jlabjapanese

Intermediate 3 Finished

I just uploaded the finished version of intermediate 3 with 932 cards in total (352 new ones). The download link is the same as before, see this post. The playlist on YouTube 2025-07-21 21:48:52 +0000 UTC View Post

Imperfect cards

The last releases contained a few rather sloppy cards: sometimes the translations are not accurate, sometimes the back is missing, sometimes there are multiple translations on the back. Why is this the case?

Mostly because I stopped doing an additional review cycle before releasing a deck to save some time. Creating a card with the current...

Intermediate 3 updated

The download link is the same as before, see this post.

There are around 300 new cards and 35 new video recommendations. The most interesting topics covered by the videos are:

• Common mistakes when using arigatou (must watch)

  2025-05-07 20:08:01 +0000 UTC View Post

My New AI Assistant: Often Stupid, But Incredibly Useful

Since around March, I’ve done a lot of programming on my tools. One big change is that the project now includes an AI assistant that helps with various boring and tedious tasks. Right now, it supports me with sentence mining, provides short video summaries for faster filtering, and helps to deliver more accurate translations with correct conte...

Expanding to podcasts (outside of YouTube)

Since around the beginning of March I spent lots of time on developing new features for the tools I use for deck creation. One of those features is to support arbitrary podcasts in addition to YouTube videos.

I added only one podcast to the mining list so far, but it is very popular: "Let's talk in Japanese" by Tomo, a teacher from Japan. ...

Delete (or Suspend) Your Flashcards to Improve

In the beginner's course and on the jlab website, I recommend to start deleting flashcards at some point. Some people asked why they should do this, so I added an elaborate answer here. I got the original idea from ajatt a long time ago, but the "wh...

New YouTube-Video

This has been on my todo-list for quite some time.
The video is not public yet, because the description is still missing.

Let's see what the reading-first people think about the advice to skip kanji 😅

YouTube, LLMs, Intermediate 3...

Hey everyone, here is a short summary of all the things I've been working on recently:

• A new YouTube video with hints to practice listening comprehension. This is not completed yet, but will be what I focus on now.

• Checking out what LLMs (Claude, ChatGPT) can do for the project:

  • Ok-ish for grammar expla...

    2024-12-29 18:45:12 +0000 UTC View Post

Intermediate 3 deck

The intermediate decks build on each other, please do them in the correct order.

I just finished the first version of the intermediate 3 deck. It has 320 cards at the moment and will be expanded to ~900 as the others, the link stays the same. There are also 40 more videos in the jlab playlist (311 in total now). This versi...

How many words are in the decks?

An interesting question that came up, here is the answer:

Beginner: 1180
Counting: 155
Intermediate 1: 715
Intermediate 2: 592
Loan words: 210

Total: 2852

Some explanations:

• The counting deck adds numbers and counters as words.

• Loan words are "Japanized" English words that I keep in a se...

  2024-09-18 19:18:54 +0000 UTC View Post

Intermediate 2 Finished

I just uploaded the completed Intermediate 2 deck, ~400 new cards and ~50 videos were added. The playlist on YouTube has also been updated and now contains 272 videos (which are presented on 100+ dedicated cards).

My personal highlight from the recent videos in the deck is a video from the channel Onomappu, where Hitoki (a Japanes...

Speaking, maintenance, cards...

Here's a quick update on what I did since my last post. I’ve written two new articles that address common questions I receive:

• How to Practice Speaking

• 2024-08-23 05:46:55 +0000 UTC View Post

How to google for grammar

Ever wondered where all the references in the decks are coming from? I've been using a set of simple patterns that make it quite easy to google for Japanese grammar, and I've written an article about it. This has been tremendously helpful ...

Intermediate decks updated

Hey everyone,

Since my last post, I’ve added all the feedback I received to the intermediate decks. I’ve fixed small errors, improved explanations, and corrected several wrong translations for around 100 cards in total. The only thing I did not change are the links to the dead videos. As usual, the download links are still the same—p...

