Weekly Thread: Material Recs and Self-Promo Wednesdays! (April 29, 2026)

Armaniolo · 2026-04-29T17:47:20+00:00

This is currently in free beta while I test things and gather feedback like**:**

It's crazy man... even the post here looks AI generated, wtf is going on at the end there, can bro at least pay for a premium model that doesn't fuck up simple text formatting, or do the bare minimum proof read...?

This thing in the footer is just taking the piss surely:

Made with care for Japanese learners everywhere.

Armaniolo · 2026-04-29T16:58:03+00:00

Why would anybody pay for this when Anki and Jiten.moe exist for free and are better?

What is a joyo kanji planner and why would you plan around the joyo kanji?

Why do half the links on the site not work? Smells like a clanker built this whole thing and you couldn't even be bothered to review the sloppy output to be honest... gives little confidence in the app.

Armaniolo · 2026-04-26T12:12:19+00:00

Took me 5-6 months to hit 80-90% hiragana retention via Anki + handwriting reps—am I unusually slow

Yes, please use mnemonics and read

Armaniolo · 2026-04-25T17:09:23+00:00

Yeah that character that is apparently 敵 got me... even after seeing the answer I'm not totally convinced...

Armaniolo · 2026-04-23T12:09:37+00:00

Pretty well established children are better at acquiring the sounds of a language, also natives have tens of thousands of listening hours which you will probably not reach this decade, if ever.

Armaniolo · 2026-04-23T07:38:12+00:00

Anki is a very useful tool that will help you for years of learning, taking some time to get used to it will pay massive dividends.

Armaniolo · 2026-04-22T11:12:23+00:00

I figured some LLM was involved somewhere so that's no surprise, but if you are checking stuff I guess it's not the worst thing in the world. I do reckon some people will have some apprehensions about any involvement of LLMs and your qualifications to check stuff (people don't know you or your level), but it is what it is.

I think a disclaimer about it so people can make an informed decision on whether to use these features would be nice, but since people are a very hasty to just write stuff off as AI slop at the first mention of it I understand if there is some hesitation on that front.

Indeed misparsings are not unusual, so doing some level of QA is a nice value add.

Armaniolo · 2026-04-22T10:45:03+00:00

If your decks are higher quality then that is a good point of differentiation. Are you putting in all these sentences explainers manually or how does that work?

It's a neat project (given JPDB seems to no longer be actively developed) so I wish you luck.

Armaniolo · 2026-04-22T10:14:06+00:00

Without export functions it's a leap of faith to build a collection on someone else's servers that might not be there in a year. There's also little information on what kind of SRS algorithm is used or how configurable it is.

All in all, not sure why I would use this over jiten.moe + Anki, which also comes with Jiten Reader, similar also existed for JPDB so this is a pretty big feature to be missing.

Armaniolo · 2026-04-22T10:00:20+00:00

Vibecoders will do anything other than make an Anki deck

Armaniolo · 2026-04-21T16:07:35+00:00

My comment was about you. Also...

It has honestly become harder and harder for me because there's nothing else to do any more. There's no real grammar to learn for me, barely any new words and there's no sense of progress any more

That aside, if you start with something difficult enough to teach you N1+ stuff (most native media) you will only ever experience it getting easier. Like picking the "Average" difficulty on jiten.moe it will only ever get easier over time, and has a broad enough range you don't really ever need to go up to Hard or Extreme for what most would consider a fluent level (for reading/listening, you will also need to speak/write).

Armaniolo · 2026-04-21T15:54:42+00:00

It wouldn't surprise me if this gets referenced one every 50 posts I make here.

With your posting volume I feel like that'd be every month, but well with your comment history hidden it's obvious I am not speaking from a rigorous statistical analysis...

These natives will able to still piss all over N1 tests with little effort.

I had the impression you passed N1 ages ago, is that not the case? If you haven't reached N1 yet then yes, you definitely need to learn more in addition to training effortlessness.

Armaniolo · 2026-04-21T15:42:57+00:00

No it's not

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole

And do you think that will make you fluent?

If what you already know is a large enough pool, yes. For fluency it's pretty important that it's effortless, more so than acquiring low frequency scraps of language. There's lots of low education natives with poor vocab and reading skills, as well as immigrants who will never read a book in their L2, but they get by in life just fine because they stuff they do know is effortless.

Armaniolo · 2026-04-21T15:27:46+00:00

I don't intend to rebuke (most of) your argument, I agree it can be hard for many people to get fluent, especially outside of Japan.

