This looks very cool, but I find it very hard to read the text against the moving background. The lights in the "windows" of the voxel building do not provide good contrast.
Fun. I studied Japanese for two years, let it slide and now every Kanji is like "Hmmm, I've seen that before but..." I can still read kana though, which is nice to know.
This site caused my iPhone to start playing music and wouldn’t stop until I rebooted. I’m on the latest security release of iOS. Something off about that.
I don't know why, but that was an extreme load on my computer/browser. The picture changed every ten-fifteen seconds, I don't know if that's intentional or not, but it wasn't something I wanted to watch. The computer fan ran at maximum and it was hard to get enough CPU to close the browser tab.
If you right click on the page, you can 'open image in new tab' and get an image of the current screen. I assume that means it is rendering an entirely new image each frame... which is a tad wild.
It's wild if it's running at 400 fps because nobody has a screen that refreshes at 400Hz. Every frame rendered past the screen refresh rate is wasted compute. Easily solved by limiting the frame rate.
It's not running at 400 fps, the UI has the current global listener count next to a button that says "fps". The fps is only shown once you click that button. Weird design, I know.
For me it showed 400 fps in the top left corner and my laptop fans spun up immediately as well. Seems to render frames continuously rather than waiting for the screen to refresh. Would probably be much less load when limited to 60 fps.
you listen to the audio and try to determine if you can either read or understand the audio. it's repeated twice, once formally and once casually, so good for listening practice, but also good for adding new words/phrases into your vocabulary since some of them might be familiar but maybe reconfigured in a way that you don't normally see in your practice.
this is probably only useful if you've started learning a very small amount of grammar, know hiragana well enough to make furigana useful, and have started memorizing enough kanji/vocab to make 'overheard train chatter' useful. probably, generously, something maybe 3-6 months into your japanese language journey, so not good for bootstrapping.
That makes sense. It seems a bit too slow to be really useful, as in, I feel like you'd want either to replay the audio as much as you want, or you can kind of listen passively/actively to something simple and slow.
Tokyo has very pleasant vibes. It's an amazing city. My brother lives there since 30 years and I've been many times (it's so far that when I go, I go for 3 months).
My daughter loves it and, motivated by having japanese family, she's currently trying to learn japanese.
I think she'll love that site (I'll show it to her as soon as she comes back home).
I think it's just one of the standard JP voice synthesisers available. I know I've heard almost exactly the same one on other Youtube videos using text-to-speech for Japanese.
As an addendum: Japanese isn't as all-in on pitch having semantics as Chinese, but pitch is very important. Words have "pitch accent" rather than "stress" the way English has, and overall pitch is strongly politeness-coded.
Speaking higher is politer, and noticeably dropping your pitch is threatening. You probably would pitch-up when speaking to your boss, and people working in shops or restaurants nearly sing welcome/thank you for coming type things.
Don't be smartass. My question was how to change pitch? Most people can't change their pitch unless they have been trained. I can't speak with the pitch of child or woman. Neither are most people.
So.. I know many people can read hiragana, but it is a very annoying habit of people who know a bit of Japanese to post un-transliterated Japanese text on an English language forum. For someone who doesn’t know Japanese your post reads ‘IIRC it’s a popular TTS character called ??NOT?FOR??YOU??’ - it communicates no information.
Writing ‘a popular TTS character called ずんだもん (zundamon)’ takes you very little time and gives readers a little more to work with, and which they can use to Google English language resources on the subject if they are interested.
Thank you for calling this weeb-ass behavior out. I’ve seen it online for nearly 25 years. I just picture the poster as a white man in silk shirt with a framed mounted katana on his wall.
Copy-pasting "ずんだもん" into Google gives you everything you want with the sidebar info, copy pasting "zundamon" into Google gives the same Wikipedia link on the sidebar. "Popular TTS character called" is enough to imply that what follows is the name, that you can then search.
Try to be more generous with your change requests - not everyone has enough time to fix every bug in their comment.
The strongest plausible interpretation is that when keywords are in another language, it is best to give the keyword rather than the Anglecised version (which is so often incorrect e.g. Huawei's Tau[1]). It is also plausible that English is their second language.
