Hey everyone,

I am currently working on creating a new comprehensive study tool for Japanese. I have a really long list of features I would like to integrate. That's why I would like learn something about other people's study methods. It would be great if you could spend 5-10 Minutes and fill out the following survey. I tried to keep it as short as possible! You don't need to answer every question, you can just leave stuff blank :) It would be really helpful for me. Thanks a lot!

Here is the link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/view...E6MQ#gid=0

If it is against the rules to post this here, I am sorry. Just delete the thread in that case. I've posted this in several forums to get more people to answer, so don't be surprised if you see this somewhere else as well : )

Thanks a lot!

Here's a useful thread for you:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=4943 (User Study Methods)
I don't mind filling out the survey for ya.

Answered it for ya.

Thanks a lot for the responses already, many of them are really detailed and helpful. You guys are great : )

Just a comment: I think it would be fair of you to say whether you are doing this for monetary gains or if the tool will be available for free.

Surreal Wrote:Just a comment: I think it would be fair of you to say whether you are doing this for monetary gains or if the tool will be available for free.

Why?

Maybe people don't want to give the OP their data for free, if the end product is not going to be free. This is reasonable.

taupe Wrote:Maybe people don't want to give the OP their data for free, if the end product is not going to be free. This is reasonable.

That's reasonable to me.

just did it

Done.

ta12121 Wrote:

taupe Wrote:Maybe people don't want to give the OP their data for free, if the end product is not going to be free. This is reasonable.

That's reasonable to me.

If you want better learning tools then telling people who are developing them what you want is the easiest way to get them. Even if you're not willing to pay for the product in question you still benifit because other developers, including those who release there products free of charge, will copy the useful features.

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=7949

some ideas here...

oh, actually this tool already exists: http://ankisrs.net/

I'd already answered the questionnaire when I read it, but IceCream's idea in the thread she linked to sounds great. Please make that.

Thanks for all the feedback. A lot of the ideas from IceCream's thread were actually very high on my priority list. However, dealing with video is always difficult, especially when it comes to official things with copyrights, etc. I'm not quite sure how to handle that yet. I'll be focusing and text and audio for now, with the possibility of adding video capabilities later on.

Quote:Just a comment: I think it would be fair of you to say whether you are doing this for monetary gains or if the tool will be available for free.

It will be free. I am definitely thinking about ways to monetize it, but it will be free and stay free for a very long time. I don't believe in charging for something that's not of *very very* high quality. Make it high quality will take a lot of time, effort, user feedback and possibly money (I'm thinking about asking/hiring native speakers to make audio for user-submitted content for example). I am also thinking of a community-based scheme. Basically, it will always be free for people who contribute (e.g. add new sentences, answer questions, tag vocabulary in sentences, rate content difficulty, etc) but not for people who never contribute. Anyway, that's still far in the future.

From researching the web for business/sites/blogs,etc. I've found that people can make a good amount of money but it comes down to two factors. Traffic and Advertisements. I'm personally still brainstorming/planning but I've got a good idea of what I will be doing. Although I wouldn't say it's much different, I'm still expecting it to pick up once I start(probably take a 1 year to pick up, if one is serious enough).

Surreal Wrote:Just a comment: I think it would be fair of you to say whether you are doing this for monetary gains or if the tool will be available for free.

I don't think asking questions in this form of survey is over the top. If you have itches, voice them and they maybe addressed if your itch is a common one. One could always choose not to respond to a survey request.

In the end, if someone builds a product/tool, they should be compensated fairly for it. For example, if one builds an iOS app for profit, there is alot of work that goes into building a quality app. The first stage of building an app is vetting your ideas to the target market.

brianobush Wrote:

Surreal Wrote:Just a comment: I think it would be fair of you to say whether you are doing this for monetary gains or if the tool will be available for free.

I don't think asking questions in this form of survey is over the top. If you have itches, voice them and they maybe addressed if your itch is a common one. One could always choose not to respond to a survey request.

(also @splatted)

I never said that I think it's wrong for someone planning to make a product that they will sell to do a survey like this, only that the people doing the survey should be informed about what their data will be used for. Regardless of whether it will benefit the answerers either way or not (replatted), they should be made clear on what intents the individual/company doing the survey has. This is because they might not want to support someone trying to make money (for whatever reason), or they might feel cheated afterwards when the end product is not freely available to them. All parties, unless in cases where the surveymaker would be interested in fooling the answerers, benefit from the condidtions being made clear. I was very surprised to see that you had responded negatively to my post, to me this is a basic, standard procedure with these kinds of things. I hope this explains my prior post, if it sounded excessively aggressive or anything I apologize.

ThomasB: Thank you for the straight-forward answer! Good luck.

ThomasB Wrote:Thanks for all the feedback. A lot of the ideas from IceCream's thread were actually very high on my priority list. However, dealing with video is always difficult, especially when it comes to official things with copyrights, etc. I'm not quite sure how to handle that yet. I'll be focusing and text and audio for now, with the possibility of adding video capabilities later on.

Great!!!

For the video part, i'm not sure it would be too difficult to do it legally if you had the funds for starting it, as it would probably come under an internet sort of dvd rental shop license. There's already a Japanese company doing a similar sort of thing for English learners who seem to be doing well, so you could ask them maybe. It's here: http://www.chou-jimaku.com/ and this page shows you what they do: http://www.chou-jimaku.com/contents/

This is something i really wouldn't mind paying for, as it's hard to come by movies with japanese subs outside of Japan, and even if you're in Japan, because of the way DVDs are made, even if you rent them you can't concentrate on lines to study very easily.

Thank you, I will look into it! By looking at the site though it seems like if you want to use a movie you will actually have to buy it and pay the full price for the DVD. Pretty expensive for 2 hours of language study. It would be much better if it was a Netflix-like scheme, but again, I don't know the legal aspects of that.

It has been a while. I've been rather lazy about this but I occasionally spent some evenings and weekends working on a new "study tool". It is still missing a lot of features I had originally planned for but the basic framework is there. Right now I am at a point where want to decide to either 1. Continue working on it or 2. Abandon the project. That's why I am looking for a handful of people who would like to test out the current version and give me some feedback. If any of you is willing to do so please send me a PM and I'll send you the necessary information once it's ready (probably in 1-2 days). Thanks a lot!