Time To Pull Back The Curtain‍

It's finally time. This last year has been a true labor of love while I've worked on getting Parsnip ready for show time. And while it's not quite red carpet ready, I am excited to announce that you now can test Parsnip for yourself!

My assisted reader is currently set for Japanese to showcase the first of three planned core features of Parsnip- easy access references that allow the user to read / study without needing to pull up additional resources.

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Currently Available Features

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I'm excited to see so many features already functioning in the Parsnip Glossary.

• Nouns are tagged with labels like person, organization, quantity, product, etc. (This makes it easier to tell when you need to look something up because it's a new word or if a new place or character was mentioned.)

• You can sort the glossary by label or reading (alphabetically).

• Each word has definitions, an index, kanji definitions and kanji indices.

• Hovering over a conjugated word will show the dictionary form of that word.

• The definition shows the likely meanings of each word with useful additional information like the Part of Speech.

• The kanji meaning section shows the readings.

• The index shows how often a word/kanji appears, where it occurs, and shows a small snippet of text around the word for context.

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To start, I am limiting the content to a few select chapters and songs to test the app's functionality. While my goal is to allow users to study any material they want, this this initial build illustrates how having all the tools readily available on screen improves flow and readability.

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Coming Soon

So much. Literally a whole expanse of exciting possibilities that will make Parsnip the ultimate language learning tool. In the immediate future however, here are the  short-term goals I am aiming for first:

• User added content
• Lookup history and context
• Adding references for other languages beyond Japanese
  

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Ultimately, I want users to be able study their own content with Parsnip. That feature is integral to my vision of accessible language learning and is my most important goal. Lookup history will be useful to users that want to revisit what they have encountered and reinforce context and meaning. Expanding to more languages will be important to those who are interested in utilizing Parsnip, but are looking to acquire languages other than Japanese.

However, these are my perception of what is most important for Parsnip to be successful. User feedback is what will really help drive this project forward. If you're interested helping propel Parsnip forward, please test it out for yourself and email me at joshua@solarmist.net with your language goals, suggestions, and questions.

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Additional Notes

Moving forward, there are several things that will need to be done in order to make Parsnip a user-friendly and fluid-functioning app. In interest of transparency, here is a list of known issues I'm aware of that I'm working to address.

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Known issues

General

• Slow loading times (Right now each chapter currently runs about 1 MB of data uncompressed).

Layout

• The text layout on large screens is too wide.
• Page divisions within a chapter are arbitrary.
• Portrait mode on mobile is unusable since the glossary is a fixed width.
• Highlight of named entities isn't configurable.

Parser

• Named entities detection is all over the place.

Glossary

• The character meaning doesn't highlight the reading being used in the word.

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Help Parsnip Grow!

This is just a step towards creating better language learning for everyone. Please consider testing out Parsnip for yourself and becoming part of a growing community of language enthusiasts.

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Join our mailing list by emailing me at joshua@solarmist.net

Test Parsnip for yourself!