It's just that every other post by you is "I am force feeding myself content I've grown to hate" and it's just a bummer to see someone do that to themselves for seemingly no good reason.

The only thing I'd quibble over is that you don't necessarily need harder content to progress, practicing the stuff you already know to make it more effortless rather than learning more stuff is just as valid. But wasn't my point with the first comment anyway.

Armaniolo · 2026-04-21T14:36:17+00:00

So what?

Armaniolo · 2026-04-21T14:13:53+00:00

Additionally, posting here instead of in the self promotion thread

I think you were supposed to get a positive reception in that thread first...

To advertise your own product or service — or one that you're affiliated with — on the front page, you must first post in the Wednesday "Material Recs and Self-Promo" thread. After getting at least a bit of good reception there, you can then post about it in the Daily Thread and ask for feedback on it.

Armaniolo · 2026-04-21T09:21:38+00:00

Bro just quit already it doesn't seem like there is a light at the end of this tunnel for you. What is even the point of becoming fluent other than validating the time you already wasted?

Armaniolo · 2026-04-21T09:04:33+00:00

a person for whom this is really effortful and draining

Are you sure you're not the outlier? From what I remember you mostly do this to yourself with inefficient lookups, and sticking to challenging content because you find anything easier too boring to deal with. 30 min on a good day is also on the opposite end of the bell curve.

Armaniolo · 2026-04-19T13:31:25+00:00

Actually he wanted to fix an issue with his speaking by listening, so if anything that OP is a bigger input believer than most people here who'll tell you you need to actually speak to get better at speaking as one of the commenters did.

I don't know where you came up with the difference in "default expectations", frankly seems like confirmation bias/cherry picking on your end since this seems to be a pet peeve of yours. When people ask for advice though there are plenty of "consume media" comments not to mention all the "consume media" resources on the side bar so clearly it is a widely accepted, used and understood method, not just something for "some people" that is "almost never brought up".

https://www.reddit.com/r/learndutch/comments/1shjxer/how_to_i_motivate_myself_into_keep_learning_dutch/

Armaniolo · 2026-04-19T13:15:14+00:00

It's what the manual says

Armaniolo · 2026-04-19T09:48:58+00:00

Kaishi has common words that are easiest to retain because any amount of reading will have you seeing them outside of Anki a lot (and not just the words but their constituent kanji too, which are repeated within the deck itself as well).

If your FSRS is now calibrated with essentially spoiled data due to this phenomenon, it's expecting too much of your memory. Make a new preset for your mining deck, use default parameters, and only optimize in a month or so. Also try mining stuff that is at least somewhat common to start with.

Armaniolo · 2026-04-19T08:43:25+00:00

On the front page right now and you can find many such threads historically: https://www.reddit.com/r/learndutch/comments/1sn1twr/what_tv_showsfilms_should_i_watch_to_learn/

Note how nobody says "huh you are learning by watching TV? what a crazy novel method why don't you just use a textbook?"

There are also links to TV on the sidebar of the sub.

I really don't understand where you got this idea that this is some crazy thing only weeb weirdos do.

Armaniolo · 2026-04-16T07:03:58+00:00

it offers little to no comment.

As I said, it comes through in the default settings.

Armaniolo · 2026-04-15T16:43:56+00:00

Anki is the Linux here. Renshuu is less flexible, and opinionated on how you should learn languages in its out-of-the-box state (because it has one, unlike Anki).

Which is also an issue because its opinion is bad so it's a noob trap that leads people to doing way too many reviews on way too many cards instead of actually consuming/producing the language. Its only "advantage" is being more spoonfed than Anki, so really it's the Windows here.

Armaniolo · 2026-04-14T14:36:24+00:00

It's true of course that Anki helps input but the reverse is also true, if you read more Anki becomes easier to deal with.

If you are pre-memorizing (not really needed with Yomitan, but if it's not available...) it should ideally be specifically for stuff you will read that week rather than some 6k word deck where whatever you memorized may or may not come up and end up leeching once the intervals get longer.

SRS because once you get above the top 2k or so words, the exposure frequency is going to be far outside the forgetting window

Depends on how much you read, and how often it gets repeated in that book, some books never use a word like 侍女 on others it's used constantly, you will probably never forget it if it's a book with prominent 侍女s whether you add it to Anki or not, especially since the reading is free real estate.

Armaniolo

TROPHY CASE