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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The evening mode has vibes of Ghost in the Shell's "chase UI", glimpses of which is in this scene:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amKt8ttja1E" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amKt8ttja1E</a>
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 am going to reach out to you via email. I like this project and I am building something similar. Maybe we can collaborate or keep in contact.
Voxel Tokyo has very pleasant vibes.
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).<p>My daughter loves it and, motivated by having japanese family, she's currently trying to learn japanese.<p>I think she'll love that site (I'll show it to her as soon as she comes back home).
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.<p>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?
This looks good and I like the idea but I don't get what the "practice" is here?
<i>very</i> cool and runs pretty nicely on my 2019 mac mini
This reminds me of Sim Copter from when I was a kid
any volume control? voice is a bit loud and i couldn't find anything to turn it down.
What a cool idea! Need something similar for Korean - perhaps the EverLine light rail line in Yongin.
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.<p>Do you just need to wait a while to be in the train? Or for it to start?
the experience for attempting to record my voice during practices is atrocious. the background music continues to play, and the obnoxious AI voice interrupted me at least twice, then it switched to "transcribing..." wth?<p>cute concept, please fix that flow..
Does this scale beyond N5/N4?<p>This could be a really useful tool.
Epic!
love the tunes
lovely
Slop
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.<p>But it’s been laggy on my device, it’s visually distracting, and the UX doesn’t seem particularly well-suited for practicing Japanese.
[flagged]
Looks nice, but what's the deal with Mickey Mouse voice? Is it sponsored by Disney or something?
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.
IIRC it's a popular TTS character called ずんだもん.
So.. I know many people can read hiragana, but it is a <i>very</i> 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.<p>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.
I did but I removed the English part, not because I assume people can read hiragana, but because I assume people will need to search it up anyway.
For me all the search results for <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=%E3%81%9A%E3%82%93%E3%81%A0%E3%82%82%E3%82%93" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=%E3%81%9A%E3%82%93%E3%81%A0%...</a> are in Japanese.<p><a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=zundamon" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=zundamon</a> produces English language resources.
fwiw i recognize "zundamon" (and many other romanized japanese names/terms) without needing to look them up, but can not read the japanese
Try to be more generous with your change requests - not everyone has enough time to fix every bug in their comment.<p>The strongest plausible interpretation is that when keywords are in another language, it is best to give the original language keyword rather than the anglecised/romanised version (which is so often incorrect e.g. Huawei's Tau[1]). It is also plausible that English is their second language.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816034">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816034</a>
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.
[flagged]
Doesn't really sound like ずんだもん tbh. Can't recall which voice it is however.
Japan likes their cutesy little-girl voices.
That is an anime voice.
[dead]
[dead]