New course: Wild Arms Vocabulary!
The first entry in one of my all-time favorite RPG series, Wild Arms’s setting is composed of a unique blend of classic medieval fantasy, Wild West, and sci-fi themes, which works surprisingly well.
Be warned: this course is difficult! It contains a grand total of 3,172 words/expressions, split between three ‘acts’, and includes a number of advanced vocab. Be ready for a challenge if you take it on!
Enjoy, and feel free to share any feedback! ^ _ ^
Oh boy, over 8k words? And I’ve barely made a dent in your other courses!
Haha, it’s certainly going to take a while to get through! I’ve been learning in the course for over a month now, getting through an average of about 45 items per day, and I still don’t plan on finishing until March! 
ooh, I find that interesting; I’m going to try your strategy. For your courses, I’ve been doing the first level of the three sets, then the other two the next day. But maybe doing all three one day would hammer them into my brain better.
I’ve actually been trying to space them out at least ten days or so apart from each other, to try to avoid having, say, the kanji and kana tests for the same item come up for review on the same day later. So for example, an average day would see me planting something like the 30th kana level, the 20th kanji level, and the 10th readings level.
That’s the theory anyway. In practice it doesn’t go quite so smoothly. I try to only plant the kanji and readings levels when the ‘time until next review’ on every item in the previous level is several days away, so mistakes end up setting the system back, and I’ll often find myself skipping days for the kanji/readings because none of them are ready, then doing whole batches at once.
So today, I planted Lv. 125 for kana, and now I’m working through 84, 87, 90, and 93 for kanji, then 61, 64, and 67 for readings. It’s a busy day!
I’d be interested in any impressions if you try learning all three sets at once though. I haven’t actually tried that myself yet.
Are you finished with all your other courses? Because I feel as though if you were doing, say, two or three simultaneously, you could do kanji reading on course A level 100 , kana on course B level 80, and kanji on course c level 50. That way you wouldn’t have to wait for the time until next review.
I shall try the three sets soon and report back haha.
That’s an interesting idea. I might try that sometime. But yeah, so far I’ve been sticking to one course at a time for the ones I make, and measuring when I’m due to run out of items so I know when to start work on the next.
The Zelda course, volume 13 of Yotsubato, and volume 2 of Fairy Tail are exceptions though, since I built those ahead of schedule, and I’m currently only planting in them when I need a boost for their daily goals. Maybe I’ll play around a bit with your idea in those when I get some time.
Hey @TinyCaterpillar,
Have you by any chance read 風の谷のナウシカ? I know there’s this course (https://www.memrise.com/course/973633/nausicaa-of-the-valley-of-the-wind-1-no-typing/), but I’m mainly asking wondering if by chance you have read it, then you might know which of your courses has overlapping vocabulary.
Hi, @TheFour-GatedDanzig.
I actually just bought the first book in the series, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. I’d be willing to see what I can do about making a list of overlaps though. I went ahead and copied the course’s vocab to a spreadsheet, so that’s already a chunk of the work done.
Would you only want the list to show overlaps with my courses? Or would you want the N5-N3 courses included as well? Also bear in mind that my checking system isn’t perfect. I make searches in my ‘master file’ for each word’s kana form, since the kanji can vary. This means that I may miss matches that use alternate readings of the kanji, like ふるさと and こきょう for 故郷. And while I try to catch these, I may also miss cases where one uses hiragana and one uses katakana, like とかげ and トカゲ.
In any case, just let me know about which courses to include, and I can try to get to it when I have the time. 
Here’s the vocab list for the course. I’ll update it with overlap notes later:
いい出来じゃない！さすが、TinyCaterpillar-博士。
I was mainly asking because I’m slowly going through the Yotsubato, the Fairy Tail, and the Shining Voice at the moment. And I was wondering if there happened to be one of your courses that you knew of which shared a lot of the vocabulary with the manga, if that makes sense. Like you made the Wild Arms course which inadvertently has 80% of the same vocab or something. BUT, since you haven’t read the manga, obviously no way for you to know haha.
With your spreadsheet, I could just cross-reference so you don’t have to do more work. Thanks:sunglasses:
Haha, happy to help! 
Feel free to let me know if such a list would help in the future!
New course: Monster World III Vocabulary!
This was a fun little ‘metroidvania’ type platformer game released early in the Sega Genesis days, with some RPG elements and a light story. It was also the very first game that I played from start to finish in Japanese!
