Please beta test Sakugo - app for practicing output in Japanese

The avatar is taken from Gravatar (you can change it by logging in to http://gravatar.com/) - I think it’s the same website used by Bunpro for the profile avatar picture. I should probably write it somewhere during the onboarding process or at least in the user profile.

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Thanks! If possible, I think it would be good to disclose that, yeah. I used a different email for bunpro so it didnt happen before. Thanks so much.

Thank you! Fixed this.

Sorry to spam you, but I just wanted to add another point of feedback- I really like how it creates a list of vocabulary on the right side. Getting a words usage wrong and then being reminded about it feels like a more natural way to learn/brush up on vocabulary than just flashcards, so I think it will be very useful for me.

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I’ve just started BunPro a couple of months ago along with WaniKani and exactly this was the final tool I was thinking about that was missing, was just practicing sentences within an LLM chat but found it to be quite inconvenient in comparison to tools like BunPro and WaniKani, which really make it as simple as possible for you to learn Japanese :slight_smile:

As for the app, someone already mentioned the leaning towards the polite forms, so I’ll just mention this here briefly.
As someone who only has about half of the N5 vocabulary, I thought it would’ve been nice if I could look up specific translations right on the page before submitting my answers, since my primary goal is to practice the grammar I have learned.

Thank you for this, now I can practice my sentences daily with convenience :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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Would it be possible to open up some more spots?

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Perhaps if possible, it would help to add furigana to unknown kanji in the explaination in addition to the vocabulary shown on the side. It could work similar to Bunpro with wanikani API integration and an option to disable for specific kanji by clicking them and unchecking a box. I have found the resource very useful otherwise, it is good for correcting mistakes that I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.

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I’ve been trying this out the past couple of days, and I have to say I freaking LOVE it. I’ve been looking for something like this.

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Thank you everyone for the suggestions! I definitely want to improve the furigana feature. I do have furigana for all the kanji in the example sentences of the vocabulary pages (you can see them if you hover over the words), but so far there are no furigana for the translation suggestions during reviews.

@rururun I wrote you a message regarding beta testing.

I’m really sorry to everyone else who wants to try it out - I’m really trying to limit the amount of beta users before I end the beta and fully launch it, which should happen early November, once I’m back from Japan (I will have very little time to maintain it during this month and I don’t want too many people to experience the issues in case anything happens).

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I’m not sure where to put feedback for the app so far but here are some more comments

  • The daily sentence quota/record doesnt reset according to my timezone, and it’s not clear what timezone it is set to
  • the AI feedback sometimes highlights words in the correction that would imply I got something wrong though both our versions match in that regard
  • I think the app could benefit from providing more scaffolding rather than just pure translation. If you were able to toggle scaffolding on and off this would provide a smoother experience to bridge gaps for people between levels and for beginners and advanced users alike. This could include providing key vocab or a suggested grammar point. Though the ultimate goal should be for people to use what they already know, sometimes there is just no way for me to translate a sentence without looking up the words, and I can’t skip sentences, so I either have to look things up or just input half a sentence. This still gets me feedback, which is great, but I think there must be a way to make the process have a few more educational steps. I expect this would create a rather more complex situation but I think right now as a pure translation app the experience can be a little lacking.
  • The way it rates me on vocab is sometimes straight up wrong. Say I use “kougyou” instead of “sangyou” for industry, but the app is expecting “sangyou.” It will still mark my sentence as correct but then it will tell me my mastery of “sangyou” has improved. This is not a direct example, but things like that have occurred a few times. EDIT: actually I checked back, and it marked me as familiar with kozutsumi when I had used nimotsu for package. I am now rated “familiar” for this item despite never having seen it in my life until the system told me “congratulations! your rating for this word went up!”- the AI didn’t use the word either in its correction.
  • sometimes the home page randomly turns blank white until I refresh it.
  • I do think the vocab list is good for kind of seeing what you can and can’t use but I am not in love with the way the rating system functions. I think it would make sense to use different colours according to whether you have used it or only seen it.
  • the home page gives all boxes equal weighting in terms of information and it creates a bit of a dissonant user experience. I think the progress bar box for JLPT levels could be smaller. On the other hand, the heading tabs (Practice, vocabulary, help) should be enlarged to increase their visual importance. I also don’t think the top two boxes need to be page-width since they are pretty scarce on content and would function better as 2/3rds like the JLPT levels box, with the learning items box moved up since it holds the most information in general. I also think it makes sense to merge the top two boxes into one container. This is all just my own opinion on aesthetics but the current state does deter me a little from wanting to use it. From a further aesthetic viewpoint, I think it would also make sense to change the green colour currently used to that of the orange in the logo and create a more cohesive colour palette. The colour story of the site is a little confusing in relation to the logo.

