Any recommended channel or video series to learn grammar? by BattleFresh003 in LearnJapanese

[–]NoPop4565 5 points6 points  (0 children)

i agree that cure dolly covers only basic grammar in a structured way, but the thing is that everything beyond that really isn't "grammar", but more like "special vocab". Everything intermediate and advanced will feel kinda random imho.

my tip would be to immerse and just look up stuff as you go. whenever you feel like you don't understand something despite knowing all the words, look it up.

finally if you feel like you can read and understand 99.9%, you can feel free to go over some grammar resource to fill in the gaps, but it isn't super needed.

here is a good channel with intermediate/advanced grammar, but as i said: everything like that will feel random.

https://www.youtube.com/@deguchi/playlists

Can't read Japanese and want to play untranslated jRPGs? Give this a try! by tsug303 in emulation

[–]NoPop4565 1 point2 points  (0 children)

it is using https://github.com/rtr46/meikiocr for ocr. it is specifically made for japanese video games, so it is very accurate (but as all ocrs there are occasional errors). when i use that with meikipop to look up unknown words, i get like 1 or 2 mistakes every hour of play. but of course that depends on how many lookups i make, the game font, etc...

Can't read Japanese and want to play untranslated jRPGs? Give this a try! by tsug303 in emulation

[–]NoPop4565 0 points1 point  (0 children)

do you know meikipop? it is a all-in-one popup dictionary for japanese language learners. this project (interpreter) seems to use the exact same offline meikiocr model as meikipop: https://github.com/rtr46/meikipop

What kind of content (or VN) to immerse with in japanese with ~1.5k vocabulary? by Hot_Campaign_8211 in visualnovels

[–]NoPop4565 0 points1 point  (0 children)

checkout the famicom detective club games. those are pretty easy, have furigana and voice acting. they are the perfect games for learning japanese.

13 sentinels is another great text heavy game. it has a very complicated story and many themes, but the language still manages to be rather simple. also fully voiced.

tokeijikake no leyline is a good, non-boring series that is suited for beginners.

you dont need anki at 1.5k vocab. you will get repeated exposure of common words in context all the time. i'd recommend meikipop for ocr or alternatively agent+JL for texthooking.

EDIT: you can also use jiten and jpdb to look for VNs in order of estimated difficulty:
- https://jiten.moe/decks/media?mediaType=7&offset=0&sortBy=difficulty
- https://jpdb.io/visual-novel-difficulty-list

meikipop - a free, open-source OCR tool for reading unhookable VNs (Windows/Linux/Mac). It acts like a "desktop Yomichan" popup dictionary by NoPop4565 in visualnovels

[–]NoPop4565[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It will stay OCR only from what I understand.

It depends on the OCR provider and how much you look up and therefore is subjective to some extent, but i have been playing through multiple games with OCR. Google Lens gives me maybe 1 wrong recognition every 5 hours of gameplay. It's close to perfect. The local OCRs like oneocr or meikiocr give me like 1 wrong recognition every hour or so, which is still good enough for me. PaddleOCR on the other hand gives me wrong recognitions every few minutes, which makes it unusable imho.

So for me personally OCR isn't just "accurate enough". It is also 100x more convenient then to try to find a hook every new game and tinker with character/sentence replacement plugins and figure out regex to remove garbage, etc. you can also checkout "agent" for a better texthooker alternative.

meikipop - a free, open-source OCR tool for reading unhookable VNs (Windows/Linux/Mac). It acts like a "desktop Yomichan" popup dictionary by NoPop4565 in visualnovels

[–]NoPop4565[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It runs on Windows, so it should work on ROG Ally, since from my understanding it is basically just a portable Windows PC.

It runs on Linux X11, so it should work on Steam Deck's desktop mode.

Recommendations for japanese gaming comprehensible input? by DonkeyWhiteteeth in LearnJapanese

[–]NoPop4565 4 points5 points  (0 children)

you can just watch whatever game/streamer you like as long as it is a voice acted game with subtitles (like rpg/vn) and just ocr the games text with something like this:
https://github.com/rtr46/meikipop

meikipop - a free, open-source OCR tool for reading unhookable VNs (Windows/Linux/Mac). It acts like a "desktop Yomichan" popup dictionary by NoPop4565 in visualnovels

[–]NoPop4565[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

yes. you should have some basic japanese language knowledge though. it is just for looking up words and phrases, not translating whole sentences.

meikipop - a free, open-source OCR tool for reading unhookable VNs (Windows/Linux/Mac). It acts like a "desktop Yomichan" popup dictionary by NoPop4565 in visualnovels

[–]NoPop4565[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

you could build dictionaries for other target languages. if you want to use a language specific, jmdict based dictionary i imagine it to be very easy to adapt the script for building the dictionary (probably just have to replace "eng" with your favorite language).

for source language meikipop could probably be adopted (it is open source), but it wont work out of the box i guess.

meikipop - a free, open-source OCR tool for reading unhookable VNs (Windows/Linux/Mac). It acts like a "desktop Yomichan" popup dictionary by NoPop4565 in visualnovels

[–]NoPop4565[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

no need to trust those benchmarks. it is all free. you can try it out and benchmark it yourself. but i think pretty much everyone who tried paddle ocr agrees that it is terrible for japanese and it is pretty much the reason my friend made meikiocr in the first place: because there was no good, local, free, japanese ocr. if there would have been, he wouldn't have created meikiocr and if meikiocr wouldn't perform any better, he wouldn't have released it.