I had actually built a course for this game a while ago, just after finishing with the first volume of Fairy Tail, but I decided at the time to try to bundle all video game vocab into one private course. I was naive enough back then to worry that they’d be too small to warrant their own courses. (points to Wild Arms xD)
This one however is a small course, totaling only 135 words/expressions. Because it’s the first video game course I had built though, it contains some useful, common words that I didn’t cover in the later courses. There’s one more small game that was in the same private course, and I’ll be releasing its separate course next. (I’d be very surprised if anyone here’s ever played it!)
This comes with a new update to my courses as well, which I’m pretty excited about: Screenshots! Starting with this course, and continuing into future and previously made courses as well, as I can find the time, I’m going to try to share the full screenshots that I had taken as I played through the games, aiming to get every single line of dialogue that I could find. I can say from experience that these make for fantastic reading practice, and I highly recommend giving them a try if you’re learning Japanese, even if you aren’t taking my courses. For those of you who are taking the courses though, I will be adding another column to their databases as they get their screenshots uploaded, showing which screenshot the word or expression was taken from. When you’re learning something in the course and are curious how it was actually used in context, it’s now as simple as referencing the number and opening up the matching screenshot to have a look! It’s my hope that these screenshots will serve as both an entertaining source of reading practice as well as a useful companion to the courses.
Again, this feature will start with only Monster World III. It takes a lot of a time and work to get the screenshots sorted out and uploaded, so I want to see how they’re received for starters. Likewise, I ask everyone who downloads the screenshots to please respect how much work was put into gathering them, and to refrain from redistributing them without my permission. If you want to share them, please instead link back to this thread’s first post! Finally, I will naturally only be providing screenshots for the video game courses. If you’re looking for copies of the books, I recommend buying them from an online store like CDJapan. I do however plan to eventually add a similar column to the manga courses, so that those with the books can track down where the entries were taken from.
The download link for the screenshots (as well as any future batches) can be found on this thread’s first post.
Enjoy! And please feel free to share any feedback that you may have! ^ _ ^
They should give you http://community.memrise.com/badges/4/leader now as a reward for making their Japanese section so much better.
I’ve made a small update to all of my courses today.
Memrise recently removed the color-coding feature in tests that allowed users to easily see at a glance which column they were currently being tested on in reviews. And according to this post, it sounds unlikely that it will be returning. Some users, like myself, heavily relied on that feature in their reviews.
In an effort to somewhat replicate the effect, I’ve added circles (●) to the prompt for kanji tests. With nothing to rely on but the words “Kana” and “Kanji” to differentiate between the two types of tests, it became necessary to make a conscious effort during each test to look straight at the words underneath the prompt, since the two words look very similar out of the corner of one’s eye. I personally found this extra step to add both time and distraction to the tests. The circles are intended to make it easier to see at a glance which field you’re being tested on. If there are circles, you type kanji; if not, you type kana.
As always, I’m open to feedback. If anyone finds it to be distracting, I’m willing to give it some more thought. I’ve tested this a bit in the Wild Arms course though, and I’ve found it to help me quickly figure out which column I was being tested on, so hopefully it can be a positive change for everyone else, too!
Thanks to @demonhead for the idea!
Works well!
Yo, I saw you were building volume 9 for Fairy Tail. Are 2-8 going to be like the first one with 1k+ words? Just wondering~
My fingers are crossed on the first volume being the biggest by far. lol I’ve gathered a lot of vocab from other sources since then, and I’ve decided to stick to only including new words for now, opting instead to leave the door open for building ‘supplemental’ levels with vocab covered in other courses later.
Counting only the unique entries, volume 1 has 379, while volume 2 has 272. Since I haven’t finalized the others yet, they may change counts slightly, but here are the current numbers:
Volume 3: 130
Volume 4: 160
Volume 5: 106
Volume 6: 147
Volume 7: 133
Volume 8: 85
Volume 9: 202
So nothing coming too close to the first volume, but it’ll still be a pretty hefty amount!
Ah, that’s good news. I’ll be able to learn the vocabulary quicker and read the volumes then, lol. Thanks!
New course: Sorcerer’s Kingdom Vocabulary!
Going by the title, “Sorcer Kingdom” in Japan, this was my second game in Japanese, and a very nostalgic one from my childhood. It’s a fairly standard early RPG for the most part, though it has some interesting ideas like turn-based strategy type battles that use the current terrain when you encounter an enemy, and character stats that level according to how you fight, rather than traditional level ups. It also has (in my opinion) a wonderful soundtrack. The final boss theme remains one of my favorite Sega Genesis songs to this day.
This course contains a total of 364 words/expressions, and the download link for its screenshots can be found in the first post.
Enjoy, and feel free to share any feedback! ^ _ ^