I have been learning to make websites with PHP for a bit now. I have been trying to think of a project I could do to help Japanese learners out.

I first thought of a conjugunator (real word?), a website where you type in any form of a verb and it coughs out all conjugated forms of the verb and example sentences for each form. It would take alot of work to do and theres alot of things out there similiar, IE dictionarys so I scrapped that idea.

What im basically asking is: Is there anything you guys want that would make your japanese learning easier? or have you ever thought" *blahblah* would be really cool, i wish it existed" no idea is too stupid for me. Any suggestions, ideas, criticsm are always welcome.

I hope this makes sense, if you have read any of my previous posts you may of seen how bad I am at explaining things.

You can help with the very website you're on: http://rtkwiki.koohii.com/wiki/RevTK_Developers_Hub

This is true and also 1 option, but if anyone wants to see anything else that is not to do with RTK then please say.

Not really something you can do with PHP, but one thing I've always wanted to work on (Programming is a hobby of mine) is an advanced dictionary lookup for Japanese. I often find that I can sort-of kind-of remember a word I heard before and have a general sliver of the semantic meaning of it but can never seem to find it when I search in dictionaries.

The program I had started in Python (but stopped due to Study Abroad) some months ago was a program where you could do something like this:
Lets say you kind of remember a word a in Japanese that starts with ま or maybe it was み. You know its an adjective or possibly an adverbial, and you know it sort of means something like "awesome." So you enter in ま・み as a keyword and say check Adj's and Adv, and specify "awesome." Hit search, and get a lot of results, one which would hopefully be what you were looking for, みごと（見事）.
Another example might be you want all nouns that end in もの (which JWPCe's dictionary lookup can sort of do).

The semantic vicinity lookup feature by itself would be awesome, but it'd be more like a reverse dictionary lookup too, which in general suck. You'd need the right kind of database to attempt it and some nice AI programming skills probably.

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I'll say this though, if you decide to do the conjugation script, spice it up by adding in "ancient japanese" conjugation. My roommate (日本人） showed me the charts they used in high school to figure out what the conjugation for words they were reading in classic lit meant (think Tale of Genji in its original form). Slightly intimidating stuff but quite interesting.

Thanks for the interesting post. Its very possible to make in PHP though it may not be the best language to do it with. Thats 1 big project to do, the main part would be getting all the data into the database which.. seems impossible enless theres companys out there willing to give that information.

What I need most at the moment is to remember the words from KO2001. Explaining them and using them in a text would be helpful. Apart from KO, just texts for lower intermediates with some translations at the side would be cool.

I need readthekanji.com but with custom word lists, audio support, and the ability to export all my information in case I want to go to another site. Might as well throw importing the info as well.

Hmm...The only thing I can think of is some kind of site for practicing Keigo.
I've technically learned it and can understand it, but using it is another story..
It might be an interactive quiz, or a sort of Choose your own adventure type game.
("You are a new employee at X Corp. Navigate the minefield of Keigo in everyday office life or perish!" )
It might be stupid but you said "no idea is too stupid"...
I think it's really nice of you to offer to do something like this for the Japanese learning community.

An awesome idioms database would be great. Something like that could be pretty useful... my dictionary has examples of idiomatic usage for whichever words have it. I was playing ff8 and アゴで使う came up and I figured straight away it was idiomatic and had a decent idea of what it meant but often there's stuff that's idiomatic but not so easy to spot or look up.

mezbup Wrote:An awesome idioms database would be great.

+1
A database of idioms, expressions and proverbs would be awesome. (and 四字熟語 too)

You might find some hidden in these links (more proverbs than idioms maybe). There are other resources for 四字熟語.

This trio is for elementary kids:
Proverbs ことわざの参考書
4 Character 四字熟語の参考書
Idioms 慣用句の参考書

Idiom Dictionary 慣用句辞典

ことわざ学習室

ことわざ辞典

ことわざ◆諺◆百科

ことわざ辞典

Thora Wrote:Idioms 慣用句の参考書

This is awesome. Contains about 650 idioms, rikaichan seems to know about half of them. Definitions all in Japanese.

I really want to make an Anki deck out of this cos it would rock not having to be confused by these when they appear in the wild. I would start right away if Rikaichan could give me good English equivalents for them all. Maybe some don't have equivalents? It's easy enough to copy and paste the Japanese definitions (which would go in aswell of course!) but making the deck with everyone's needs/taste in mind I need English for them too!

Though I am seriously, seriously serious and if anyone else is interested we could put something together in no time at all.

I should of never asked! I want to do all of them. I do like the sound of the idoism one and the keigo one.

Keep them coming people! If I get more interest in a week or so I will put it too a vote on what you people want, I dont want to make somthing that nobody wants!

I tend to think it's better to just learn idioms as they come up. A dictionary is bound to have many you'll never come across. And you don't really want to be peppering your output with awkward idioms. :-) Though it is fun to read through them.

Thora Wrote:I tend to think it's better to just learn idioms as they come up. A dictionary is bound to have many you'll never come across. And you don't really want to be peppering your output with awkward idioms. :-) Though it is fun to read through them.

You're likely to use the ones you've come across I think because you know well what they mean. The rest it's great to understand them when they come up. I think 650 isn't too many (though I'm sure there's more) and is definitely a worthwhile investment once you're at a good level of understanding and want to hash out some of the finer points of the language

Thora Wrote:You might find some hidden in these links (more proverbs than idioms maybe). There are other resources for 四字熟語.

Sweet! Got a new site bookmarked

Codexus Wrote:

mezbup Wrote:An awesome idioms database would be great.

+1
A database of idioms, expressions and proverbs would be awesome. (and 四字熟語 too)

My favorite site for proverbs is the Kotowaza Databank and the Yojijukugo Databank
for yojijukugo. I like both sites because they both list the meaning, English equivalent(s)
synonyms/antonyms and other things.
Those sites, along with the ones Thora posted are goldmines for this kind of thing.

So it seems every suggestion bar Bokusenou reply has been done, this is a shame as I still cant find a project that will be able to help learners, that doesnt already exist.

Babyrat Wrote:So it seems every suggestion bar Bokusenou reply has been done, this is a shame as I still cant find a project that will be able to help learners, that doesnt already exist.

Written output training? By that I mean going by frequency (of hand written notes ) a website that would have example sentences all in Kanji with the target word in Kana and you just have to write out the target word by hand. Scheduling with an SRS. The idea isn't so much for ppl starting out but rather those who've done RTK, gained a good grasp on reading and want to round out the skills of writing to know that they could write at least 80% of anything without having to use a dictionary.

People usually do this themselves with (time consuming) Anki decks but to be honest I've focused hardcore on reading and know there's tonnes of words I can't remember which kanji to use (though the kanji are no problem) and I couldn't be bothered creating a deck to try and train this after all my efforts learning to read. So here a premade resource that's SRS driven and frequency based would be a real bonus.

Edit: ability to add custom words too would be nice.

It's the sort of thing I'd tackle in my 3rd year of learning (currently starting 2nd) once I've eliminated reading and vocab as a problem.