer to offering the quizzes for readings. Subscriptions may already be live by that time.
Our next planning meeting will be held on Monday, May 11th at 9 am Pacific Time. Let us know if you want to participate via Google Meet.
Thank you for your continued support.
Read on!
Another week Zoomed by tooā¦
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Exactly. Zoom fatigue is real. Thatās why weāre switching our virtual meetings to Google Meet - at least for Monday. Letās see how it goes.
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Keybase was also Zoomed 
Subscriptions are live.
Start your free 5 day trial with 50% off on your subscription with code wanikani here: Yomi.ai - Read real Japanese. Limited to the first 100 users; redeemable by May 31st.
Previous supporters can continue the site as normal and will receive their own coupons for their discounted subscriptions on July 1st.
Hi reader,
I hope you are doing well.
The biggest change on Yomi.ai over this week has been the transition to the subscription model. All supporters who contributed prior to May 11th can still use all the features for free until July 1st. Based on their contribution, they will receive a discount code via email that same day for further use of the site. New subscribers enjoy a free five-day trial period.
Today, we had a zoom meeting that brought us closer to offering quizzes for the readings. While there is still no clear timeline for when we will offer this reading comprehension assessment tool, it is a feature important for us to make weekly progress towards.
We are also planning to work on the dictionary lookup soon.
Please vote on @Naphthaleneās poll (next post) whether you want J/J, J/E, or both.
Thank you for your continued support.
Read on!
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