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WordPower for Japanese

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Aristy
New in Town
Posts: 11
Joined: April 18th, 2008 11:11 am

WordPower for Japanese

Postby Aristy » October 31st, 2008 1:30 am

OK, I went ahead and bought it tonight. These are my impressions:

** DISCLAIMER: I'm not associated in any way to any of the developers for this or any other application that I mention in this review. **

The flash card system coupled with the pronunciation review COULD have been a killer combination, only if they had implemented it properly :-(

The good:
Right off the bat, this is a much better application than MyWords. Why? Because of the inclusion of the (very simple) flash card system. Granted, MyWords will eventually grow to have more than the 2,000 words that come with WordPower, but without a flash card system MyWords it's pretty limited as a learning tool (not to mention that the 10 words that you get daily with MyWords don't seem to have any rhyme or reason for their order of appearance, other than the fact that they show up in related podcast files)

The bad:
The flash card system is a VERY simple design: If you know the word, the card is removed from the deck, if you don't know it, then it's kept in the deck. This may sound like it's good enough for a flash card system, but it's not, for the simple reason that once you mark a word as "known", it will not be presented again until you are finished with the whole deck!

What's surprising is that they would use such an algorithm for the flash cards, considering that the Leitner system for learning with flash cards is so well known (see wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashcard )

As it is, if you don't need the pronunciation help, you'd be better helped with some of the other offerings for the iPhone like "Japanese Flip", which comes with 6,000 words and phrases as compared to WordPower's 2,000

kskinner
New in Town
Posts: 1
Joined: March 21st, 2008 2:26 pm

Postby kskinner » November 22nd, 2008 4:25 pm

I agree with the flashcard algorithm. It's a neat little app but why not use the Leitner algorithm instead of the simplistic one described above? Also, the animations associated with flipping each card over in order to show the answer really slows you down when you're studying and want to mark the answer right or wrong. The extra half second to second wait for each card x 2000 cards = a lot of wasted time compared with just showing the answer and the buttons without the animations. The buttons could be bigger as well...

I'm torn between this app and JapaneseFlip. They get the interface (button size and animations) right, and they have the right algorithm but they don't have any way to store the information you're really interested in studying and force you to view all JLPT4 or JLPT3 words at once instead of just viewing a subset of these. Decisions, decisions!

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Aristy
New in Town
Posts: 11
Joined: April 18th, 2008 11:11 am

Postby Aristy » December 29th, 2008 2:58 pm

kskinner wrote:I'm torn between this app and JapaneseFlip. They get the interface (button size and animations) right, and they have the right algorithm but they don't have any way to store the information you're really interested in studying and force you to view all JLPT4 or JLPT3 words at once instead of just viewing a subset of these. Decisions, decisions!


What I ended up doing was buying both apps, and then exporting their resources (the words and their reading), and adding them to a third flashcard application on the iPhone. Now I have a flashcard program that behaves the way I want, and that has all the words divided in the order that I want. *

By the way, since I'm able to keep adding words and sentences, I already have over 10,000 entries! 8)

* Of course, I respect their copyrights of these assets, and the effort they've done to create them, so I'm not re-posting them anywhere for anyone else to use. This was done for my personal use, and I had already paid for them

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