I get the same feeling. There’s a lack of polish and intentionality to it. It’s a cool idea and a nice demo, and there’s certainly a lot of buttons and features.
But it’s been laggy on my device, it’s visually distracting, and the UX doesn’t seem particularly well-suited for practicing Japanese.
The voice does not sound like a native speaker. I don't mean it sounds like a non-human character, I mean something is subtly off. Timing or something. Is that intentional? Maybe pick a different TTS solution?
Meanwhile I am sitting in an InterCity"Express" train in Germany, which already started 14 minutes late, and somehow managed to drive so slowly, that at every stop another ~2 minutes were lost. Now just standing around at a stop, because of some medical emergency at the next station, and announced a delay of fucking 90 minutes. How long can it take to remove whoever causes the medical emergency from the tracks or wherever they are and continue driving? It is all so nuts here, all so idiotic. The last 10 times or so, that I have been traveling, every fucking time they have stupid issues.
And they don't even manage to have functioning displays inside the trains. Every now and then the displays are turned off. Why am I not allowed to see the up-to-date status?
Yep, but then what takes 1h? They must have had that multiple times already. Either get them off the tracks in whatever state they are in, or get them out of the train. I don't find it to be a good reason to punish the collective amount of all train passengers in any train in the vicinity by making everyone an hour late. It seems very unprofessional.
Medical assistance can be received outside of the train, or once medical professionals are on board, while the train moves to the next station at the very least, if it isn't there already.
First, i agree with you. Inconveniencing everyone is unacceptable when something ought to be taken care of as quickly as possible. That said…
if someone jumped in front of the train they probably need to get police, medical, and train teams out there. The police need to do a quick investigation and gather any evidence around tracks (could be foul play), the medical team needs to probably clean things up. You also probably need to have Inspectors for the train to check and make sure that the train and tracks are safe to continue.
Overall, having to get all three parties to the site and then assess and perform their duties, an hour seems pretty reasonable
The train has probably already hit them and they need to be cleaned off it because you don't want to give your train employees PTSD or you run out of employees.
I watched for a couple of minutes, and while it kept saying Japanese phrases, it just showed me floating by a large city landscape. Certainly nothing like being in a train.
Do you just need to wait a while to be in the train? Or for it to start?
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[ 1165 ms ] story [ 1906 ms ] threadThis could be a really useful tool.
What's wild about that? That's exactly what it's doing and what most uses of canvas/WebGL do.
this is probably only useful if you've started learning a very small amount of grammar, know hiragana well enough to make furigana useful, and have started memorizing enough kanji/vocab to make 'overheard train chatter' useful. probably, generously, something maybe 3-6 months into your japanese language journey, so not good for bootstrapping.
My daughter loves it and, motivated by having japanese family, she's currently trying to learn japanese.
I think she'll love that site (I'll show it to her as soon as she comes back home).
Speaking higher is politer, and noticeably dropping your pitch is threatening. You probably would pitch-up when speaking to your boss, and people working in shops or restaurants nearly sing welcome/thank you for coming type things.
Does the entire Japanese population learn these things while growing up?
Writing ‘a popular TTS character called ずんだもん (zundamon)’ takes you very little time and gives readers a little more to work with, and which they can use to Google English language resources on the subject if they are interested.
https://www.google.com/search?q=zundamon produces English language resources.
The strongest plausible interpretation is that when keywords are in another language, it is best to give the keyword rather than the Anglecised version (which is so often incorrect e.g. Huawei's Tau[1]). It is also plausible that English is their second language.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816034
But it’s been laggy on my device, it’s visually distracting, and the UX doesn’t seem particularly well-suited for practicing Japanese.
It would be more attractive to me if it's vocaloid
And they don't even manage to have functioning displays inside the trains. Every now and then the displays are turned off. Why am I not allowed to see the up-to-date status?
if someone jumped in front of the train they probably need to get police, medical, and train teams out there. The police need to do a quick investigation and gather any evidence around tracks (could be foul play), the medical team needs to probably clean things up. You also probably need to have Inspectors for the train to check and make sure that the train and tracks are safe to continue.
Overall, having to get all three parties to the site and then assess and perform their duties, an hour seems pretty reasonable
Do you just need to wait a while to be in the train? Or for it to start?