Aww the beta program is full - I’ll have to wait 
It looks good though!
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and just for the third onslaught of stuff, I changed my path from Genki 5 to N4 and it erased my known words.
However, if I switch back to the path, they appear again. Unsure if this is intentional
or not, but maybe something to be aware of if people stick around to go through all of Genki and then move to the JLPT levels. Dont want people having to double up by mistake.
JLPT Lvels
Genki Path
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Yeah, it happens from time to time. There’s a bit of tradeoff here because I can make the LLM smarter and then these kind of problems happen less but it also makes the feedback process about twice longer and a bit more costly. I’m definitely still playing around with it to try to get it to be more accurate. It’s a bit like LLM psychology where I need to coerce the machine into doing what I want - I’m trying to convince it to be forgiving of small errors but still not too forgiving 
By the way, there is an undo feature though it’s a bit hidden. If you click the “Info” button next to とても you can press “Undo” which would lower your mastery level back for the word to make sure you keep practicing the word and not cheat your way out of it 
Yeah, it’s a known issue. The vocabulary items are currently completely separately tracked for genki and JLPT. I do want to consolidate them at some point, but I didn’t have time to get to it yet.
I want to try this so badly 
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Not a super big issue, but a little odd; it corrected 「私」 to 「私」 haha.
)
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Is the beta program actually full? I can’t register or use the app 
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I’d say it’s actually a common issue for LLMs. I used to ask ChatGPT to correct my Japanese sentences and it was common for it to say that my version is good but it would be better to say… [and here it wrote my very same sentence] 
Same unfortunately
Very interesting concept, I can only hope the various issues (like increasing strength for words that weren’t used or such) will be ironed out, because this can no doubt be a very nice tool to try and strengthen my output. Will definitely be testing it and reporting issues I find!
I think so, or at least I couldn’t sign up for beta testing:
one small suggestion! when we reach our daily goal, it would be nice if we got some sort of notification. i ended up doing a bunch of extra sentences, which isn’t a bad thing, but if i just want to hit my goal specifically, i can end up on the website for longer than anticipated!
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Yeah, sorry to everyone signing up now - for now I do not want to have more than 50 beta users, especially while I’m ironing out initial issues. I’ll try to see in the next few days if I can open up to a few more people and report here.
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That’s a great idea! I’ll try to add in general some indication of where you are in your work towards your daily goal in the practice session UI (currently it’s a bit annoying that you can only see it when you go back to the dashboard). I’ll try to fix it this weekend.
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Good job, but a couple of notes:
- I would argue that translation is not output (or reading/listening comprehension). Translation is a whole different skill.
Not all bilingual people make good translators because it’s a learnt skill. So I’d say this is an app to practice translation to Japanese. It’s probably useful to those who want to practice that specific skill.
When I speak a foreign language I don’t think first in my native language and then translate it to the target language, and vice-versa if I’m listening or reading. - And I would strongly advise against using LLM to produce and/or translate sentences, especially if they are not reviewed by humans. Please refer to discussion on AI here for more insights. LLM don’t know what they’re telling you, LLM don’t have the concept of “Japanese”, “English” or what’s correct or not, and they will “lie” to you. They are just statistical models.
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Thank you for the notes.
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I completely agree. I have some ideas for how to try to improve this (e.g., give the user more open ended prompts like “tell me about your day” or “you are at a store trying to buy X, what would you say to the shop attendant”. However, I ended up going with translations for now because that’s way it’s a bit easier for me to control what vocabulary you’ll have to use (I wanted the app to force me to use vocabulary that I’m less familiar with). I’m aware that it’s not a perfect solution (and it becomes even more apparent in high levels like N2-N1 where I’m finding it hard to translate some of these sentences even to my native language).
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Thank you for pointing me to that interesting discussion! I agree that users should be wary of AI answers in general and I try to give proper warnings on the website (maybe I should add more). I think as a quick way to put some extra practice I found this helpful (for myself) and in most cases I found that it does give me helpful advice when I’m making mistakes.
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Thank you for the app !
One minor request : would it be possible to have a counter of how many sentences you’ve done ? Right now, you can choose a goal, but the app lets you practice up to 20 sentences a day, no matter what you choose. That’s fine, but for pacing purpose, just showing how many sentences you’ve done so far would be nice.
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Really hoping that the idea of this app goes on further. I find it a bit odd some people usually advice to learn “how to think in japanese first”, but translating a sentence from english to japanese can also be just as valid to evaluate comprehension. Looking forward for new openings in the beta testing!
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Thank you for the suggestion! There’s a progress bar that shows how many sentences you’re done in the main page, but I just added it to the practice session as well (during feedback). This was also suggested by @koyakoyakoya
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Thank you for adding the progress bar to the review screen !
A question : when testing for a level, it seems like only the vocabulary for this level is taken into account (for exemple, only N3 vocabulary if you’re practicing for N3). What happens for N5/N4 words you might be using ? In the future, could there be a way to test multiple levels (i.e : set goal as 5 N5 level sentences + 5 N4 level sentences + 10 N3 level sentences ? Basically like Bunpro Decks, where you can set a different goal for multiple decks and study them at the same time ?)
And once again, thank you for the app ! Even though it can be argued that translation and production are two different things, there are simply NO translation apps to be found anywhere. Clozes (and Duolinguo-style sentence rearranging) are not the same. I do realize that the grammar-translation method has fallen out of favor many years ago, but immersing (that is, reading/hearing but on the whole passive understanding) doesn’t magically make you able to produce japanese, and not every one has access to regular speaking partners, either because of location or work/life schedule… Your app fills a huge gap (at least one I’ve been looking for for a long time…)
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