Comment by kouteiheika
2 years ago
I run a site for people learning Japanese (https://jpdb.io) as a side project. I'm currently at exactly ~$1996/month from Patreon donations. (It's not an aggressively monetized project.)
I've been doing this for over 2 years now. You can take a look at my changelog to see most of the updates (at the beginning I did not maintain a changelog so it doesn't start exactly when I started the site): https://jpdb.io/changelog
Can you share with us the main differentiator your product has over some behemoth like Google translate? I'm personally an occasional tourist to Japan only and wish I could find a course in "tourist essentials" or "Tourist fluent" Japanese
> Can you share with us the main differentiator your product has over some behemoth like Google translate?
You might as well ask how a screwdriver is different from an apple. (:
Google Translate, is, well, a translator. You give it text, and it translates it. That's it. My site's for people who want to actually learn Japanese to fluency, with a particular focus on media-based immersion.
For example, is there a Japanese anime you'd like to watch without subtitles? I can probably help with that; I have vocabulary lists for many shows, and the site can teach you (through flashcards/spaced repetition) most of the words you'll need to be able to understand it.
I also have a plugin for the mpv video player where (if you load appropriate Japanese subtitles for the show you're watching) the plugin will color-code all of the words according to whether you know them or not, and you'll also have access to a popup dictionary where you can just hover your mouse over any of the words and see their definition. You can also use the plugin to make vocabulary flashcards with the screenshot + audio from what you're watching; demo video by one of my users: https://streamable.com/ww6x0e
I can keep on going as there's a lot more, but I'll stop here! It's probably not appropriate for someone who just wants to learn a little bit of Japanese for tourism purposes.
This is wild for a side project?!?! I wish you had something like this for Dutch. I recently moved from America and something like this would be phenomenal. I can see why you have so many patron donations!
Thanks for making jpdb! Even without your srs system, just the catalogue of media and difficulty ratings has been monumental for immersion.
Wow, this is great! Love the simplicity of the website (focused on the essentials, no fancy design). Do you share the number of visitors / regular users?
A few thousand daily.
Not everyone uses every feature though; some people only use the dictionary, some people use the SRS, some people look at my difficulty lists, some people look at my vocabulary lists, some people only upload their Anki decks to see which shows/books/etc. have the most known vocabulary, etc.
$2000/m in two years is amazing. How are you marketing it? Is most of your traffic just from Google Search?
Oh hey! Thank you for developing this, it's a great resource!
Do you have any plans providing a Mandarin version of this?
Maybe someday, but not at this point.
I'd love to support other languages too, but at this point it isn't very feasible. I'm just a single man, and this is just a side project, so I simply don't have the resources to even do everything that I want to do with Japanese (and there's still so much more I want to add/improve!), never mind branching out into other languages.
I’m asking because I’m learning Mandarin at the moment and the features you listed are just so freaking cool. Wish to have that!