Lately I've been developing a reading assistant program that is similar to Rikaichan and Reading Tutor but includes explanations of some grammatical elements (conjugations, auxiliary verbs, functional expressions, etc.) as well. Right now I'm just wondering if the way I'm displaying these explanations is helpful and easy to understand. So I thought that I would ask everyone's opinion here.

I've prepared three different texts with the program:

Beginner Text
Intermediate Text
Advanced Text

Each page has a place at the bottom where you can rate it. Of course, any comments and/or suggestions that anyone has are very welcome!

Thanks

If the page doesn't take too long to load, it can be a good alternative of rikaichan

I logged on just to comment on this. I'm extremely impressed with it. My biggest problem with Rikaichan was the box interfering with browsing things like youtube, which this doesn't have. Its like you're studying everything at once. vocabulary, grammar, sentence patterns in writing (if that makes any sense) I see it as being extremely useful for new people, and people like myself having a hard time reviewing all of tae kim's lessons as well.

Keep it up! I support you

Wow, this is amazing! I really like this program. As I don't use firefox, this could be extremely useful!

I was also thinking it might be a good idea to have a way to look up the kanji, especially is essential to understanding a word or if the kanji is an old obscure one

First I would just like to thank everyone for their ratings and comments, they've been very helpful!

deign Wrote:If the page doesn't take too long to load, it can be a good alternative of rikaichan

Unfortunately the file sizes of the pages are fairly large at the moment, especially for longer texts. I will do some optimization that should make them much more smaller.

Tolerence91 Wrote:I was also thinking it might be a good idea to have a way to look up the kanji, especially is essential to understanding a word or if the kanji is an old obscure one

Thanks for the suggestion. I've been focusing on adding grammar support to the program so I haven't given much thought to supporting kanji look-up. But I do see why it would be useful, I'll just have to think of how I can fit it into the interface.

How is it better/different than yomichan or rikaichan?

sweet stuff

It looks quite promising.

At the moment you seem to have static (hand-coded?) pages. I'd be interested in how it would cope with pasted or imported text. How accurately it will be parsed, the parts of speech detected and the links to definitions, Tae Kims Grammar and Wikipedia etc. auto-generated.

In your definitions you refer to plain polite form. (which I think of as non-past polite form). Usually I see ~masu form called "polite" and dictionary form called "plain". So At first I wasn't quite sure what you meant by "plain polite"

Graphically it looks fine. Although I find the thin underlines a little bit distracting. Maybe it might be better as a hover turning on the thin line. At the moment the hover turns it off.


I look forward to your program's development.

jettyke Wrote:How is it better/different than yomichan or rikaichan?

The main difference from rikaichan is that this program provides more explanations of grammar (specifically auxiliary verbs and functional expressions). It also automatically identifies the words in the text for you, rather than just finding the longest matching word nearest your cursor.

belton Wrote:At the moment you seem to have static (hand-coded?) pages. I'd be interested in how it would cope with pasted or imported text. How accurately it will be parsed, the parts of speech detected and the links to definitions, Tae Kims Grammar and Wikipedia etc. auto-generated.

Actually these pages are being generated automatically. The only parts currently added manually are the explanations and Wikipedia links for the proper nouns (although I hope to eventually do this automatically as well). I'm just showing these three sample pages at the moment because I wanted to collect feedback on the way that the program is displaying the grammar explanations.

Of course the program does not support everything yet, especially since automatic identification of some functional expressions can be very difficult.

belton Wrote:In your definitions you refer to plain polite form. (which I think of as non-past polite form). Usually I see ~masu form called "polite" and dictionary form called "plain". So At first I wasn't quite sure what you meant by "plain polite"

Thanks for pointing this out. You are right, non-past would be better.

belton Wrote:Graphically it looks fine. Although I find the thin underlines a little bit distracting. Maybe it might be better as a hover turning on the thin line. At the moment the hover turns it off.

I originally thought to display the underlines so that people could easily see which parts of the text had explanations, but maybe it would be good to have a couple different styles to choose from.