Hello, I made my way over from HN since this site looks to be right up my alley (I'm just starting to self-study Japanese). The interface is pretty confusing if you're not going precisely by the book but a lot of that could be that I just haven't gotten used to things.

I've run into one frustrating thing that seems to be a bug, though. For some words I added to my custom list, when adding I chose a different reading/definition than the default one. When I'm practicing my list, however, it doesn't use the reading I chose.

A few examples are 行, for which I see "ぎょう line; row" and which I had changed to "い.く going"

#2: 知, which is "ち intellect; wisdom" rather than "し.る know; wisdom"

and the most confusing:
#3: 明, which comes up as "あきら Akira (male given name)" rather than "あか.るい bright; light"

Hi JMStewy, welcome!

Scott's the guy doing Japanese and he's at a wedding this weekend, but when he gets back, he can figure out what's going haywire with this. (Unless he's so addicted to his work that he's checking the forum from a wedding--let us hope not.) Japanese is a new addition, so there are still a lot of kinks; that's why it'll be free for a few months yet.

We're continually redesigning the vocab list, custom list editor, and practice interfaces, and would love any feedback you have as to exactly which bits confused you.

I'm having trouble duplicating these results.

Let's see, for 行, I couldn't find it on the list you made, but in order to add the word you're looking for you would have had to put in 行く, rather than just 行. What did you put in?

Same for #2, you'd need to put in 知る rather than just 知. I edited your list and put in 知る after 知. Adding from the list now should get you the one you want.

For #3, this also confuses me the most. I couldn't find 明 by itself on the list but there was a 明るい entry. How exactly did you try to add '明'? Was it with the queue or from the list page, selecting a row and clicking the 'Add to queue' button?

By the way, in the prompt interface, it will give you first the word definition, and then the character general component definition below once you've finished or seen the written character. So you should see both.

What browser are you using, by the way?

I'm using Firefox 3.5.3

To be more specific about the process I'm using:
I'm using an outside program (NJStar) to produce a list of new characters I wish to learn. In this case I might have made the list:
行
知
明

While editing my custom list, I paste the above into the "Add Words to List" box and click "Validate." For each of them appears a drop-down box that lets me select a set of readings and definitions.

For most characters I add, the default one is fine, but for these three I wanted to use the other available reading. Specific example: the reading that is selected by default for 明 is "あきら - Akira (male given name)". I changed this to the other option, which has many given readings and the definition "bright; light".

The problem comes in when I set my custom list as a cram list and then go to the "cram" option under "practice". When it gets to 明, the reading and definition presented to me are "あきら - Akira (male given name)".

In an effort to work around this, I edited my list and removed the entry for 明, adding 明るい instead, which was why you saw that in my list. Despite this change, I am still prompted with "あきら - Akira (male given name)" when testing myself on actually remembering and drawing the kanji. So it looks to me like that doesn't solve the problem.

Having only the default reading/definition presented isn't too much of a problem most of the time, as with 知, for example, "intellect; wisdom" rather than "know; wisdom" is close enough to trigger memory. 明 and 行 are the only two of mine that were so far off that I couldn't recognize them, which is why I brought this up.



Now, with that rather lengthy explanation out of the way, the disappearance of 行 from my list is more troublesome than this definition issue. I did have 行 on my list, and checking now I don't see it either. In addition, I know other characters are missing since the first characters I ever added were numbers (一二三四五...) and they are absent as well. Do you have any idea what might have happened to them? If it helps to diagnose this, I'm pretty sure all the missing characters are among the first I put on the list - maybe their age had something to do with it?

I've spent a little while trying to remember what was on my list, and here are the characters that I know used to be on it that are now missing:
半
曜
日
月
行
五
六
七
八
九
十
中
出
山
来

There could of course be others. It's possible I removed 一,二,三 myself, but the rest I can't account for. I think these are all characters I added early on, and especially the fact that 四 is still on the list is what makes me suspect that this is age-related. In adding the numbers I'm pretty sure I forgot 四 until some time later than the rest.

