Maybe it is an app issue but the audio for おぎゃあ in level two of the Zelda course sounds strange.
Thanks for creating these courses. I’ll try the Zelda course once I’ve made more progress on the basic courses.
Thanks, @Marcus.W! I hope you enjoy the course. 
I’ve put in a request on Forvo, and I’ll see what I can do about getting the audio replaced. I’ll update here later.
Edit: The audio’s now been replaced with a new clip. Please feel free to let me know if you notice any other issues! ^ _ ^
TinyCaterpillar, do you have a group link for your courses?
I just made one. Bear in mind that due to how the ‘groups’ system works, clicking this link will add you to every course that I’ve published, and unless you leave the group, any courses in the list that you quit will be added again whenever you go to the groups page.
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Is there a recommended order to take these courses?
Not exactly, since all of the courses that I’ve made so far are simply vocabulary found within the respective manga/video game. The courses were built in a certain order though, and the later courses do not cover the vocabulary that’s already been covered in previous courses. Certain sources will have more difficult vocab, but I still feel that they’re all accessible if you’re interested in the source material.
If you were to want to follow the courses in the order that they were made (this is what I’ve been doing as I make them), here’s the current list, in order:
1: Yotsubato Vocabulary (Vol. 1-12)
2: Fairy Tail Vocabulary (Vol. 1)
5: Shining Force Vocabulary
6: Langrisser Vocabulary
7: Beyond the Beyond Vocabulary
10: Legend of Zelda Vocabulary (OoT Vol. 1-2)
11: Yotsubato Vocabulary (Vol. 13)
12: Fairy Tail Vocabulary (Vol. 2)
(The missing numbers are courses that I’m still working on, that I plan to publish later. I’ll be updating the list in my first post to reflect this order when they’re finished.)
I suppose this list would be the closest I have to a recommended order. I don’t think there’s any real harm in doing them in any other order though. If it were me, I would pick one where I’m interested in the source material, and go through the course as I read the books/play the game, so that I could learn the vocab with context. I don’t know what your current level is, but I personally think that Yotsubato is a great manga for early reading (it was the very first thing that I seriously read in Japanese), and the vocab is probably the most beginner-friendly in that list.
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Thanks for that detailed answer. I’m still a beginner but learning kanji so I’ll follow your suggestion.
@TinyCaterpillar, do we get to have a sneak peek at what your next course is going to be? RPG or manga (or novel?!)?
I was looking at 惡の華 today. You might be interested in it – surprised how easy it was.
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Sure! The course I’m working on now is for the PS1 game, Wild Arms. It’s going to be a huge course, estimated to have over 3,000 entries! :o It’s unsurprisingly taking quite a while to build, but I hope to have it finished by the end of next month at the latest.
It’ll be RPGs for the next while, actually. I plan to build public courses for the first two small games I played in Japanese: Monster World III (more of a platformer/RPG) and Sorcerer’s Kingdom after that, then I’ve got Suikoden, which should be about half the size of Wild Arms. I’m planning to build volumes 3-9 for Fairy Tail after that, then it’s back to RPGs, with the first two games in the Atelier series. (My first Japanese exclusive games! :D)
I’ll be getting back to making manga courses eventually (I’m eyeing Cardcaptor Sakura at the moment), but I’ve been shifting between the manga and games as I feel the need for a change of pace. I actually played and gathered the material for Wild Arms and Suikoden about a year ago, so I’m still in my ‘gaming mood’ right now. lol
And thanks for the recommendation! I hadn’t heard of that series before, so I’ll look into it. It seems to be available on CDJapan, so maybe I’ll throw the first volume into my next order. I’m always happy to be introduced to more reading material. I ended up buying the first book in the Magic Tree House series after seeing one of your posts a while back, though I haven’t gotten to it quite yet. (So hard to find time these days >_<) I haven’t tried reading any Japanese novels yet, so that should make for a nice first step into that territory.
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Oh, wow, great to see all of the things you have planned, haha! Always curious about your courses since you have great layouts and good taste for vocabulary to facilitate hopping into native material. I look forward to more.
Aku no Hana is… strange in the beginning. I’ve read the whole thing in French, and it captures the closed-off feeling of a small Japanese mountain village with lots of teenage angst. It’s worth a read, just don’t let the initial premise (highly deviant as mimesis to Baudelaire’s work) put you off.
I still need to read my Magic Tree House stuff~ I took a break from my Japanese, like I said before, to hone in on my other skills; now I gotta focus 
. I was looking at amazon, and there’s a very famous German author whose books I’ve read. Many have been translated into Japanese, and I think you’d be surprised how well you can read them (this is my pushing you to read more novels because I’m betting you can do so easily after all the courses you’ve made).
Check the first pages for this one:
There’s also 吉本ばなな’s キッチン, which is always recommended as a first novel. There is a course on it, too. https://www.memrise.com/course/634891/-10712/
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Thanks! I’m glad to hear that!