Subtitles for the video recommendations

You can download the subtitles I use for working on the the video recommendations from the link above. Below is an excerpt from the readme.txt contained in the zip:

I used OpenAi's whisper to compute subtitles with relatively decent quality for the video mining project. They are probably helpful for you so I will share them in the future. ...

Status Update

Hey everyone,

I know it's been a while since my last update In January. What happened?

Long story short, I was really sick for almost 5 months. After recovering, life got super busy with work, family and other personal things. In my now not-so-new-anymore job, I usually work 10+ hours a day, and my family and parents have needed extr...

Vocabulary deck

I just finished the vocab deck you had voted for, the download link is in this post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/vocabulary-deck-95915372

The deck teaches the ~500 most important words of the beginner's course in isolation. The front of the car...

Vocabulary deck download links

This post is just for sharing the links to the new vocab deck. The details are in this public post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/vocabulary-deck-95917318 

Deck: 2024-01-05 13:17:36 +0000 UTC View Post

December update

It's the last day of 2023 and high time for an update! The last weeks were packed with job and family related things, so I did not post anything. However, I also continued with the project: In addition to creating a few new cards, I was mostly working on two new types of content: First, the vocab deck you voted for: I extracted all the vocabular...

Intermediate 2 deck updated

I just uploaded version 2 of the intermediate deck with ~250 new cards and 42 new videos. The new videos cover friendship, love hotels, kitanai kotoba, kids embarrassed by the hair dresser, giving tips (gratuity) in Japan, moving a lot, uchi vs. ie and some interesting other explanations in Japanese. Have fun!

The playlist was also updated...

Jlab intermediate 2 deck (with updates)

The intermediate decks build on each other, please do them in the correct order.

You can download the second intermediate deck from the link above. As usual, the link is permanent. This means, you can use it to download future updates. The deck will be extended to 900 cards.

I created half of the cards during th...

Vacation!!!

I'm taking the first vacation from my new job. I have been riding the train for four hours now while creating new flashcards for the first time in four months. It's so much fun... For those still waiting for an answer you had asked about a card: I currently have 180 unanswered emails, getting through all of them takes some time. I decided to cre...

How to make the beginner's course easier

I wondered if it is possible to lower the entry barrier of the beginner's course. From the feedback I get, it seems to work well for most people. For some however, there is too much to digest on a single card. One thing that could be done about this quite easily is to create a supplementary deck that teaches the vocabulary used in the course in ...

Where's the next update?!

I started a new, demanding job in May, which currently eats up most of my time. It requires to learn many new things and it will take a few weeks until I got used to everything.

Until then, the jlab project has lower priority. In fact, I couldn't do anything during the last two weeks. I really start missing to work on the project and will ...

45.000 downloads - Thank you!

The beginner's course recently hit 45.000 downloads, which is absolutely amazing. I have uploaded a video to the jlab channel to say thank you to all users, maybe some of you have seen it already:

https://youtu.be/ZSaHay78tlA

I didn't mention any of the patrons in t...

Intermediate deck updated

Version 3 has now ~1000 cards and 150 video recommendations. You can download it with the previous/known download link from this post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/77555584

Playlist deleted

By accident I deleted the jlab playlist on YouTube (instead of updating it - stupid). Here's the new link:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeKxu0M1zxK-yrGad7zKkNeDViq2_5cLh 

It has 50 new videos now (150 videos...

What happened in March?

I did a lot in March, but nothing is fully finished yet:

I finally started patching the Anki addon, which stopped working on 2.1.55. Unfortunately, the operations executed when a deck was imported are permanently broken. It's possible to fix this, but requires some effort. Therefore, I decided to move the operations to the jlab menu instea...

Subs2srs decks now hosted by jlab

The original owner of the community-created subs2srs deck repository had removed her blog a while ago for time reasons. I've been in touch with her for a while and asked for taking over the account. This has happened now and means: The decks will remain available for the community and hosting costs are covered by this patreon. Awesome!

For...

Intermediate deck updated

Version 2 now has 250 new cards. There are 82 videos included on 30 video cards. You can download the new version with the same download link.