Upon initial login I'm definitely impressed by the interface, the existing content, and the potential to finally brush up on my Japanese.

I ended up linking to my Google account, but I spent a long while trying to "sign up" with my email only to be given an message about failing to meet the password requirements (no mention of character limit and no special characters allowed). At first I thought I just needed to adjust my password generator to get a valid password (usually 64 chars with alpha-numerics and special characters), but even the simplest passwords failed with the same error message.

> I ended up linking to my Google account, but I spent a long while trying to "sign up" with my email only to be given an message about failing to meet the password requirements (no mention of character limit and no special characters allowed).

This is strange; I don't really have any special password requirements. What's the exact error message you were getting? The only requirements are that it's at least 6 characters long and different than your username, and in each case it should tell you exactly what's wrong.

Wow, that looks great!

My main complaint is that I haven't known about this until now. I frequently search for Japanese resources and specifically did searches to find pre-made decks of Japanese content from Japanese language media, but never encountered your site.

Thank you for the effort to revamp the Heisig kanji keywords - makes me wish I didn't already learn it the RTK way. The way to teach new kanji by introducing the enclosed primitives first is smart - it's a good compromise between "primitive first" and "usage first" approaches.

Thanks!

Yeah, it's still pretty much a very niche resource that many people do not know about. (:

Indeed, Heisig's keywords can be janky. Mine are not perfect, but in general they should be better than Heisig's. Well, at least for most of the really common kanji; I still need to change/improve the keywords for some of the more rare kanji and tweak a few more common ones. (As you can imagine doing that manually for a few thousand characters is a lot of work, so it has been slow going.)

Hi, if you're still around:

jpdb looks really cool, but will it work for somebody who is a complete beginner?

I want to learn Japanese, and intend to commit time to doing so sometime in the upcoming 2-3 months. However, right now, I'm literally at zero.

Is there somewhere else I should go to learn things like basic grammar and sentence structure first, or will jpdb help with that sort of thing too?

A complete beginner? Nope. Well, at least not yet!

Eventually I do want to make it a one-stop-shop which will teach you everything and take you from a complete beginner to someone who can immerse in native media as soon as possible. We're not there yet, and the site works best if you're at least an advanced beginner. The bare minimum requirement is that you know hiragana and katakana already.

Your best bet would be to start with a textbook of some kind and/or some actual lessons with real teachers to learn the basics. The more of a beginner you are the more the human touch helps; the more advanced you are the more you can depend on apps.

I'm creating a free Japanese course that ships as a flashcard deck for Anki. It completely starts from zero, maybe it helps you: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/911122782 I guess this format is similar to what jpdb offers, maybe you can even import it there. The deck currently covers most grammar and a little more than 800 words on ~1800 flashcards. It's mostly based on anime though, so at least some interest in this is beneficial ;).

This is quite cool. One suggestion would be to have the pronunciation listed in addition to the kanji and audio (at least when I searched I didn't see it, so the only way to learn to pronounce is to use audio). Do you know of something similar for Chinese by any chance?

> One suggestion would be to have the pronunciation listed in addition to the kanji and audio (at least when I searched I didn't see it, so the only way to learn to pronounce is to use audio).

Sorry, I'm a little confused? The pronunciation is listed for every word; that's the hiragana next/on top of the words. (:

> Do you know of something similar for Chinese by any chance?

Alas, I do not. Maybe I'll make something like that in, like, 20 years if I'll ever be able to make a living off of this. (:

Thumbs up for revising the keywords of remembering the kanji.

I don’t follow his book but I do refer to it when studying and sometimes his keywords really can be far out. If I remember correctly he never clarifies if the kanji for “can” is “can do” or “can of soup”.

Really neat! Business-wise, is it meant to compete with sites like Wanikani and Bunpro, or is it meant to be more complementary?

Eventually it's meant to have enough content/functionality to be a replacement for both.

Looks fantastic, and I especially love the simple tech stack. How do you handle updates out of curiosity? scp and rerun?

Yep. Copy the executable (plus another file which is a big blob containing the dictionary, examples, etc.), and then just do `systemctl restart`.

There's nothing extra running on the server; no reverse proxy (the app itself automatically fetches/renews the HTTPS cert), no database, nothing. Just the app, the SSH server and the default system services.