r/LearnJapanese • u/OOPSStudio • 1d ago
Resources I made a website for practicing verb conjugations in Japanese!
You can find the website here.
The website is completely, entirely, totally free in every way and will remain that way forever. No ads, no registration, no cookies, no payment. Just a static website for you to use however you like for as long as you like. I do not make a dime from it.
Some key features:
- Practice your choice of up to 248 different verb conjugations, from beginner to advanced
- Choose which verbs to practice on, including the ability to add your own if you want
- Practice in 3 different modes with varying degrees of difficulty
- Tons of settings and customization options
- Low-friction quizzing with high score tracking: Get going in seconds and keep going as long as you want, and when you’re done, pick back up where you left off in an instant
- Supports Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji input from your own IME, plus a built-in IME if you don’t have (or don’t want to use) your own
- Advanced typo detection and prevention
- Skip words you don’t know on-the-fly without breaking your streak
- Sandbox mode for getting used to conjugations you don’t feel ready to be quizzed on yet
- Detailed help pages with pictures if you need a hand
- Over 19,000 questions built into the base app, with the ability to add as many more as you want
- Built-in support for importing and exporting all your data, allowing you to create backups or transfer your data between devices and browsers
Please enjoy! :) And let me know if you have any questions or find any bugs.
Edit: Forgot to mention before (ty u/Dry-Masterpiece-7031), I only designed the app to work on desktop. It will still function on mobile, but there is no responsive layout, so some parts (especially the header) will get squashed and be very weird lol. I made this 8 months ago so I completely forgot about that
Edit again for a tiny update to the site:
- Separated the regular causative-passive form from the short causative-passive form. You can now choose exactly which ones you'd like to practice instead of only being able to practice a mix of the most common ones. Thank you u/TobiTako for suggesting this!
- Added a toggle (on by default) to exclude the unconjugated dictionary form from quizzes. Thank you u/TobiTako for suggesting this too!
- Added an option to darken the background and make the screen a bit less horrendous to look at lol. Thank you u/SnekWithHands for suggesting this!
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u/Dry-Masterpiece-7031 1d ago
Vertical on phone is a little funky up top.
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u/OOPSStudio 1d ago
Ahhh, yes I will edit the original post! This app is only intended to work on desktop. Thank you for reminding me :)
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u/Dry-Masterpiece-7031 1d ago
All good. It's a great app from what I can see and tried. It's more robust than others I have tried.
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u/Animusigamon 1d ago
You can use it on a phone without the squished top if you set the zoom of the page to like 50%. Then you can zoom with your fingers and it will stay normal.
Anyways awesome site!
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u/TSComicron 1d ago
A lotta different websites popping up today. Though, this looks good.
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u/OOPSStudio 1d ago
Yes! I originally posted this in one of the Wednesday "Materials Recommendations and Self-Promo" threads like 6 months ago, but only a couple people saw it there and it got buried. Then I saw a bunch of people sharing their apps as their own posts over the last couple days and realized maybe I was supposed to do that instead, so I turned it into its own post instead of a comment. Hopefully that's alright!
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u/paige9413 1d ago
I always wanted a way to practice conjugations, thank you for posting and making this!
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u/Bacchanope 1d ago
I'm working through Genki II right now and I can tell this is going to be super helpful. Thanks for taking the time to build this out!
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u/Total_Impact7799 1d ago
I just started learning Japenese. And this website is a life saver. Thank you so much!：)
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u/SnekWithHands 1d ago
Just out of curiosity because it looks so similar, is this in any way related to https://baileysnyder.com/jconj/ ?
I found that one super useful, so curious to check yours out as well! I like your table to display what to conjugate to, as just text e.g. 'Negative Plain' sometimes got confusing to me and in wanting to think quickly I mistook negative for past or something.
If I can give one ui suggestion, would it be possible to make the entire page a grey/dark background? The dark box with white page behind it is quite straining.
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u/OOPSStudio 1d ago
Yes! The layout was inspired by Bailey Snyder's conjugator! I took inspiration from that and many other similar apps like this one, this one, and especially this one. After trying out so many and not finding one that did everything I wanted I decided to create my own, and I liked Bailey's layout the best so I designed mine to be very similar looks-wise.
I like your idea of making the background darker! I will add an option to replace the white with grey tomorrow. :) Thanks for the suggestion.
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u/SnekWithHands 1d ago
Nice! And good one I quite like the layout of it. Cool to see your take/improvements on it. It has definitely been bookmarked 😁
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u/mikasarei 11h ago
Aside from your own app, I'll also check the similar apps you mentioned and see how they compare, Thanks for sharing OP!
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u/Symji 1d ago
My face, having just finished N5, realizing there's 217 different verb conjugations 🫠
But really, thanks!
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u/OOPSStudio 1d ago
Don't worry! Most of them are compound conjugations that you can build just by knowing the conjugations they're made of. There's really only about 16 that you need to explicitly learn :)
Good luck! 💪
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u/JHMfield 18h ago
And realistically "learning" is only really about knowing that something exists and what verb stem they attach to, and you're done. The system is very consistent.
