掲示板 Forums - A little button to hide furigana in quizzes

Hello, everyone!

I love studying with Renshuu, and have a suggestion that could be helpful to other users too.

When I'm doing quizzes, my eyes go automatically to furigana.

Furigana is helpful, but this can be really frustrating when I already know the reading for that word, specially taking into consideration that most Japanese media doesn't use furigana. I keep thinking that this can become a crutch over time, and doesn't let my brain really try to remember and read without help.

I know we currently can mark words that we already know, and Renshuu will (sometimes) disable furigana for those. But going word for word is a lot of trouble. And if you forget one of those words, you have to navigate a few menus to mark it again as unknown. Kind of a hassle.

Here's what I thought: what if Renshuu had a slider button on top of quizzes, to turn furigana on and off for all Kanji?

This would allow users to disable and enable furigana at will, and should keep their settings saved between questions. It would also allow users to rely on furigana when they want to, without having to deal with knee-jerk eye reaction, and peripheral vision reading.

That's it!

Don't know if it's possible, or a good idea at all, but, thought it was worth bringing it up.

Thank you so much for your hard work on Renshuu, I'm having a lot of fun learning Japanese here!

I think it’s a great idea and would be really helpful, but it comes to マイコー to have the final say in this. I don’t know if he is still on vacation, he was a little while ago.

I made a little chrome extension that can do this. https://github.com/buruburukun/renshuu_furigana_toggle

This topic was brought up in discord as well, and while the discussion there was more about word questions (and not sentence based ones), allow me to post up the wall of text I put in there. I always hope (but never expect) that everyone will agree with me, but even if you don't, I hope this will clarify why things are the way they are. (sorry for the funky discord formatting)

1. It is interesting, but I am also extremely hesitant to add it. I did not read the full conversation above, but while I try to allow for as much freedom and customization as possible, I do have things built into renshuu that try to keep learners from cheating themselves (usually unintentionally).
   
2. [4:46 PM]By that, I mean I do not want to introduce systems that I feel are hindering their learning when a different approach would help them learn more and/or faster
   
3. [4:47 PM]renshuu is very unlike, well, almost all other apps because it doesn't treat Japanese like a flashcard. It's very convenient, no doubt, but flashcard-style quizzing (Japanese on one side (the question), and English on the other side (the answer) can be detrimental because it can be wholly unlinked with how we interact with the language in the real world
   
4. [4:49 PM]In addition, renshuu is not trying to just get you to learn enough Japanese to feel good - I truly want people to know that if they stick with renshuu, they can achieve a HUGE amount of progress over months and years - we're working towards fluency across all usages of the language
   
5. [4:49 PM]So 90% (this is a "guess" number, not something I have proof to back up) of the kanji usage a person is going to see if they are interacting with native texts/materials is going to NOT have any furigana on it
6. [4:50 PM]manga is the clear (and practically only) exception, but while manga has a ton of benefits as a learning material, it also kneecaps your kanji learning in a way because you can't control where your eyes go, and it's going to suck up the furigana next to the kanji whether you like it or not
1. That aside, to the best that I can, the questions in renshuu are meant to help simulate how you interact with the language
2. [4:51 PM]if you are telling renshuu "I want you to gauge my ability to read a term in kanji and know the meaning", I want to make sure renshuu is actually measuring that
3. [4:52 PM]Adding an optional furigana toggle would, simply put, get in the way of that measurement, and it would actually be "hey, do you know the meaning of the kana reading" - a still very useful recall skill, but not the one that specific vector is going for.
4. This is a bit of a stretch, but I often think of song lyrics when this topic pops up. There are so many songs that, if you told me to sing, I could not. However, if you showed me the previous line of the song, I could easily sing the next.
5. [4:54 PM]But if someone is saying "sing the song" (or if someone is telling you "read this kanji"), in a sense, they're not going to step in and help you
6. [4:56 PM]It would actually be trivial for me to add this in terms of time to make it (and I LOVE things that are easy to add - just look how cluttered the renshuu settings panel is, haha), so you might then think that I have a really good reason for not adding it. I naturally want to help people learn as much as they can, and I was an in-class teacher for almost 15 years, but I want to help people learn in the most productive way that I can.
   

All of this makes sense if the request is to be able to turn furigana on and off arbitrarily, for all kanji whenever encountered. But that’s not what I want.

When a sentence pops up that includes kanji the system thinks is new to me, and therefore furigana is appropriate, I still want it hidden until I click on “show furigana”.

As I use multiple tools and websites (heresy, I know!), I may already have seen a kanji that renshuu thinks is new to me. And I’d like the opportunity to use my age-atrophied brain to remember the reading, before renshuu tells me.

I do *not* want to be able to show furigana when the system has already decided that it’s more beneficial for me to do without.

Make sense?

I understand your point, マイコー, and, honestly, I agree.

Disabling/enabling all furigana would get in the way of measuring what kanji we learned, and which are still giving us trouble. Looking through that lens, it doesn't make any sense to include this option in Renshuu. It would be, like you said, detrimental to the learning process, and to Renshuu overall, as you'd have less data to work with (to know which concepts are harder for people to grasp, or which questions need a rework to facilitate learning).

In my specific case, I'm not learning Kanji through Renshuu. This messes things up a bit, as I'm not "synced" with Renshuu in the sense that Renshuu doesn't know what Kanji I do or do not know.

To me, and possibly to others that also use other resources alongside Renshuu, a feature like this would be useful. But, I suspect we're not the majority of the Renshuu population. I think you should do what you think is best for everyone, and to improve everyone's learning process.

The extension ブルブルクン made is also very neat, and solved 100% of my problems with furigana.

Maybe a good path would be to not add this feature to everyone, but to include it in a "Third Party Apps and Extensions" topic (if ブルブルクン agrees to it), so users that do want it can find it easily, and we can have that kind of custom functionality centralized.