Anyone on here happen to be using the "Kotoba" app on Android? - Feed Post by mog86uk

Anyone on here happen to be using the "Kotoba" app on Android?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ee.yutani.kotoba

Wanna see something crazy?

This time last year I posted here showing my progress in the "Kotoba" Android app:
https://japaneseclass.jp/feeds/comment/11409

I pretty much just use the app when I'm stuck waiting somewhere with nothing to do. (I used to use this app a lot when walking my dog, but sadly he passed away a couple of months ago.)

Well anyway, one year on from my previous post, here's an updated screenshot of my current progress!

I've now managed to get all the 7,568 words in the JLPT N5~N1 levels to become green. I'm very close to reaching a point where I have no red words remaining at all! Hopefully by this time next year I'll have all the 25,510 words green, or at least all yellow. :P

posted by mog86uk February 6, 2019 at 9:22am

• 
  Yoshipon

  Congrats on your progress!! Really inspiring.
  
  Sorry for your dog (˃̥̥ω˂̥̥̥)
  
  Hadn't heard about this kotoba app before, I've been doing this site and duolingo for quite a while, but feel I'm not really making that much progress, need to search for ways to practice listening and speaking, writing also is something I almost never do : (

  February 6, 2019 at 9:37am
• 
  mog86uk

  Just realised that for some bizarre unknown reason the app doesn't seem to exist in Play Store anymore. :(
  
  Here are the links to its GitHub pages:
  https://github.com/sh0/kotoba-android
  https://github.com/sh0/kotoba-data
  
  The app is actually available on the developer's homepage. However, I've not had any luck getting the downloads to complete successfully:
  http://yutani.ee/files/kotoba/
  
  For anyone interested in trying out the app, you'd probably now have to download it from some unofficial app store website.
  
  The app isn't as great as it could be anyway. The developer made the app and stopped working on it three years ago. The app really needs SRS for it be effective for learning. It's just nice as a challenge, but not so great for memorisation.

  February 6, 2019 at 12:24pm
• 
  mog86uk

  @Yoshipon, I know what you mean about listening and speaking. These are much harder to practise effectively online compared with reading.
  
  When I went to Japan for a month a few years ago, I got on pretty well with reading, wasn't too great at listening, but my speaking ability was completely non-existent. I met lots of cool Japanese people, some who couldn't really speak English at all. The whole trip I barely managed to speak any Japanese at all, even though I could read a couple of thousand kanji, had learnt thousands of words, and had lots of head knowledge about grammar. This is because I'd never practised speaking Japanese and never even practised writing my own sentences. I couldn't think on the spot to actually speak anything.
  
  So I came away from that trip with a strong feeling that I should start focusing a lot more on speaking and listening.
  
  SuperNative is a very cool site which might help with listening and also has a speaking feature too.
  https://supernative.tv/ja/
  
  Japanese radio apps are nice for listening practice.
  
  The best thing I've found for listening practice is to listen to Japanese anime or drama in audio only. I drive a lot for work, so I have a lot of time to listen to whatever I want. I've listened to the whole series of a couple of anime (Great Teacher Onizuka and Maison Ikkoku). I only listened to anime I'd already watched, and I think this way works best. It's fun as you can picture what you remember watching for the bit you're hearing, and you start actually hearing a tonne of interesting Japanese words the characters were speaking. It's almost as fun to listen to some series as it is watching. Highly recommend trying this. ^^
  
  For speaking practice, the 50Languages site is really neat to use. It can be downloaded as mp3, and then have it playing endlessly and simply repeat each sentence after the speaker.
  https://www.50languages.com/phrasebook/en/ja/
  
  For me, one thing that's probably worked best for speaking practice is Japanese versions of songs which I know well in English. So I searched for a load of Japanese Christian songs. This has worked great, because I can work out more and more words each time I listen to the same song without having to look the words up. And also knowing the songs well in English makes the Japanese lyrics a lot easier to remember. The fact these are designed to be sung along to also makes these kind of songs work better for speaking practice than many other types of music. The downside with singing a long with music is that its not really conversational speaking practice, but it helps with getting used to speaking words and general pronunciation. (Another big downside with this is that singing isn't really my kind of thing at all, haha...) ^^

  February 6, 2019 at 12:57pm
• 
  Yoshipon

  Wow thank you for so many tips on sites to use!
  
  Sad to know about the app, feels like its a rough time to apps these days, so much competition and if the adoption goes a little under expected I can see devs quickly loosing interest on maintaining support, bad for the users : (
  
  Must have been quite the experience in Japan, if I went there and wasn't able to speak a thing (which is probably what would happen) I think it would be really depressing, nice thing you managed to use it as fuel to search new ways of studying.
  
  Never thought about only listening to anime without actually watching, sounds interesting. I loved GTO and feel like it would be really funny to listen to Onizuka's japanese and try to remember the scenes.

  February 7, 2019 at 10:10am
• 
  aledda

  I use that app from time to time. It's not that I don't like it but it's like I don't rememer having it there when I have free time. My progress is not that great (obviously): I still have a lot of words for N4 in orange, even though I took the N3 last year... maybe I should consider the challenge to make all the N5-to-N3 words become green, and of course work on the N2 level...

  February 8, 2019 at 8:32am