I hope this isn't something dumb like me having somehow removed them by accident...

Hmm, well I think the main problem is the cram lists unfortunately have no way to store your drop down choice! I originally designed it nice and simply for Chinese, but using the same simple system just doesn't cut it for Japanese. So when you study with cram mode, for now at least, you're stuck with the default choices. I'll make a note of that for Japanese users so they know; it's on my list of things to do to figure out how to build a new system that is similarly simple but covers all the bases in Japanese.

The fact that when trying to practice 明るい you get 明 instead is a bug though. It should be stripping out all invalid characters, but the code ends up stripping out all kana, which for Japanese should be retained as valid characters. I'll fix that now and should have the fix uploaded by the end of the day. Sorry about that!

As for the mysterious disappearing characters... I'm not sure what's happening with those. The custom list builder is a pretty complex system though so I imagine it could very well be a bug. When you clicked the process button to turn the list into a usable list, do you know if the characters were in there then and disappeared later, or weren't part of the list from the get go?

I'm sure the missing characters were successfully added to the list, since they used to show up in some of my cram mode sessions. I've been keeping an eye on my list and no further characters have disappeared, so perhaps it was a one-time thing. For now I'll re-add those characters and store a parallel list locally to see if it happens again.

Thanks for looking into the issue with the cram list. In investigating a bit now I see that clicking on the cram list itself changes it to a text box! That makes it clear that the cram list isn't actually accessing my custom list, which is what I thought was happening (and why I thought it was a bug).

I have a bunch of other questions/suggestions, is it ok to just keep going in this thread? For example:

Q: Is it possible to remove words from the "practice mode" list somewhere? My friend was trying out some characters from the Genki lists when I showed him the site, but now it thinks I know them. This is one of the reasons I still use cram mode almost exclusively.

Q: I don't quite "get" the queue feature, even after reading the help section. I don't really see how it's different from a custom list. Presumably since I only use my single custom list, I haven't run into whatever problem it's trying to solve?

S: A dot or some kind of mark showing where to start drawing a character would be really nice. I know the system is forgiving of where the first stroke is located but I still want to start the character close to its actual location in the box.

S: The number of clicks it takes to navigate from the Cram List page to actually making a cram list is high, unless there's a simpler way than my path:
"vocabulary list" hyperlink -> "custom list" button -> "your lists" tab -> list name -> advanced tab -> make a cram list
By contrast, from there it takes just one click to do the reverse ("make a cram list" button).
This is actually probably a really hard problem to solve without substantially changing something in the interface, now that I think about it. Just some food for thought I guess.

S: Make the "help" link at the bottom of the site a tab at the top alongside "progress," "vocabulary," "account." I didn't know it existed until reading about it in the forum.

And just an FYI, the scratch pad is a really awesome feature, especially for trying out the site for the first time. The only thing that could make it better is if once you get it better integrated with the site it were possible to save the list of characters you've entered. Saving as a cram list or something would be great.

Alright, let me know if you see it again, and I'll try and fix it. I'll also be on the lookout for any possible ways those words could have disappeared.

Hmm, maybe we can add some sort of indication that you can click to edit a list. You can do the same thing with the cell of the table that contains the name of the cram list.

For removing words from practice, you can remove them from study but your progress is stored on the site so if you add it back from somewhere else, it shows up again. There's no direct way to tell the system 'reset these words to no knowledge of'. To remove a word, though, you just select it from the list, then click the delete button. Perhaps a button could be added to allow users to reset their progress on a given word. Is that what you need?

It's too bad you're using cram mode. Practice mode is much better since it keeps track of what words you know over the long term. If you use it, and get wrong those words that it thinks you know, they'll be scheduled at a shorter interval.

The point of the queue is to have a really simple way to add words to your studies, no hassle. If you see a word you want to learn, you drop it into your queue, and gradually it will be added to your studies (when you're on the practice page). Without it, you would have to create a list and then activate the list and so on. The mechanism for adding words to the queue and to a custom list are the same, but the aims are different. Custom lists are for words you want to have organized and shareable. The queue is for words you just want to learn without going through the hassle of grouping it with other words in some organized fashion.

