Powerlevel, a Japanese study tool for gamers and geeks(beta)

[mattiapavinati8647]

i also have to say that training time is quite messed up atm... i have words scheduled for 8-10 days ahead, but i get asked all of them during my training... like every single word

You are probably doing kanji reading training here, right? If so, there is indeed a discrepancy here: the next exam schedule times currently show only the schedule for word translations, not kanji reading and writing. This is a relic from the past design and it should be now easy to show the earliest review of all the directions. I'll get right to it!

Could also be that... but it feels like the word knowledge lvl is decreased with time. now that i can train kanji reading i did master 40 kanji, but few hours later my progress did disapear (i didn't close the program in the meanwhile).. that's why i suspect there is a lvl decrease over time. Maybe it was balanced with the +0/+1/+2 score, now that it's -1/+0/+1 it's a bit different. now i'm just guessing, but it could be it.

Speaking about kanji with different readings for different meanings
月 : つき; がつ
丁 : ちょう; てい
If i had to decide, i would take that exam in multiple steps... ask 1 reading, if the kanji has more readings keep the current reading, add a comma and ask for an other reading until all the readings of your vocabulary are asked... if you don't recognise the kanji, you get -1, all the readings +1, and 0 otherwise [or maybe adding +1 only for the reading written]...
Example :
i get asked 日:
i type : ひ and press enter. the text will "freeze" so i can't delete it, and the i would be asked for 1 more meaning,
i would follow with にち, making the textbox look like : "ひ、にち" and so on... what do you think?

[deirh]

Thanks for the suggestions regarding the kanji. So far, I added a hotfix so that you get notified there are other possible readings if you happen to choose a different one from what is expected and you're no longer penalized for it as long you can still recall the one originally asked. It was, by far, the simplest solution to implement, although yours would be nicer and more robust. I'll consider it in the future once all bugs are dealt with

As for 'disappearing progress', have you tried it with the latest update (16 hrs ago)? I did fix several things concerning next exam display and kanji read exams. There should be no spontaneous decrease over time, only if you fail the exams. Even if you get the 'sad' outcome by answering too slowly/with too many mistakes, you'll get effectively 0 change (-1 rank but +1 pass combo). Should you still see some strange behavior with last version, please send me the build time and the profile file from My Documents/Powerlevel so I can take a look and help you out with it (just realized it could happen if there were 2 simultaneous instances running at the same time but that's probably not your case. Will start handling this in any case though).

[deirh]

Nevermind, found the reason between disappearing progress for new words. Will try to fix asap.

[deirh]

Squashed the bug in today's update. Let me know if it fixes it for you as well.

[mattiapavinati8647]

goodjob!
i still have more things to test... but it seems fine so far!
I'll update you as soon as i get new info.
じゃ、また！

[deirh]

Implemented better support for kanji drawing. There's a new how-to and IME Pad should now also open automatically (except on Windows 8, seems impossible there ). Let me know if it helps.

[mattiapavinati8647]

The addition for IME pad is very usefull for lazy people (myself included) or for people who don't actually know how to enable it.
So far it's working very nicelly... just a question : how do you rate the precision on the kanji writing? just my time of completition? or can you access the internal API of the IME pad and see if people "undo" lines?
I ask that because sometimes the word i have to type contains many strokes, and i get rated "sad" even though i couldn't write it faster (examples : 頑張る、お願い)

By the way... you're doing a great job! thank you for the time you're devoting in developing this app!

[deirh]

Analyzing user's kanji strokes...now that would be a truly amazing feature to have. But unfortunately I discovered no possibility to access IME Pad's composition progress or anything else concerning IME Pad as there just doesn't seem to be any documentation about it *at all*. Even its opening is a dirty hack I had to resort to in the absence of any reliable source on how to do it properly

Should you happen to find anything, do let me know, but otherwise I don't see a possibility to rate how well you draw, sorry Right now Powerlevel rates only the speed of your answer. There's definitely great room for improvement as I have only begun to work on it so please do let me know your insights. For starters, the number of strokes you are required to draw is known to Powerlevel so I can start adjusting the expected completion time according to it. Also, did you try practicing hiragana drawing when it is part of the word as well? That does lengthen the answer time as well (yet could be a useful practice) and I think I can detect that and react to it by lengthening the 'par' time. If you could provide me with some timing info on drawing specific words when you know them well, I'll be glad to make the appropriate adjustments.

Anyway, I'm glad you like it and thanks for the praise! Should you like to share the word, you're more than welcome to join http://www.facebook.com/groups/powerlevel/. Tell your friends

[deirh]

Just implemented some of the above changes concerning the kanji write rating, hopefully for the better. But maybe it is too lenient now Let me know.

[mattiapavinati8647]

i've got something else to report!
under stats -> kanji. if you click on a grade to explore its kanji, scroll down the list and then switch to the grade 1 panel, you'll find the panel already scrolled down, but no sidebar to go up!

and 1 more think... in order to start practicing writing some kanji, you need to get 5 exp points on both "say" and "hear", then you start practicing "read", and when you finally get 5 exp points in "read" you can train "write"... so far so good, but if it happens to get a very high score from the beginning, you'll get to the "read" stage with 1 training every 5-6 days, and if you keep reading the kanji correctly, the timespan will only get longer. Since failing on purpose is not nice, is there a possibility to force a training?

[deirh]

Thanks for your initiative, scrolling in stats should be now fixed

As for the kanji training, I was not yet able to reproduce the behavior you're mentioning but maybe the timing needs to be adjusted nevertheless. If indeed everything works as it should, the stats for kanji "read" are kept separate from those for word meaning training ("say" and "hear") and should not influence each other when determining when the next review should be (if you have any words in Next exam: [Read Kanji] state, does a mouse-over display any outrageously long interval?).

Now, the requirement for starting the "write" exam is actually 5 "knowledge" (which is a sum of rank ["exp points"] and successive passes). The review interval when getting close to 5 should be 4-9 days (4 if you're at 4.0, 9 if you're closer to 5, like ~4.9). So basically, all in all it should take about 7 to 14 days to get from reading to writing if you're already good at kanji reading (influenced by what numbers exactly you hit). Which is maybe indeed a little too much if you already know the word and are just itching to try the writing exam. Should I steer it more towards a week? Let me know and let's try a new timing and see if it's for the better or worse. In this update, I already reduced it a bit to requiring just above 4.0 knowledge which should translate to 'no more than a week'.

[mattiapavinati8647]

wooo! today i had to write 150+ kanji (due to the recent change), but i was very happy to train all those kanji, and in the meanwhile, i found an other issue
there are words that are not always written in kanji, like そして (thus), and when asking to write the hiragana for the word, you can clearly see it into the example sentence.
And... today while training, i happend to press enter for 2seconds... and it fast skipped like 6-7 training exercices (failing each of them) maybe add register the event onKeyUp instead? :p

[deirh]

Good catch, definitely need to fix that enter, nice to see a fellow programmer mindset .)

As for the words with uncommonly used kanji - I noticed that too but didn't come across any easy solution on how to be able to diagnose that. Looking into example sentence use and judging from that is actually a great idea and I'll try to find a way to implement that in an efficient way. Great idea, keep 'em coming

[mattiapavinati8647]

that's not the best place to speak about high computer programming, but i have few ideas on how you could resolve this "issue". i'll let you know by the facebook group! let us speak japanese here!

Today i'll try to install the application on my linux system... i'll let you know if it works

[ofeliadgrd]

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