You can still take the survey here.
I usually keep track of everything I do, through spreadsheet, including learning japanese. In May I assumed I started to have gathered some valuable information in one place and uploaded it piece by piece on a google spreadsheet for all to use.
I shared it on Reddit, and I assumed that was it. To my surprise, the spreasheet is constantly being used since then, and I coudn't understand why. So I ended making a survey, to understand how you guys were using it and how to improve it.
I really want to thank those who took the time to answer, it really helped me.
Now, after two weeks, enough people have answered the survey for me to draw conclusion. So it's my turn to answer, and for those who are curious about the results, here goes.
Most people use it for the Readability and links to Anki Decks.
Which means more people are interested by what they can watch / read, rather than using Anki for learning. I'll try to add more items like books. More details below.
The third one is the Ressources tab.
I don't personaly use it, so I don't spend much time updating it. Since it's popular, I'll update it with all the saved reddit post and bookmarked webpages and links that I never looked twice. I'll keep the key ressources one as a "curated" tab since I can't possibly test every podcast / website / app / books / games myself. But I'll expand the list.
A guide / roadmap
I've been thinking about it for some time, I just didn't know which format. Definitely not a MIA type. I won't tell you what to study nor how. The guide will be a reference on what's available depending on preferences. So it will probably look like a flowchart with links.
I'll also put a big wall of text and links on a new tab, with a fixed table of contents for easy navigation.
I have no plan of making a youtube channel so I'll probably go the imgur route for writing specific guides to make specific tutorials.
More decks
Number one media choice, without surprise, is anime. I share the links from https://www.mediafire.com/folder/p17g5uk4phb41/UserUploadedAnki_Decks. However, I only share the highest-rated shows, and some exeptions. You can add decks to the list yourself using sub2srs. It's very easy to use, but I'll make a tutorial to go in more details. A lot of people upload them so anime decks will probably constantly get updated.
More Books
Question was poorly asked, because it didn't specify if you wanted more readabilty indication (which I do too) or decks. You can find books pretty easily but I don't know if I should focus on famous english works translated in Japanese (like Harry Potter) or native Japanese work. Either way I need to choose wich books, so I'd like to find something like MyAnimeList, or Imdb, to focus on the most popular / highest rated books.
More Manga
The big problem is you'll need a transcript.
I use bilingualmanga for this. But they deleted most of their work, or they don't have enough chapters to make a relevant deck. You can either retype every line yourself or use an ocr software. But it's not accurate enough and you'll have to rewrite eventually anyway. So you're stuck to watching the anime based on the manga, and use the subtitles or no japanese lines at all.
I guess you can use the card template from my Yotsuba deck to read the manga with japanese and english side by side pages, and only keep the page / panel that interest you by adding one word or one sentence from time to time. I'll make a tutorial for it.
I'll start working on the volume 2 of Yotsuba at some point, but I'm afraid it'll be the only manga I do a deck for, unless something changes.
A column for difficulty.
It's a complicated one. We talked about it on discord and reddit, and it's tricky, because, how do you measure difficulty ? And you've got 2. How easy it is to read, and easy it is to listen. I want to be as objective as possible, so math and numbers. You can use the N / JLPT of words, how much Kanjis by sentences, the level of those kanjis, the sentence length, grammar used, and so on... That's just the reading part. When it comes to listening, do charater speak fast?, do they have an accent?, is there loud music when they speak?, do they enonciate well or mumble? etc. Some data is measurable some not. Even then, how do you ponderate and merge all those numbers into one ?
So I go to the end and just do this: if the card is hard to understand, for whatever reason meantionned, I tag it. Do all the decks, check the percentage of flagged card, that's a diffculty indicator for the deck.
Problem is that I can't do that for every card of every decks, because that's million of cards, it's subjective, and I get better from deck to deck. So right now I bolded the "universal recommendations" and I'll probaly only rate my own-made decks, since I review every card before sharing them anyway.
The Rest of the wish list.
- Everything is pretty much leveled and behind the trio Guide / Anime / Books-Manga.
- For Games, they're very long and annoying to make because you can't do a lot of things automatically. So I'll do Chrono trigger (my favourite), finish FF7 (also favourite) and some Pokemon (most wanted), and call it a day.
- More textbook benchmark. I used Genki, Wanikani, and Tango, since they're the most popular. JLPT don't have an official list of vocabulary, so I kept it to textbook. But nobody said which one to use so... Best to focus on shows you like anyway, let morphman do the +1 order.
- Grammar lessons / recap / links is not a priority on this spreasheet, but it's my most download deck with the kanji one on anki web. So I'll update to at least add Genki 2 and finish JLPT 5 and 4. We'll see after that.
- Game Scripts, used to be my priority, but it's easier to make decks from anime and more useful since they have sounds. Once I've progressed enough I'll return to playing games in japanese, and I'll refocus on adding more scripts. In the meantime, don't hesitate to leave links to the ones you found, like someone did for the Tales of Games.
Visual Novels. Like manga, I need the transcript to make that happen. Some games have a text hooker available which makes the script available. Without that, don't expect readabilty for visual novel to come up unfortunately.
More Decks with English
That was someone's specific comment. I agree. That's why any deck does have english subtitles as well. For the others one, I just have no control over. I won't download them, add english subtitles, card by card and reuplad them. I just start from scratch. So I at least download them all, and let you know if english is included or not.
Personnal Recommandations
Most people would like me to make decks for Anime. Shows over movie.
However I'll focus, on Movies for now for two reasons.
I want to finish decks for the most famous Ghibli movies, since I haven't seen them yet.
Since I check each card, it's just easier to make decks for movies than shows when 10 times more cards.
Once I'm done with a few more movies, I'll just make decks for shows, but I won't be checking every card, that's what I did for Cardcaptor Sakura.
Someone recommended J-Drama, and I'll look into as well in the same manner. I'll focus on the highest-rated as well. It's not a priority for now though.
- "Explaining what "vocabulary based on this spreadsheet" means, and how to get that list of vocab words since it seems to yield the best comprehension results"
Will do. I'll share the frequency list soon. I'm planning on revising the readabilty list with more data, and update the read me tab accordingly. Probably merge it to the upcoming "guide" tab.
In the meantime, to answer the question:
The formula for readability is: number of lines where all words are known / number of lines.
The "textbook" columns assumes you know all the words from the textbook.
I created a frequency list based on the decks on the spreadsheet. All of them. So the word that appears at the top of the list is the most used word across all decks. Probably the particle は or が or の. The first two columns assumes that you learned the words from that list. It gives better readability for the decks because the list originated from the decks directly.
FINAL WORD
Thank you again for anyone who took time to answer, it gave me better visibility on how it's used and which content to prioritize.
I'll get right on it.