Hmm, I think for me a dot would be TMI, at least in trying to test myself. If I know where to start then I'm not actively recalling as much as I could. And I think the lines that criss cross the canvas are there exactly for the purpose you describe.

Yeah, interface is king. There are a couple possibilities, though. One: I could build some sort of list selection widget that would allow you to search for, find, and select any list you have access to, so that you wouldn't have to leave the cram list page to make a cram list from an existing list. This is probably something we'll build, but not in the near future. Another possibility is to make it easier for users to access lists that are currently active, so they don't have to descend the whole tree just to get to the list pages they often go to. We had something like that before the list page reorganization. Will have to think about how we could rework that into the site somewhere... perhaps the home page? Have to think about it for a while before a decision can be made, though.

We do need to make the help section more visible. One way I'm thinking of doing this actually is putting links to specific sections throughout the site. For example, 'learn more' links under certain settings options, sort of like Google does in Gmail settings.

As for making the actual link to the help section more accessible, the top of the page is prime real estate, but yeah we need to figure out a way to make it more prominent. We'll be conferring to figure out a way to get the help link back up there.

Thanks for your thoughts and suggestions!

Re: cram mode
I completely understand the difference between cram mode and practice mode and the benefits of SRS. I think that my needs are perhaps a bit unusual as a beginner, which is why I like cram mode more. The scenario in your about page ([...] desk drawer crammed with hundreds of cards or lists. Somewhere in that unorganized pile, characters are being forgotten...) is really compelling, but I'm a near-total beginner. I've just learned my first 80 (nontrivial) kanji since last week. I'm learning not only the shape of each kanji, but what pieces get reused from one kanji to another, intuitions for stroke order, and the general aesthetic sense of the characters. I can well imagine that within my next few hundred kanji, my needs will naturally shift to fit the style of practice mode, but I'm just not there yet.

At the same time, the scratch pad type interface and cram mode are very useful to me. This interface is way nicer than making flashcards, and the calligraphic style of the characters helps me a lot in learning kanji aesthetics.

This ties in to my confusion about the queue, I think. The way I'm using my custom list now is basically how someone with a nontrivial vocabulary would use the queue. I'm not using my list to structure my vocab in any way, I'm just using it as a dumping ground for the set of characters I want to practice. But since I don't readily see that the queue is linked to cram mode, I have little choice but to use a list. The queue was difficult to figure out the purpose of because I kept trying to add to it words that were already on my list, just to see what it did, which of course got me nowhere :).

Re: dot
I can see your point about TMI. Being able to recall the character from a blank slate is certainly a different task than being given even that hint.

Re: removing words from practice
I still don't see how to do this. When I click on "Vocabulary" and then on "Viewer" I can see the list of characters I will be tested on, but I cannot select or delete the ones I want to get rid of. The words I need to remove are not on my custom list, but they're still in the viewer and they still come up whenever I click on "Practice." If I click on Practice right now, the first word that comes up is のる, which it informs me is from Genki 2 Chapter 14.

True, the SRS is most important as you reach a critical mass of kanji. At that point it's invaluable.

Ah, so you want a way to easily dump words into your cramming as a corollary to dumping words into your queue for regular practice? Well for that you should just make a cram list from the cram list page. Click the 'Add New List' above and to the right of the list table. Then just make sure your given words are separated by space or anything really. That way you don't have to go through the arduous process of making a list just to cram a set of characters. Yeah, if you're not using normal practice, the queue doesn't make sense. The cram mode is really designed as an auxiliary tool, so using it on its own could easily cause confusion. The tools in the rest of the site are simply built with practice mode in mind, not cram mode.

Hmm, being able to delete items from the viewer... that's a great idea! I was talking about going to the list and browsing the words/deleting them from there. But we could add the ability for you to delete words from the viewer. That shouldn't actually be that difficult even. I'm adding that to my list of things to do...