sounds cynical in my ears. energy demand of these toys will cause many problems, people elsewhere starving being one of them.

Tested for Japanese. No problems so far, except sometimes repeating the desired number of times didn't work (mobile). Seems to work now.. But looping infinitely produces only three repetitions.

Really good UI with little friction: easily hone in on sentences, easily move on or jump ahead, see vocabulary, create Anki deck. Took a while to discover loop settings, but it's a good choice.

Only now discovered the "custom span loop mode". Great! I was about to ask for it!

AI mode is unobtrusive and helpful.

At last, found something that could need a touch up.. The starter deck from the example story is a bit nonsensical. It features words like URL and site from the Librivox intro. お is "translated" as "honorific" which is kind of true, but it's only a marker. A beginner might not know this. たち shows as answer "plural marker", there it worked. Integrating a flashcard app is no small feat. Impressive. I wonder what algorithm was used. Does it scale?

That's all. Thumbs up!

Quake and Quake III Arena was were the magic happened.

And wow.. you did seem to go out of your way to stay ahead of those comments. Respect for that.

And my respect for dissecting this aspect of Japanese grammar. You seemed to be dissatisfied spending time learning something that, in your eyes, wasn't yet condensed to its most basic rule. And I agree with that feeling. It leads to truely understanding how something became, eventually to discovery. Your article reads like you did that research mostly for yourself, but wanted to share what you found. That's a refreshing attitude, although the chances are high that field has been tilled thoroughly by Japanese linguists. I have to say I can't remember having seen any explanation about secret vowels/consonants in Japanese grammar books - I know some. But that may be because 1. I haven't read every there is, 2a. it's sort of doing archaeology on language and/or 2b. it doesn't add much to simplify learning the rules.

I confess my affair with grammar was always a cursory one and that may be because it proved to be so much more effective to go with examples, and pick that conjugation up as a side dish. But that's just me.

Compressing the rules does make sense, but at some point you just have to learn what's there. Language and grammar is always more or less arbitrary. Elegant yes, but arbitrary. It can't be derived from fundamentals. But the payoff makes it a worthwhile endeavor learning a language so strange from English as Japanese: you get a glimpse what the essence of language is. What a great motivation that was and is.

Some things that might spark your interest and keep exploring:

There are ごだん verbs that look like いちだん: 要る, 帰る, 限る, 切る, 知る, 入る, 走る, 滑る

Verbs with the same dictionary form but belonging to different conjugations: 切る/着る, 帰る/変える, 要る/居る, 減る/経る, 湿る/閉める, 練る/寝る

Keep up the good work. Doing research with the door open is a noble endeavor in its own right.

Was a no-brainer.

Your brains "language module" is not a slow computer, computing rules, it's a fast lookup-table.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48618391

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48618377

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48618371

Points: 7

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I too noticed a shallowing of the piece somewhere in the middle. It started with an interesting observation but ended with triviality (like you'd expect from a synthetic mind without a body).

You are compressing thoughts/ideas to symbols. Via a visual feedback loop your mind can operate on more complex ideas as your working memory doesn't need to hold everything at once. The term "second brain" really applies here. While you're "doodling forth" you become proficient in your on-the-fly invented symbol language.

Key is also the slowdown effect of being careful to draw properly. It's like a harness for your thought process. Fixating your thoughts on paper is a way to be safe not to go astray; like a climber who puts hooks in the wall.

It's really more complex than it seems from the outside. A picture of a group of people drawing lines in the sand comes to mind. And one wonders - once again - how language came into the world.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48321591

bad luck, i guess :)

Listened a handful of times and I still love it.

Someone commented 'last album' or another 13 years :)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48321591

Points: 6

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who cares about this?