Both of those were unfamiliar to me too, so I’ll add them to my list. I was able to read all of the preview pages without too much trouble, though I still have to go very slowly and consult my dictionary regularly. (It amazes me how often I still run into new words after all this time! lol)
I should probably start finding some time every day to do some casual Japanese reading. I tend to feel pressured to mine everything I read for vocabulary as much as I can, then try to make a course with it, but that of course takes much longer than simply reading the book. It’s probably time for me to start trying to learn some things passively, as I did with English.
Thanks again for the recommendations! I’ve got them all bookmarked now, and I’ll try to get my hands on some copies.
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Haha, the thing with running into new words is… it never stops. Professors who translate (or just translators in general) sit down with their dictionaries. So, no hope there. What I’ve done in other languages is read extensively (like how you would in whatever tongues you’re comfortable) and just jot down any words I don’t know onto a notepad. Then whenever I get around to it, I’ll add them to my memrise courses. That way, the reading flow isn’t interrupted, but at the same time, I’m not losing those words. Of course, if I psych myself out and can’t be bothered to pick up a pen, then I’m happy to read novels completely uninterrupted!
Once last recommendation I forgot, which you might like. There’s a terrific website on Soseki.
Many of his novels there with full audio, translations if you want them, and vocabulary lists. Really excellent. Hats off to whomever made it.
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Haha, that’s true. I’ve made peace with the fact that it won’t stop. Though it would be nice for them to start to become less frequent eventually. lol I’ve been keeping records lately of the average rate that I add new vocab to my lists for the screenshots from my games. Atelier Marie, the game I just finished, had a rate of about one new entry per three screenshots on average, and felt pretty manageable and enjoyable. Anything more frequent than that and I start to feel stressed out. lol Wild Arms came to about one for every two screenshots, and was an enormous project. (Though it was also a much larger game) I’d be happy to someday get to something closer to one for every five.
I was taking a similar approach with writing down the vocab when I first started reading the manga, but I eventually fell out of the habit when I began to restrict my reading to when I was actually ready to make the courses. I think I’ll give that another try, as I was getting through books pretty quickly when I was taking that approach. I just need to remind myself not to stress out about the ‘backlog’ on building the courses.
Wow, that really is an amazing resource! Thanks for sharing it! I really like the mouse-over translation feature. I’ve seen a handful of sites with similar features, but they were all done automatically, and were unfortunately very often incorrect. This one was clearly done by hand, which was undoubtedly a lot of work.
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All the effort you put into your courses is going to be repaid, no worries. You’ll be much better off for the time you spent, and your future self will be thanking you.
Mhm, clearly a labor of love at the Soseki sight. I need to read those novels and again and again until I can do them easily. Oh, the joys of learning Japanese. If you want to make a course based on the website, I will be the first to line up 
Actually, the backlog thing is interesting. I’m at the point in most of my languages where I can read without much problems, but I still feel tied down to memrise. To the degree that it’s affecting some travel related stuff because I’m worried about not having internet and coming back a month later and it being hell to review all the items. I need to wean myself off instead of adding new courses, ugh.
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All your work on these courses are appreciated, it is nice to see well structured courses with good audio.
I’m not far enough in my studies to focus on these courses yet but I will return to the later, for now I will have the Fairy Tale one as a “bonus” to my other courses.
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@TheFour-GatedDanzig Thanks for the encouragement! I’ll keep at it! 
I’ll think about making courses for the site as I give it more of a look. If I could get their permission to copy their word lists, it should be a lot less work than my other courses, since such a large chunk of the work is gathering the material.
I can relate there. (Though I see that you have more than twice as many items as I do to juggle! :o) While I still feel quite a large dependency on using Memrise to drill each new word into my head, the daily review load has definitely started to feel rather cumbersome, and I feel like I might be better off spending some of the time elsewhere. I used to make it mandatory that I get through everything every day, but I’ve recently started giving myself some more flexibility on it. I now aim for the courses I’ve been learning in recently and the ones I have streaks for, then I do what I can with the others, but back off for the day if I get worn out or run low on time. I’m also seriously considering shelving some old courses and/or ignoring all of the kana tests that have matching kanji tests in my review cycle, since those are starting to feel a bit redundant.
I’m still crossing my fingers for some sort of option to freeze the review cycle temporarily, so we don’t have to stress out about things like that coming up. I don’t travel often myself, but we all have days where we should be worrying about other things. lol
@Marcus.W Thanks! I’m happy if they can be of some help! 
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God, I wish that freezing button existed. I reviewed all my stuff up until around ~15:35 yesterday. Busy for the rest of the evening. I can’t remember the last time I didn’t check a couple of hours before going to bed, but I didn’t yesterday… I wake up to almost 800 words for review. And that’s USING the site multiple times yesterday. BLAH.
BLAH I SAY.
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Haha, ouch! I start having problems when my daily load gets to half of that. I’d go crazy long before dealing with that many all at once! xD
Good luck in getting through it!
Hey, @TinyCaterpillar
What do you think about the audio for level 14 of Shining Force きらく? To me, sounds like the man is saying ひらく, but I’m probably wrong.
Hi, @TheFour-GatedDanzig.
After giving it a few more listens, it sounds like it may be one of those files that got part of it cut off. That seems to happen with the files on Forvo sometimes. I’ve replaced it with another one, which I think sounds clearer. Thanks for the report!
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