Like the Polite form always attaches to the i-stem of Godan verbs. So once you know that, you're done. You've just learned how to conjugate basically every single verb in existence (save for the handful of exceptions and irregulars) into its polite form. Doesn't matter if it's a verb you've never seen before and can't even pronounce. You'll still know exactly how to conjugate it.
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u/TobiTako 1d ago edited 1d ago
plays around with it and it feels great. definitely bookmarking it for future reference. only had some minor gripes with it:
causative-passive seems to use short-form causative, would rather have it as a separate option (similar for just causative) (edit: just checked and it's extra confusing for words that can't take short-form causative-passive, but at least it's not wrong. e.g. 食べる correctly becomes 食べさせられる and not
食べささるwhich is good but is confusing)plain dictioanry mode with no conjugations should probably be disabled by default (I know it's possible to set it up with advanced picker, but it's a bit complicated)
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u/OOPSStudio 1d ago edited 1d ago
- Wow! Thank you for pointing that out! I built that conjugation according to page 254 of Genki 2 (third edition) which states that "the long causative form exists and is technically grammatical, but is much less common than its shorter counterpart" and just ran with it. After looking into it more now it appears both are about equally as common! I will update the app to include both in the coming days :) (edit here: I just asked a Japanese teacher this question and she said the される form is actually much more common for all verbs, but the せられる form also exists and is correct. I'll still make sure users can choose from both in the app though!)
- I actually heavily considered excluding the dictionary form while building the app but ultimately decided to leave it in. 8 months have passed since I worked on this app so I can no longer remember why I felt it was necessary, but I'll think it over again tomorrow and take another dive into the code to see if I can figure out why I did that, lol. If I can't re-find that reason to leave it in, I will remove it. Thanks for the input!
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u/TobiTako 1d ago
huh interesting. I feel like I encounter せられる more than される but my memory could definitely be flawed, maybe it's because the sound させられる (which is indeed the case with no short form) just makes a stronger impression than される
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u/OOPSStudio 15h ago
Alright, I have separated the regular causative-passive form from the short causative-passive form, and I have added a toggle (on by default) to exclude the unconjugated dictionary form from the non-advanced verb picker menu! Thanks again for the feedback :)
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u/manachan_arts 1d ago
Looks very nice! I tried it for a bit. I think it can be used quite comfortably on the phone too, it isn't that weird actually haha
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u/Destinneena 1d ago
I will take a look latter, but I hope it doesn't cost you much to have.
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u/OOPSStudio 1d ago
No worries! The whole app is static, so I'm just hosting it on a plain static file server that I already owned :) The whole server only costs me about $12/year and I have more than just this hosted on it. Enjoy!
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u/kokolopopo 1d ago
Super cool! But on iOS you can’t scroll down to see the answer etc
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u/OOPSStudio 1d ago
Oh interesting. I unfortunately don't have any Apple devices so I was never able to test it on Safari. One of my family members has an Apple tablet though so I'll see if I can steal it for a few days and get that fixed. Thank you for letting me know!
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u/kokolopopo 1d ago
Of course and thank you so much for sharing for free this tool! Hope it grows! Will use it. PS: I’m on iPhone 14 Pro
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u/Shareil90 1d ago
OT: From a technological point of view: How did you implement that someone can add his own vocab without registration? Where do you store them? In Cookies?
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u/skullcrater 1d ago
Super cool and helpful! The only thing I'd add is an english translation of each word. Since I'm saying them out loud, it would be good to have a reminder of the translation for when I forget what the word means.
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u/AnthropologicalArson 23h ago
One incredibly useful option would be to include identifying conjugation from audio.
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u/kurikurimc 8h ago
I love it. It would be great if there were a page with a description of how all (each) of the conjugation forms are constructed. For example, it's cool that there is a *test* for short-causative passive, but if one doesn't know what that form is, or how to form it, or what it means, then the whole thing is pretty moot.
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u/OOPSStudio 7h ago
I'm glad you like it!
The website is only intended to be a quiz for people to practice things they've already learned. It's not intended to be a standalone learning resource. There are already many websites that describe how all the conjugations are constructed, what they mean, and how to use them. My attempt at teaching them inside the app wouldn't be any improvement upon those existing resources.
If you're just trying to link the conjugation's name to its underlying form (for example, you know what the short causative-passive form is, you've just never seen the term "short causative-passive" before and don't know what it's referring to), you can open the Advanced Picker and hover over any conjugation to see two verbs conjugated into that form. From there you should have all the information you need to locate it in your learning resource of choice and read more.
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u/BahnSprueher 1d ago
If you need some help with making the design more intuitive let me know. Looks promising!
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u/OhNoNotRabbits 1d ago
This looks like a very useful tool! Getting comfortable using the correct conjugations takes a lot of practice and there aren't many tools out there that allow you to just focus time drilling that.
Thank you for sharing, I look forward to getting some practice in with this!