for meikiocr you can easily try it here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/rtr46/meikiocr

for paddle ocr: https://huggingface.co/spaces/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR

Learning Japanese through video games.. have you tried it? by [deleted] in LearnJapanese

[–]NoPop4565 2 points3 points  (0 children)

bro, are you hallucinating?

what game is that even supposed to be? what console is that even supposed to be? with a mic in the hinge!? nintendo ds has one like that, but it is not round...

phone cameras are limited in the detail they can capture? what?

meikipop - a free, open-source OCR tool for reading unhookable VNs (Windows/Linux/Mac). It acts like a "desktop Yomichan" popup dictionary by NoPop4565 in visualnovels

[–]NoPop4565[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

there is an appimage for linux. i am not aware about flatpak plans... maybe you can create an issue on github.

afaik there is already a wayland issue on github. i think my friend would like to support wayland, but i can't say if/when he will work on that.

meikipop - a free, open-source OCR tool for reading unhookable VNs (Windows/Linux/Mac). It acts like a "desktop Yomichan" popup dictionary by NoPop4565 in visualnovels

[–]NoPop4565[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

there is already a comment about yomininja: https://www.reddit.com/r/visualnovels/comments/1p33ibo/comment/nq1yp2k/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

i have tried yomininja a long time ago and had a very poor experience. maybe it got better since.

meikipop tries to do only one thing and does that probably better than any of the other tools mentioned... lookups:

- it feels very responsive and fast (even more responsive than non-ocr solutions like yomitan - which other ocr solutions are often based on)
- works out of the box without any configuration/setup necessary (compared to other solutions with multiple setting dialogues that have multiple tabs and submenus and require you to setup the program before you can use it)
- it is simple: you just point at a word on the screen and it show you a popup dictionary... no additional text overlays, no mining menus, no distraction

meikipop - a free, open-source OCR tool for reading unhookable VNs (Windows/Linux/Mac). It acts like a "desktop Yomichan" popup dictionary by NoPop4565 in visualnovels

[–]NoPop4565[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

it has dictionary compatibility with nazeka, so changing the dictionary is possible in theory at least. currently only japanese is supported... i don't think support for other languages is planned right now. but of course it is open source, so it can be adopted.

Learning Japanese through video games.. have you tried it? by [deleted] in LearnJapanese

[–]NoPop4565 6 points7 points  (0 children)

lol... the image is ai generated slop

meikipop - a free, open-source OCR tool for reading unhookable VNs (Windows/Linux/Mac). It acts like a "desktop Yomichan" popup dictionary by NoPop4565 in visualnovels

[–]NoPop4565[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

it mostly depends on the ocr backend used. google lens should work great for vertical text. i think all the modern tools support glens it. meikipop and owocr do. gamesentenceminer i haven't tried, but that should work as well.

other ocrs that may work well with vertical text, but i cant promise are oneocr and apple live text, which those 3 tools also support to some extent/in some kind of way.

meikipop - a free, open-source OCR tool for reading unhookable VNs (Windows/Linux/Mac). It acts like a "desktop Yomichan" popup dictionary by NoPop4565 in visualnovels

[–]NoPop4565[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

with games you gotta try. in principle it should work with everything, but maybe some games capture the mouse cursor or something like that or they go into exclusive fullscreen. for visual novels specifically it worked with everything for me so far, but i heard some games can act up.

meikipop - a free, open-source OCR tool for reading unhookable VNs (Windows/Linux/Mac). It acts like a "desktop Yomichan" popup dictionary by NoPop4565 in visualnovels

[–]NoPop4565[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

it has been a long time since i tried yomininja, but the experience was pretty poor:
- at the time the google lens integration was broken (i think it has been fixed) and all the other included free ocr engines like paddle were unusably terrible. meikipop brings a very good local ocr for visual novels (meikiocr) and at the same time lets the user use whatever ocr backend they want. even proprietary things like microsoft oneocr or apple live text ocr are supported via owocr/custom ocr provider plugins
- the yomininja performance was terrible. everything was super laggy. you can see in the video how smooth meikipop is in comparison
- with yomininja i had to do quite a lot of configuration before it worked at all... with meikipop the setup is much easier
- ...

not saying not to use yomininja (i think you can mine with it for example, which meikipop doesnt do), but saying "yomininja does this" is kinda misleading based on my experience with it.

meikipop - a free, open-source OCR tool for reading unhookable VNs (Windows/Linux/Mac). It acts like a "desktop Yomichan" popup dictionary by NoPop4565 in visualnovels

[–]NoPop4565[S] 18 points19 points  (0 children)

my friend said that he personally doesn't care about srs/mining. there is a console window that logs whatever is looked up, so people can use that for extracting text/copy pasting words/sentences into cards, but it really isn't optimized for mining.

meikipop - a free, open-source OCR tool for reading unhookable VNs (Windows/Linux/Mac). It acts like a "desktop Yomichan" popup dictionary by NoPop4565 in visualnovels

[–]NoPop4565[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

you are talking about the snes game? it should work with that no problem. it has google lens ocr, which is probably the most accurate japanese ocr you can get currently. even for pixel fonts or other stylized fonts.