Powerlevel, a Japanese study tool for gamers and geeks(beta)

[deirh_497742]

Fellow Japanese students,
I'd like to mention my application for training Japanese words, Powerlevel, and humbly request your help in testing it. So far I've developed and used it for myself so I could travel to Japan and now I finally hope it may prove helpful to others as well. I'm giving it for free and looking for feedback on how to improve it.

At its core, my app is a spaced-repetition vocabulary drill but it is unlike Anki (which I guess everyone uses) - Powerlevel expects you to actually type in the answers and grades you for the speed and correctness with which you do it (rather than asking you to grade yourself), planning all the successive exams for you based on your previous performance. So it's designed to be more like a game (with stats and quests) and less like arduous drilling. But you can also use Powerlevel for research: there is an integrated dictionary (edict), example sentence database (breen) and kanji explanations (kanjidict) at your disposal, and you can practice drawing hiragana and kanji by hand. You should be able to dissect every word you come into contact with easily and decide whether you want to learn it or just translate it for now. And if you're really serious, there is a vast example sentence database that can help you to figure out the correct usage of almost every common word. This is how it works and looks like.

Powerlevel should be grasping your word knowledge fairly quickly without you having to tell it so and will bother you only with words you are most likely to be forgetting. My use-case was mainly watching anime/J-drama, translating words that stood out and every now and then, adding a few of those that seemed interesting to my vocabulary/study list. Before long, you should also have a nice and personal collection of those you actually care about, just as I did. But public JLPT vocabulary lists are included as well for a quick-start into a more 'official' style of learning. Whatever you put in, Powerlevel will make sure you remember it or die trying.

Here you can check out the entire interface and decide whether you want to try it out . It installs and runs from the web, no strings attached, with no advertisements and at no cost.

The goal of my tool is to be more entertaining than traditional flash card approach. Let me know if it achieves that or not and what do you think about this style of learning, compared to what you know and used. Really, any kind of feedback, be it good or bad, is appreciated. It's going to be a free app and I'll gladly implement new ideas that most people deem conductive. Especially the JLPT lists are not yet suitably refined - they need more synonyms and commenting out prepositions/particles so it's easier to figure out an answer - I'll be happy for any help in this regard (so far processed most of N5, long road ahead).
~ Deirh

[mattiapavinati8647]

Hello Deirh-さん
I've just read the introduction, and i'm downloading the app right away!
I'll give it a few days to trst it, and i'll let you know what i think about it ^^
but anyway, your effort in making such an application is just remarkable!
がんばってねください。

真修

[deirh_497742]

Appreciate it! 　試してくれて、ありがとうございます！

[mattiapavinati8647]

now that i've given it some time, i can tell you few more things.
I really like the way it's structured, but many things are still unclear for me, like "how do you master a specific word"?, how often do you need to train? what do you mean by "expired" in the vocabulary section.
Not sure about that, but could you also use that app to teach some grammar? (just wondering)
Anyway, i really like that application, and as a fellow developer, i really thank you for your work!
どもうありがとうございます。

[deirh]

Thanks for your time testing it, this is some great feedback!

Let me try to answer all I can first:
1) "How do you master a specific word" - Powerlevel uses a custom timed-repetition algorithm, one I tried to hone on myself during my years of study and will continue to develop as other feedback comes in. It composes of four recognized exam 'directions' - from Japanese to English, from English to Japanese, reading the word's kanji and being able to write the word's kanji. Internally, each of these directions maintains a separate memory of all your previous performance and plans its next repetition according to it. So to truly "master" a word, you need to do really good in all four aspects as the word's presented "knowledge" is a sum of all four (it can be seen in detail if you click the knowledge bar during an exam). I'll be happy to provide more details about the algorithm but as that would be of interest only to other programmers, we'd best continue elsewhere

2) "How often do you need to train" - That entirely depends on how good you're doing with each of your words. The amount of knowledge you gain depends also on speed of your answers and from that, the time to next exam/repetition is computed. The better you do and the more knowledge you attain, the less often you will need to train such word and can shift your attention to others sooner. But although my algorithm tries its best to guess the exact time when you might start to forget the word, it's surely not going to be perfect for everyone so I will also add an option allowing you to specify a sterner or a more relaxed approach to evaluating when should your next exam be. But as a rule of thumb, Powerlevel sees no point in trying to drill a specific word over and over in a course of a singular day as it's very likely its student would forget it a few more days later anyway if the repetitions were not evenly distributed in time.

3) Good point about the 'expired' word, it's misleading. I've renamed it now to 'queued' (maybe there is a better word still, 'pending'?) and added a popup that explains what it really stands for and how it is computed....but it's still work in progress, I'll add more information about the computation directly into the application in the next few days, stay tuned But if you now restart the app twice (which triggers update detection), you can already see the first steps if interested.

4) No direct support for teaching grammar right now but you can review a range of grammar concepts through searching in 'Example Sentences' for a word that plays a central role in such a concept. I use it a lot when trying to write something in Japanese and finding out I'm really unsure whether I'm using correct grammar or not - so I search for similar sentences (you can specify multiple words) and try to figure out the best practices from that. Hopefully it may come useful to you as well.

