emb

I also didn't realize the community was doing the bingo thing, that's kinda cool. Might try to get into that, and I can use the summer reading stuff as a jump start.

My library is doing summer reading, and they added a version of the challenge for adults. Their goal is to read 4 books over the summer, for bonus points one can be a non-fiction book about dinosaurs (their theme).

In the spirit of that, planning to read 4 library books. I've checked out Dragon's Teeth and Thunderstones: Quest for the Meaning of Fossils (McNamara) since it was out in the display and ostensibly about dinosaurs.

So far I am not loving it, lol. It's slow, spending a lot of time reiterating that ancient people made stuff out of rocks and sometimes those rocks were fossils and they thought those looked cool. And the author has repeated the phrase 'they looked for all the world like _' like 6 times. Distractly uncommon phrase to use so much. On top of that, it's not really about dinosaurs even, most of the fossils mentioned are sea urchins. /shrug At least it's short and has pictures to make pages go quick.

But alongside it I also checked out The Memory Police (Ogawa). In the opening pages it seems really interesting and well-written. The premise is a bit on-the-nose dystopian tho, so we'll see how well it's executed.

It sounds pretty good. As long as it does have a systematic way of approaching Kanji, I think that's what counts.

Heisig's way is similar but different. It's just kanji only, no vocab or readings. And since he thinks you need all the common kanji anyway, it's done purely by components with no care for how useful the character is. The building-up-parts and mnemonics stuff I like, but I do think the ordering could use a little more consideration.

The Kohii app is actually a Foss thing that's not officially associated with the book or author. You can customize all the keywords and you record your own stories (or use ones shared by the community). I think it could still be useful for tracking characters you know, even if you're already deep in another app. (Then again, you've got a system and it's working, so no need to overcomplicate things and spend time on tools you don't need.)

How does MaruMori handle kanji?

I think RTK has definitely been good for me. I was doing Genki stuff and common words in Anki for a while before I tried it. Building up kanji knowledge the RTK way helps with not getting similar characters confused near as often, and not having to copy every time I write one.

You can get a lot of milage out of just reading the first bits about the method if you don't want to go all in on flashcards.

But getting that strong familiarity with kanji makes it easier to learn new words and such, so earlier is probably better if you want to do it.

Made my way through learning to write 75% of the Joyo Kanji via Rembering the Kanji and Kohii. Love the way this satisfies the number-go-up instinct in my brain, even if going through doing isolated kanji study isn't the most valuable thing.

I've also just generally been kinda absorbed in Anki this weekend. Had a few days where I couldn't really watch/listen to anything, but I could kill time on my phone w/ flashcards. Caught up on my Core 2k/6k deck (I'm about 1100 cards deep into that).

Also messed around with importing media decks from Jiten and messing with those. It's like a buffet tho, where my interest is higher than my capacity. Looked at these decks, but ultimately realize I should be focusing more on my core deck if anything, to get all these common words out of the way. The media decks are more compelling when they can be less than 1000 cards for high coverage, but for a season of anime or something, I'm still looking at about 2k card decks for 95% coverage.

It's the first game that came to mind for me, too. Destruction there is very satisfying!

Buuuut people keep shooting at you. When playing it, I got constantly annoyed with the TPS elements and just wanted to tear stuff up. After a bit I bounced for that reason.

Pretty much the same. I'll look at the post or headline or whatever and make my assessment of if I want to see more like that. If I see downvotes already there tho, I try to figure out why. Sometimes the post does turn out to be spammier or more controversial or more factually wrong than it first appeared.

Was messing around with Jiten.moe (spiritual successor to jpdb, again boasts the utility of ingesting a book or subtitle file and creating anki cards) and it made me think of this question. (And Jiten is actually open-source, so the repo's there with how they do it... but I'm pretty sure it's mostly just wrapping a bunch of Japanese-specific tools.)

Did a little looking. Tried checking https://github.com/keon/awesome-nlp and didn't see anything French specific, but did come across https://github.com/french-ai/french-nlp which might have useful stuff. It sounds like a library called Spacy could be useful.

But then I ran across this tool, which might be pretty close to what you'd need? https://github.com/FreeLanguageTools/vocabsieve

VocabSieve is a companion program for language learning with Anki. Its primary function is sentence mining, in which sentences with vocabulary words are collected and added into Anki for long term retention. It aims to help intermediate learners gain vocabulary efficiently by allowing card creation with minimal friction. Possible use cases include sentence mining from videos, texts, asynchronously from ereader highlights, and even completely automatically from books or subtitles.

I haven't looked into exactly how the 'automatically from books' stuff would work or anything, but seems promising.

And I guess elephant in the room, NLP is the kind of task LLMs are actually pretty good at, so there's also always that lazy-ish route: convert the book to text, feed it through an LLM and ask it to identify important vocabulary words.

It really has been delightful! Once it's going, really surprises me how quick and painless it all is. When I think of configuring Anki, I usually immediately think of how confusing the UI is for cards, notes, decks, deck options, etc. The yomitan > AnkiConnect workflow was only slightly confusing at first, then after that swift and smooth. I already had a reasonable note type from the optimized Core 2k/6k deck I use. Though it is weird how Yomitan won't provide part of speech.

The furigana extension is this one, right? That does sound super useful, since the example sentences I pull from the page don't get furigana by default.

I was also looking at https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1184164376 to maybe fill in better details and audio on the handful of cards I'd mined before, but not sure yet if it'll be worth fiddling with.

It used to drive me crazy, but these days I love it when my Internet goes down. Can't work if I can't get online. Can't mindlessly scroll timewasting websites on my computer (bonus points if my phone has no cell signal).

Just all the time to play games, read, get things done around the house, take a walk, etc.

Power outage can be nice too, but more limiting.

But sometimes of course no Internet means you can't do things you need to or want to. Don't mean to minimize the annoyance it can cause, and I hope you're connected again soon if you want to be.

Actually now that you mention it, I just checked and it seems like links in profile aren't even clickable or selectable from the Loops Android app, so that's annoying.

I usually make an acct for each distinct fedi service, so not sure. I see a bunch of videos pop up from Mastodon users, but I just browse it from a Loops account (and never post videos).

Thought this looked really good!

The uncut gameplay reveal approach is a little weird when combined with the mostly-cinema beginning of the game. Might've been nice to see more gameplay and less setup.

I dig how goofy Frank the cube is. But I can see those quirky random characters really rubbing some folks the wrong way.