Duendecat - Sentence looper / reading practice app

Duendecat - Sentence looper / reading practice app - Printable Version

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Duendecat - Sentence looper / reading practice app - Transality - 2014-07-18

Duendecat is a Japanese reading practice web app that I started working on earlier this year. It shows short sentences in Japanese and then reveals the English translation, one at a time. It's also free to use, customisable and has just been updated with a whole load of new features, which include:

- Furigana
- Long / short sentence option
- Pause / skip controls
- Speed control
- English / Japanese interface
- Flashcard option
- Cumulative option: shows sentences that contain combinations of kanji that you've learned in previous levels
- Add your own sentences and categories
- Review sentences using spaced repetition
- It's free! Smile

The app contains tens of thousands of sentences from the updated (cleaned up) version of the Tanaka corpus, which are grouped into Wanikani levels 1 - 50 (but should be useful for anyone who isn't learning kanji in that order).

http://www.duendecat.com/

Let me know if you have any suggestions / comments! Cool

Duendecat - Sentence looper / reading practice app - Linval - 2014-07-18

What a cool idea. I'm gonna give it a spin. Love the design overall.

Duendecat - Sentence looper / reading practice app - Stansfield123 - 2014-07-18

Is there a way to get the translation, or move on to the next sentence, manually, rather than having to wait for it to show up automatically?

Duendecat - Sentence looper / reading practice app - Linval - 2014-07-18

pressing right arrow on your keypad seems to do the job for that. You can also pause with the space bar.

Duendecat - Sentence looper / reading practice app - Kuzunoha13 - 2014-07-18

Wow..that's really cool. Super impressed.

Duendecat - Sentence looper / reading practice app - Transality - 2014-07-18

Thanks! And yes, the keyboard controls are:

Spacebar : Pause
Right arrow : Skip sentence
Top arrow : Copy sentence to list manager*
Bottom arrow : Don't show sentence again*
Left arrow : Open sentence manager*
R key : Report sentence (if you spot a translation error)*

* if logged in

Duendecat - Sentence looper / reading practice app - Darukeru - 2014-07-18

Wow it looks awesome, I´m still not ready to sentences but I´ll use later, Big Grin

Duendecat - Sentence looper / reading practice app - jasberg - 2014-07-18

looks good. is there an option to decrease the text size? i find the font of the sentences to be too large, even with the page zoomed all the way out in firefox.

Duendecat - Sentence looper / reading practice app - Transality - 2014-07-18

jasberg Wrote:looks good. is there an option to decrease the text size? i find the font of the sentences to be too large, even with the page zoomed all the way out in firefox.

Hi Jasberg. Yes, there is: on the 'Levels' panel (right side of the screen) there is a stopwatch symbol near the top; click on that and some more sliders appear. Text size is the second slider down.

Duendecat - Sentence looper / reading practice app - aldebrn - 2014-07-18

Transality Wrote:the updated (cleaned up) version of the Tanaka corpus

This sounds interesting, could you tell us more about this? Is the cleaned-up corpus cleaned up beyond that used by WWWJDIC [1]? Thanks!

[1] http://www.edrdg.org/wiki/index.php/Tanaka_Corpus#Downloads

Duendecat - Sentence looper / reading practice app - jasberg - 2014-07-18

Transality Wrote:Hi Jasberg. Yes, there is: on the 'Levels' panel (right side of the screen) there is a stopwatch symbol near the top; click on that and some more sliders appear. Text size is the second slider down.

ah, cool. just from a design standpoint, I'd suggest making the ability to click on the stopwatch a bit more obvious. Also, it would be nice to have the minimal font size even smaller than it currently is at the minimal setting. I like to practice reading smaller type as is typically seen on news sites, where individual strokes are sometimes hard to distinguish. Overall, very nicely designed and a useful tool.

Duendecat - Sentence looper / reading practice app - Transality - 2014-07-19

aldebrn Wrote:
Transality Wrote:the updated (cleaned up) version of the Tanaka corpus
This sounds interesting, could you tell us more about this? Is the cleaned-up corpus cleaned up beyond that used by WWWJDIC [1]? Thanks!

[1] http://www.edrdg.org/wiki/index.php/Tanaka_Corpus#Downloads

Yup, sure. The sentences were originally taken from the Tatoeba Project (tatoeba.org), which is (as far as I'm aware) the most recent version of the Tanaka corpus. Over the past few months I've been removing any sentences that could be thought of as inappropriate, of no use or old fashioned. Otherwise, there have been no additions/changes except for the addition of furigana for all sentences, which has been hand-translated by myself and (in the more difficult cases) by a few native-level friends, and also some of the more old-fashioned names have been replaced with modern ones.

So the goal here is to take the most reliable, modern-sounding sentences from the 2006 version of the Tanaka corpus, leave out the weird bits, and add furigana.

Duendecat - Sentence looper / reading practice app - Transality - 2014-07-21

jasberg Wrote:
Transality Wrote:Hi Jasberg. Yes, there is: on the 'Levels' panel (right side of the screen) there is a stopwatch symbol near the top; click on that and some more sliders appear. Text size is the second slider down.
ah, cool. just from a design standpoint, I'd suggest making the ability to click on the stopwatch a bit more obvious. Also, it would be nice to have the minimal font size even smaller than it currently is at the minimal setting. I like to practice reading smaller type as is typically seen on news sites, where individual strokes are sometimes hard to distinguish. Overall, very nicely designed and a useful tool.

Thanks. I agree about the location of the sliders (generally speaking it's not good practice to hide options inside of other unrelated options.... Smile

). It's likely that these will be moved / made more prominent when the next update rolls out.

Duendecat - Sentence looper / reading practice app - Transality - 2014-08-04

Hi, new update - spaced repetition. Look for a new 'reviews' button in the list manager (options panel) to switch this on.

When a sentence is on screen you can press number key 1 or 2 to choose the interval of time before the sentence reappears for review (selection is subjective, based on how well you were able to read/recall the sentence, similar to RTK).