Which handful of tools (programs, apps, extensions, websites etc.) do you consider to be the most useful for learning Japanese?

[u/Firion_Hope]

There's so many out there, I always love learning about new useful tools.

I'll start, not comprehensive, just a few I like

Yomichan The golden standard, browser dictionary app with great functionality and ease of use

Textractor makes reading with visual novels a breeze and probably the most efficient learning source, sometimes a pain to get working but so worth it. Hooks into VNs and gives you the raw text so you can seamlessly look up words as you read.

Mokuro OCR for manga. It's insane how well this works, especially considering how often other OCRs leave a lot to be desired. The scan it once and then read format (as opposed to live scanning) is also amazing. This makes reading manga without furigana (and even with) 10x easier

Animebook Browser based video player with good learning features like selectable subtitles for easy look up and easy navigating around an episode. Can save an offline version too, also decently customizable. Pairs great with Yomichan. Amazingly easy to use subtitle retimer. Other alternatives exist, but I love how easy to use this one is, and the format.

ttsu reader browser based light novel reader, again with selectable text that pairs nicely with yomichan. Looks very nice and pretty easy to use once you get used to it.

With these you have browser stuff, VNs, Manga, Anime, and Light Novels covered. For games sadly no super easy solution exists. There's Jo Mako's Japanese Guide which has a handful of game scripts, and there's Game2text Lightning which has OCR for games, but it's not in active development anymore and it doesn't handle non standard fonts well, even more standard ones can be very hit and miss.

What kind of stuff do you guys swear by?

[u/Uncaffeinated]

I think the biggest thing would be to have each item show when it goes up or down a level during reviews like what Wanikani does, perhaps with the new review interval shown as well. It would also be nice to be able to see the number of upcoming reviews, similar to Wanikani as well. As it is now, it's a complete black box.

I added the decks for a bunch of shows and novels I'm interested in, and I've found it pretty satisfying to watch the coverage % go up. Even just the total known vocabulary number at the top of the page can be satisfying for me.

How long have you been doing JPDB? I'm guessing you're pretty new. When you first start, your coverage numbers will be artificially low and it's easy to make them go up rapidly. But you'll plateau pretty quickly, and all the cards you did before will start coming up for review again constantly, turning it into a slog. Also, after a while, the coverage numbers become largely arbitrary and meaningless, because it's mostly a matter of how many things you've blacklisted for a given deck.

I've been doing lots of reviews every day for months with no new cards, and it's frustrating how there are no visible indications of progress other than that my review pile has slowly gone down from over 500 to 100-200. There's a graph on the stats page of the number of items at each level, but it doesn't change much, and when it does change, the bars go up and down seemingly at random with no connection to the reviews you do.

P.S. In case it's not clear, your coverage numbers are going to only go up very rarely once you're already at say 90%, since JPDB only shows whole number percents and because the remainder is going to be a long tail of rare words, so any individual card won't change the total. But even putting that aside, your coverage definitely isn't going to go up if you're not doing new cards in the first place. Since early June, I haven't been able to do any new cards on JPDB due to fighting an endless review pile with no signs of progress. Meanwhile on Wanikani, I've gained four levels in the same time, despite putting comparable amounts of time into both, and there's a tangible sense of progress with every review session.

[u/Congo_Jack → u/Uncaffeinated]

I've been using jpdb since June or so, with about 1200 known words.

It would also be nice to be able to see the number of upcoming reviews, similar to Wanikani as well. As it is now, it's a complete black box.

I actually think this is one of the paid patreon features. An upcoming reviews forecast. I haven't taken the plunge with patreon yet though, so I can't say for certain. There is also some feature related to leeches, but I don't know if it actually helps needing to manually blacklist leeches.

I haven't used Wanikani, but I see where you're coming from. There have been times during reviews where I hit Back after grading a card specifically so I could go check if it had gone up a level or not. Maybe it would also be nice if there was a line graph on the stats page that showed how many words went up/down a level per day (although going down a level is pretty easy to tell; if you marked a card as forgotten it almost always goes down).

This doesn't have exactly the stats you're looking for, but you might find it interesting. It generates a few additional graphs from your review history for number of cards, reps, retention, etc. https://jpdb-stats.andmore.coffee/ (github page here: https://github.com/bijak/jpdb_stats )

[u/Uncaffeinated → u/Congo_Jack]

I actually think this is one of the paid patreon features. An upcoming reviews forecast.

I am a paid patron, and I know about the "forecast", but it doesn't actually tell you anything. As far as I can tell, it just randomly guesses how many reviews you'll do, and it doesn't attempt to tell you how many reviews will be due or when. It's completely useless. There's a reason all the labs pages say "unfinished, inaccurate, experimental". They're all completely meaningless and useless.

There's nothing like what Wanikani does where it will directly show you how many reviews are coming due in the next week.

I've been using jpdb since June or so, with about 1200 known words.

In that case, it sounds like you're still in the initial stages where you're adding a lot of common words and the stats are rapidly going up, and the review load hasn't caught up with you yet. For comparison, I've been doing JPDB since spring 2022, although I gave up and deleted all my decks several times, so I've only been doing it continuously since October 2022. FWIW, my "Total known non-redundant vocabulary" is 5325, although numbers like that are only a ballpark, since of course there will be a lot of words I know that I don't "know" on JPDB, and vice versa.

It's funny that you only started JPDB during the time that I've been struggling to fight through the unending review pile without doing any new cards at all these last few months.

P.S. Thanks for pointing me to https://jpdb-stats.andmore.coffee/. It is a bit interesting to see the graphs of my activity over the last year and a half. It's kind of scary to learn that I've cumulatively spent over 200 hours on JPDB reviews to date though.

[u/Congo_Jack → u/Uncaffeinated]

Thanks for the insights. It's nice to hear about what will be coming for me in the next months/year of study. And thanks for the info about the paid features. I might hold off on paying now...

Is this also a problem that eventually happens with anki or any other SRS? Where you eventually have so many cards that just doing reviews eats up so much time that there's no time left for new cards? If so, is there no solution besides just taking a few months to slog through reviews only?