Vocabulary based on the books みんなの日本語 I/II (Minna no Nihongo 1&2).
All definitions have both furigana and kanji where available (ex. わたし;私), providing either will be considered as correct (romaji is accepted too but without spaces). Audio, part of speech and preferred writing are provided. Knowledge of hiragana/katakana is assumed.
I noticed that the expressions can make the course quite tricky at times, so I’m thinking about moving them to a final lesson. I’ll implement this after some time as there are active learners.
Hi! I have been using your course for almost a year now and it has been extremely helpful. I was wondering if I could be allowed to add in extra sections for each of the chapters (e.g. Lesson 1 Extra Vocab). This is because there is some vocab that is covered on the extra pages of each chapter which are not covered in the main lessons, but are still probably worth knowing. I probably wouldn’t include everything as some vocab is virtually pointless, but there are some extra words / pieces of vocab that are probably worth knowing.
Provided that you are happy / ok to allow me to do this, would you be able to tell me how I would add the audio for each of the words (just because the audio aspect of your memrise course is the main reason I liked it so much). Thanks
Hi @Kevin_Longe10 , it sounds like a good idea to add additional vocabulary though it might be better through a separate course. I did something similar while studying Chinese (https://www.memrise.com/course/470362/pavc-supplementary-vocabulary/)
It’s a supplementary course containing additional vocabulary from the series of books I used and extra stuff that got mentioned in the classroom.
An added benefit is that you can cover more than just book 1 or 2, but relevant vocab that you feel might be missing from the official books.
Should you want to go ahead creating such a course I’d gladly help. As for the audio, it comes directly from Google Translate. I’ll PM you the link to the tool I use for that.
Yeah, that sounds good. If you could send me the link to the tool you use on google translate that would be great
As far making the course goes, should I name it “「みんなの日本語 I」 Minna no Nihongo Supplementary Vocabulary”? Also, would you want me to add you as a moderator (or however it works)?
In addition to that, would you prefer if I tried to figure out how to make the course using an excel file, so that its easier to make changes or merge things if necessary? (just curious, because I have never tried to make a memrise course with an excel file before)
Hi @Kevin_Longe10, using a spreadsheet is indeed advised, even if it were to just have an offloaded copy of your course. Using this also makes it easier to perform bulk uploads (as columns are tab delimited). The course will be your creation, the title looks good as it is a supplement to the books. You could add me as a contributor so I can help out, though at the moment I’m working on a few other courses in Chinese but also experimenting with sentence based ones (including one for the MinnaNoNihongo books).
Building a course is pretty easy, though do prepare properly and check what fields you want to have in your course since it becomes difficult to make a structural change once you started creating lessons. With these I mean, any additional information you want to display in the character/word overview as well as attributes you might want to show as additional info.
For the spreadsheet, use a column for each bit of information you’re gonna use. The ones I used for the course are:
Japanese word/expression [わたし;私]
English translation [I; me]
Preferred writing [私]
Part of Speech [[Part of Speech]: Pronoun, No-adjective]
Verb form
Alternatives [_watashi]
I added “preferred writing” as some words can be written using kanji but are usually written in hiragana instead. The “Alternatives” are alternative answers, you can get right answers in romaji if you wanted but sometimes you could have more correct answers like: “jaa arimasen” vs “deha arimasen”, people prefer one or the other and both are correct. This is not a visible column in the course but added manually as alternative answers. The “Audio” column is missing but needs to be added in the course and manually updated.You could add more columns depending on what you think will benefit learning your course… for example add an sample sentence in the word overview? Or, a dictionary lookup etc… whatever you might feel is missing but could help the learning process.
Ah ok, that sounds good. Just to check about the excel stuff, would I put the column headings in exactly the same fashion you have? For example, looking at this video:
Would I do exactly the same thing, but just with your headings (e.g. Japanese word/expression for the first heading)? Thanks
Hi @Kevin_Longe10, It depends on your preferences. What kind of content do you want to display and in what order? You create the columns in Excel and Memrise independently, though their content needs to match. In Excel you can skip the audio column.
The video shows how to bulk upload, basically its a tab-delimited entry.
Ah ok. In truth, I am still a little bit confused. I tried testing out the bulk upload thing with a old course of mine by adding a new database and then a new level. This is what I got:
My questions are basically as follows:
It seems to be saying, however, that I need to choose a certain amount of word per level, which I don’t want, because it will vary depending on the level. Can I just exceed this limit on a given level, do I have t be under it, or do I need to exactly meet it?
Hi @Kevin_Longe10.
The alternative answers aren’t in a column on Memrise. When you edit a course, next to the “Japanese Word/Expression”, an “Alt” button appears, after you click this you can add alternative answers.
When bulk adding, I never got prompted to specify a number to add; I just pasted whatever. The underscore is to hide the alternative answer from the overview page (when you get a new word for the first time).
@oli2904
Hi there, I was digging into the forum postings and this is the closest posting to what I am looking for. If you would care to give your insight I would most certainly appreciate it. Do you know if there is a way to add Alternatives (Alt’s) during the initial bulk upload? It seems like it’s only feasible one at a time and only after the upload.
With no access to the real columns (database tables and their fields) one can only try to guess what format would work.
Thanks.
Okanogan.
