How about tracking audiobooks by minutes/hours and auto-calculate the percentage? Not how it will work in the UI, when coupled with physical/e-book texts.
I could make calculation in percentage, but it’s a little laborious. Even Excel doesn’t have time duration units, and addition over 24:00 is easily wrong. Not sure if division will work correctly.
No, I would think that would slot into whenever @brandon’s able to implement web novel/web comic stuff.
Hitting the next book link is sometimes really slow. It can take over 1-2 seconds to load the page, and right now it took over 10 seconds for the book cover to load even though the rest of the page had already loaded.
Stuff also seems to be getting out of sync a lot. For example, I did all my remaining gradings, but the user menu still said I had some (until I clicked it, then it went away). Similarly, when I rate a book and then go to the series page, often the series page hasn’t updated. I don’t think any of this happened before the infrastructure changes.
Ha, I appreciate this error message. 
Just doing some stress testing. 
Uhh @brandon, I’m getting server errors when I change any filter on my book list. I thought all that was done client side now?
Oh really? Ok, good to know.
Still getting them? I can’t seem to reproduce.
Hmm, noted.
In other news, this month unfortunately hasn’t been a super productive one for Natively, been really focused on my language studies. Hopefully I can do a bit more this coming week, need to finish the infrastructure change over and the webnovel/videogame branch… soon…
I’ve looked through the available lower level books for Japanese, but weirdly, there aren’t a lot of picture books.
I’m used to Korean Natively, with a plethora of children’s books available, because sure, graded readers are nice, but sometimes you just want to change it up a little bit.
So yeah, I was just wondering why there are so few low level books on Japanese Natively. Do most people just jump straight from graded readers into manga and novels? Are most Japanese Natively users at a higher level? Are there just not as many picture books written in Japanese? I’m genuinely curious.
One factor that might be different from Korean is that low-level Japanese picture books will be written mostly or entirely in hiragana with spaces rather than with kanji + furigana. This means they can actually be harder to read for older non-native learners, who usually start learning and relying on kanji fairly quickly. I’ve occasionally run into this with books written for older children that spelled out a word in hiragana that I hadn’t encountered before but understood as soon as I looked it up and saw the kanji.
I think it’s also likely a lot of people do want to jump straight into manga given how many people get into learning Japanese because of Japanese media. (I was one of them - I was struggling through my first manga before I finished Genki. I also preferred simpler media aimed at adults in my interests over children’s books, in part because the vocabulary overlapped better with my textbook vocab, but that seems to be more YMMV.)
I’d second that. Reading a book in all hiragana would be a nightmare. It’s bad enough when you’re reading kids books with a lot of kanji written out as hiragana.
But as to specifically why there’s not a lot of children’s books, my additional guesses are twofold: first, there’s a lot of “common wisdom” that’s been handed down from on high about what you read (Yotsuba or Flying Witch, then Majyo no Takyuubin or Nichijo no Natsuyasumi. Then maybe Harry Potter. After that how come you’re not fluent yet? Get good scrub). If you follow that path there’s not a ton of need to go off and find things on your own to read. Second, the NPO readers are quite good. No, they’re not enthralling literature, but given what else you’d be able to read at those levels, they’re probably more interesting than children’s books are to the average adult learner.
Honestly, I think maybe 5-10% of children’s literature can really captive me as an adult even when you take into consideration that it’s for language learning, so for me personally I try and do as much audio/video sources as possible at the beginning to get to around a late elementary school vocabulary before I start reading in a new language.
If you’re looking for JP picture books in general, just google 絵本 or えほん, and you’ll find a ton… There’s even apps for them
Otherwise as others have said, they’re not particularly helpful for adult learners, and not particularly interesting
It is working now, but it was happening consistently around the time I made my post. Maybe there’s something in the logs around then.
There are also for Japanese, see e.g. on the site of ehonnavi. There used to be a time when you could even read about 10% of its contents for free, though just once. But some time ago they got the idea that they should earn money…
The more interesting ones are e.g. the アニメ絵本 series that visualize Gibli movies with images from the movies but the text is in the form of a short normal novel.
But otoh they are already at elementary school level, so for a starter they are advanced. They best starter material are in fact the graded readers.
Btw Natively has a tag ‘picture book’ that you can use in a search, but as you said yourself there is not much.
Somehow it doesn’t save when I use the Days Read / Days Watched counter. I noticed today that it hadn’t saved that I checked it off yesterday (thinking I might have forgotten), but when I looked at it again just a bit later, it has reset again.
I’m getting errors when changing the book type filter again. This time I’m on mobile, if that matters.
I too can replicate but cannot determine the reason it’s occurring… very odd. Will look into more tomorrow.
this too 
It might be something in the front end, because if I reload the page after the error (so the filters are in the URL) it loads correctly.
Right, but it’s strange… the api request call is failing (404) when you filter, but not the initial load. Odd.
@brandon I’ve been seeing lots of instances where, when adding a new series in Japanese, the series title is sometimes appended with 第X巻（全Y巻）-> book #X (Y total books). This doesn’t always happen, but I wanted to bring it to your attention since it shouldn’t be.
I’m getting a dns block on learnnatively on my laptop, though oddly not on my PC (same network, though it is my work laptop, though I’m not logged in via VPN… here’s the diagnostic).
ACType 0 Block Type phish Bundle ID 540467 Domain Tagging - Host phish.opendns.com IP Address 101.112.244.149 Org ID 2072697 Origin ID 577164088 Prefs - Query url=learnnatively.com&server=syd2&prefs=&tagging=&nref Server syd2 Time 2024-05-04 08:10:04.445111808 +0000 UTC m=+5158226.685938834
I sent in a note to my administrator as well
They gonna phish-steal your gradings.
On my phone, I visited my dash to mark today as read then scrolled down to visit the forum from there. It gave me an “issues with our servers” pop-op, I hit “OK,” and then it took me to the forum just fine. I went back and tried it again and everything went as usual. So that was odd.
