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by wahnfrieden 446 days ago
In Japanese learning, people sell premade decks for things like learning kanji with mnemonics and graphics, or curriculum-like decks that provide a sensible order such as N+1 sentences (sentences with at most one unknown word or kanji)

I'm also in the business of generating Anki decks, except on the tools side: https://reader.manabi.io is growing in popularity for Japanese sentence mining for Anki on iOS & macOS

My project began as a "blissful" side project and is now my full-time occupation.
2 comments
aecsocket 446 days ago
Interesting app, I haven't heard of Manabi before! How does it compare to other apps like Jidousho? And other, more general desktop tools like Yomitan? On mobile, I'm currently using Yomitan on Firefox for mining, but I'm curious about other mobile-specific approaches and apps that people have made.
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wahnfrieden 446 days ago
Compared with Yomitan, a couple quick differences that come to mind:

- Manabi tracks the words and kanji you've read to show you which are new to you, and which you have as flashcards. You can see this visually on the page, and in a vocab listing

- Review flashcards that appear in whatever you're trying to read. Soon I will also have it auto-review flashcards passively as you read and encounter them naturally

- Add flashcards to Manabi Flashcards or to Anki including AnkiMobile on iOS

- One-tap words to look up instead of mouseover from starting boundary

- Manabi packages reading tools such as RSS, EPUB and soon manga (via Mokuro) with user-editable curated libraries of content. Yomitan is less of a standalone-capable tool

I am working on adding Yomitan dictionaries now (to also make the app multilingual) as well as more integrations such as 2-way sync with Anki, WaniKani, JPDB

I think Jidoujisho has a lot of similarities but it's not an iOS/macOS app

I should put up some product comparison material as there are a lot of tools out there

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joshdavham 446 days ago
Ah I didn't realize you also had a macOS app out! Also cool to see you're on HN! I honestly love the niche that we're in.
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wahnfrieden 446 days ago
Hi! Maybe you saw my old app before I rewrote it fully in SwiftUI. Yes it's a nice supportive community to be in
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