Sorry for the wall of text and whether this is a bad place to put this, but I thought as a beta tester I should probably talk about my experience so far! It might also come off as a little blunt and for that I apologise and would like to also note I think the site itself is a great idea and already quite awesome.

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Thank you so much for your detailed comments! I’ll try to address my thoughts (though as I said I won’t have much time to fix any of these before November).

  • Daily quotas - for now I decided to keep it simple and reset all quotas at midnight PST. I agree I should either make this clearer or make it configurable (though I would have to make sure this can’t be exploited - e.g. maybe I can make it so that the reset timezone could only be changed once every X days)
  • AI feedback - there is some tradeoff between the quality of the feedback and the cost/time it would take for each feedback. For example, the Gemini 2.5 pro model is amazing, and gives incredible feedback, but it would take around x8 times the cost and time for each feedback, so I thought at this point I just can’t use it (maybe soon if it becomes faster/cheaper). For the model I’m using now, I can configure how much time it would invest “thinking” about the feedback, and there’s some tradeoff here as well. In addition, the prompt itself gives a huge difference, and I have a lot of work to optimize that. In any case, feedback from users on this really helps, and I plan to integrate better ways for people to report bad feedbacks from within the website so that the AI could gradually improve.
  • Scaffolding - this is a really cool idea, I might try to add some scaffolding at some point. Currently, I tried to address this by offering the “Genki route” so that students who already use the Genki textbook could use that as scaffolding and then only use the app to practice what they already learned (and I plan to add other popular textbooks as well), but it might be cool to actually add the scaffolding within the app - especially for JLPT vocab.
  • Giving you +1 for words you’ve never used - this was a conscious decision. I wasn’t sure if it would be good for everyone but it worked for me (I might make this configurable per user). The reason I wanted it to work that way (for me) is that my main objective was to be able to convey what I want to say in Japanese, so I didn’t want to “punish” myself for cases where I used one synonym and not another, so for my use-case, if I use any synonym and managed to convey the main idea, I wanted to mark all other synonyms (or almost synonyms) as leveled up. I understand this decision might not work for everyone.
  • Regarding the website itself - thank you for your feedback. I definitely plan to iterate more on how the website looks and functions.

Hello! Thank you for the thorough reply!

Re daily quotas- I think it’s fine not to make it configurable as long as I can tell when it will reset. If it is possible, you could add a little “resets in ~~” at the bottom in grey text to the daily goal progress box. Or if that’s too difficult you could just write “resets daily at 24:00 PST!” just to give more clarity.

Re plus 1 for words I’ve never used- I see where you’re coming from and I like the exposure to unused vocab, but I think the system itself needs clarity. Maybe there should be a different system for suggested words vs words you have actually used otherwise it seems like a bug. For the record, I think its a great idea for the system to give you synonyms and not punish you for not using them, because it’s fantastic natural vocabulary exposure, but it feels strange to level up on a word I have never seen let alone used. I suppose making this configurable would achieve the same end but I like the idea of the system naturally pushing synonyms towards me and I assume if I configured it off, it wouldn’t do that. I have no idea what the backend of this looks like though so I’m sorry if I’m talking about impossible things.

BTW enjoy the rest of your time in Japan!

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By the way, I know it doesn’t fully solve your issue but just in case you didn’t see and it might help you - whenever you get a level up on a vocabulary item you can press on the little “info” icon on the corner of the vocabulary card and undo the mastery level change. You can use this to prevent synonyms from going up a level if you don’t want them to.

hello, can I know which framework you used to build this website?

beta program is full :cry:

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Backend: I use Python with flask. The database is Google Firestore. The LLM I’m using for creating and evaluating sentences is Gemini-2.5-flash (it worked best from all the ones I tried. Gemini 2.5 pro works much better but it would also be much more expensive and would be around 40 seconds wait for every sentence evaluation). The app is hosted on Google App Engine.
Frontend: Built with React (which uses JSX - a syntax extension for javascript) and Tailwind CSS.

It just told me the beta program is full :frowning:

Any chance you can let in a few more of us bunpro folks? This looks super cool but I missed it because ironically I was in Japan earlier this week.

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I would love to try this out! This is one thing I really struggle in, kinda putting it all together and form proper sentences in japanese. Super duper interested!