Anyway, thanks for your thoughts so far and if you have any further questions, I'll be happy to provide further answers.

[ofeliadgrd]

みなさん、
コメントをありがとうございます！

Hi everyone!
Thank you for your comments.

If you have any questions, while studying each lesson, please feel free to leave a comment, we will be glad to help you!

Thank you very much,
Ofelia
Team JapanesePod101.com

[deirh]

Next exam time popup updated, it's now possible to see how Powerlevel computes your next exam time.
Another geek-friendly feature will be coming soon: details of how word knowledge level is exactly computed (so there will be no need to explain it on forum )

[mattiapavinati8647]

as a fellow programmer (computer engineer) i understand what you mean
but i'm a bit curious now, it's been a week so far, and during trainings, i never had to write down a kanji... the program only asks me to write the hiragana and the meaning of the words (sometimes very close to eachother, so it's easy to cheat).

[deirh]

Once you word's knowledge reaches certain level (10), there should be a new option available in the exam tasks screen: XX more words in kanji you can learn (I probably need to revise this title. Any suggestions that don't have a larger character count?). Starting this task should introduce you to kanji of those words, starting with the simplest ones.
But it's true I haven't tested the kanji introductions lately so there might be a problem with it - let me know in case it doesn't show up (and maybe I should make it sooner than 10?).

By the way, just curious, what do you mean with the meanings being very close to each other and easy to cheat? That it asks the hiragana and then english translations of the same words too close to each other?

[mattiapavinati8647]

Your algoritm is predicting the time for training pretty well (in my opinion) but if you already know a specific kanji, it's a bit hard to get a high "knowledge score"...
Immagine you already know perfectly the kanji 私, after you train some time with it, you'll easily get to know-lvl 6, and then you have to wait 3-4 days for the next training section with that kanji, and it will take a lot of time to bring it over 10...
In my opinion you shouldn't add a +1 knowledge when someone answer the question too late (let's say, over 10 seconds) or when someone do a lot of mistakes typing the word (4 mistakes is already too much), that way you can lower the boundaries for the kanji "drawing", and make sure that people who reach lvl 8 in a particular word, know it pretty well ^^
About beeing able to cheat... not sure if it's actually cheating, but sometimes the program asks me to type translation of a word (where i can read the hiragana) and then it asks me the hiragana as soon as i finish this exercice. Maybe adding a minimum time span between exercices of the same word would help, even if you test different things on the same word

[deirh]

Good idea there, I'll try lowering the knowledge gain if Powerlevel sees you to be struggling with the word (<geek>the actual knowledge composes of rank plus combo of successive correct answers. Currently you get +0/+1 to +2/+1 depending on your speed and mistakes made. Next update will have -1/+1 if you're struggling and let's try that.</geek>) and see if I can balance it the other way as well so the kanji is offered sooner if you're doing exceptionally good (would like to keep 'NiceNumbers' like 10 as boundaries but we'll see ).

I see your point about 'cheating'. This can happen when the word is relatively new and you have always succeeded in translating both directions so they always have equal knowledge when replanning. Good point and I'm wondering how to solve this. The easy and obvious solution would be either add some randomness when planning next exam or to simply avoid doing the other direction of the same word too close after the first. I actually had it like this some time before but then found out it helps, at least for me, to ask about both directions together when learning a completely new word (both to either learn it faster or to faster realize you already know it quite well and stop bothering you about it). So I guess I'll try to keep this only for relatively low-knowledge words and force to spread it apart once the interval between exams grows longer (so Powerlevel can actually discover if you're having difficulties with the second direction).

Thanks for the great, in-depth ideas so far and keep them coming! Should have an update ready with these changes soon and you're more than welcome to comment on it

[mattiapavinati8647]

just saw the changes.... so far so good... but... i have a problem, in my vocabulary i have 3 entry with the same kanji..
日 that is にち, か, ひ depending on the meaning... if you just hide the translation, i don't know what the program wants to know

[mattiapavinati8647]

i also have to say that training time is quite messed up atm... i have words scheduled for 8-10 days ahead, but i get asked all of them during my training... like every single word

[deirh]

Thanks, will check what's up with the training.

As for the same kanji / different meanings - good catch! Since Powerlevel cannot show you the translations in this exam (it would be too tempting to just translate the word instead of reading kanji), how about this solution: if you type in another reading than is currently expected, you only get warned that this is also a possible reading of this kanji but that you should try to recall another one to pass this. Or, alternately, it can ask you about all of the possible readings each time (but this will be a lot harder to implement correctly as it would break the current system). In any case, I think this situation is going to be fairly rare outside the simplest kanji like the 日 (or have you encountered another? If you can show me a few more examples, we can better decide how to deal with this. Let me know if you have any other ideas.)

[deirh]

i also have to say that training time is quite messed up atm... i have words scheduled for 8-10 days ahead, but i get asked all of them during my training... like every single word

You are probably doing kanji reading training here, right? If so, there is indeed a discrepancy here: the next exam schedule times currently show only the schedule for word translations, not kanji reading and writing. This is a relic from the past design and it should be now easy to show the earliest review of all the directions. I'll get right to it!