Same here. My extension these days approaches 3000 users across Chrome/Firefox, but only a fraction of those visit the donations link and send something. It just makes no sense to pay $99 to maybe get a few donations. I don't want to make this a paid extension and then spend time and money on marketing and hope that maybe I will one day break even. I just want the extension to be available to users, that's all!
Looking at some examples of tldrs, it mostly boils down to the most common use cases as examples. So well written man pages already have an "examples" section, and that really helps!
Not OP, but personally I removed it and don't miss it. But then I'm not trying to monetise everything, so analytics seem more about the ego boost in retrospect. A bit shameful I was willing to compromise my readers' privacy for that.
Depending on your needs, it's pretty easy and interesting to hack something together yourself though.
In my particular case, I realized I really didn't care about traffic stats with any kind of intimate detail, so I just wrote a thing that tagged the user with a cookie and sent a POST to my site with JS, but even then I eventually just gave up and decided that I really have no interest in the analytics since I really don't have any plans of trying to monetize my blog.
I quit Duolingo for Japanese because it was super slow and boring. I went through a few beginner grammar books/websites and started reading native material/talking to natives.
Currently going through KKLC so focusing on kanji/vocab... I passed the JLPT N5 (admittedly so easy it's useless as a certificaiton) with six months of studying from scratch, and I approximately N4 level now (~1 year in).
I know everyone has different goals and timelines, but 2 years of Duolingo feels like it covers what you can learn in <4 months by yourself.
Sure. And sorry if I sounded rough in my comment... if you're happy with Duolingo it's fine. I put in an hour every day towards Japanese (with a full time job + life on top) so I know I'm in a privileged position when it comes to language learning.
I used the following:
- Genki I, II
The classic Japanese textbooks. They're pretty good and have tons of exercises. Do the exercises!
Alternative guide written by one guy. Very good as reference or quick learning. Used it to review Genki material.
- Japanese: The Manga Way
I thought this would be stupid but in some ways I liked it more than the other resources. Every chapter goes through grammar/expressions and it uses real manga examples. Vocab is translated for you. Not necessary with the other two resources but if you like manga or want something different, it's fun.
Long (20+ mins) lectures on grammar with a lot of examples. Goes on tangents often and some videos are too long but a great source of vocab, native expressions, etc.
You've probably heard of this. I currently use it for kanji but you can use it for whatever I prefer making my own flashcards but there's pre-made decks for vocab from Genki, Tae Kim, grammar etc. I'd link to some but they also include links to pirated PDFs so don't want to get the mods mad at me.
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With all of that said, the most helpful thing for me has been reading native content in Chrome with this extension -> https://foosoft.net/projects/yomichan/ if you don't read, write, etc. you will not retain stuff. You will start out not understanding anything but slowly you will start reading without even translating to English.
You will hit a wall with vocab without kanji study but you should be good to go for some time with this.
Japanese conforms extremely poorly to the duolingo format. As someone who is also learning Japanese, I'm very surprised you've stuck with Duolingo this long. My experience was that it explained nothing. No explanation of particles, the different between hiragana and katakana, no other grammar explanations, etc.
How useful is explicitly learning about the difference in use of hiragana and katakana, really? As far as I’m aware the research on language learning is pretty clear on teaching grammar; teaching it explicitly is no more effective than teaching implicitly. This example is right, that one isn’t is how we learn to speak our native tongues and we faultlessly follow rules we can’t teach all the time, e.g. adjective order in English is opinion, size, physical quality, shape, age, colour, origin, material, type, purpose.
Do you have a link to a paper or two supporting that claim?
Sure as children we learned our natives language by hearing it for years but the point is you can't magically have ten years of everyday language input when learning a foreign language. So then as adult it is way more efficient to learn the underlying rules. If there really was a more efficient method universities would have ditched their curricula for it. But from my experiences they don't and they don't recommend Duolingo either.
Two years ago I had zero knowledge of the language, today I know all hiragana syllables, half of the katakana and a few kanji. I also know some basic vocabulary.
Ok, it's interesting because I also learned Japanese (MA graduate). In comparison, it took me a few days for learning hiragana/katakana plus few weeks more to read them a reasonable speed. Two years before that I've learned about 70 kanji with kunyomi in three weeks during high school. That part was done also with Wikipedia-sensei. Then I actually started learning the language at university.
So, if after two years of using Duolingo you cannot read all the katakana and cannot make a sentence more complex then xxx ha yyy desu it just totally prove how bad the application is. And what's even more damageable is that user think they are making progress and then do not focus on real, useful material.
// `http.get()` returns an optional string.
// V optionals combine the features of Rust's Option<T> and Result<T>.
// We must unwrap all optionals with `or`, otherwise V will complain.
s := http.get(API_URL) or {
// `err` is a reserved variable (not a global) that
// contains an error message if there is one
eprintln('Failed to fetch "users.json": $err')
// `or` blocks must end with `return`, `break`, or `continue`
return
}
This looks really handy. Is there somewhere else (outside of V) where I can read about Option types (in the real world, or in theory).
I’d like to recommend checking out Numenera, from Monte Cook Games. It’s kind of a sci-if/fantasy mashup. It takes place on Earth one billion years in the future. Eight great civilizations have appeared and disappeared in that time, leaving the world full of ruins and starnge technology, all of which is inscrutable to the people who live there now. The game materials have high production values, on the same level as the D&D books, and about the same level of complexity of game mechanics. The thing I particularly like about Numenera is its emphasis on exploration and discovery rather than killing things. There is still fighting, if you want there to be, but the focus of the game is on going out into the strange world and uncovering it’s weirdness.
If you like the basic 'fantasy' setting of D&D, but want a game with a more gritty and 'low' fantasy feel I very can highly recommend trying to find a copy of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying.
If you want a game which is more realistic and almost entirely 'straight' historic medieval Europe, but where magic, as they believed in it at the time, is real, go check out Ars Magica. Ars Magica is especially recommended if you like playing mages and want a game with one of the most fleshed out and 'realistic' magic system ever seen in a role playing game.
There are way too many options to give a simple answer to that question.
If you want to stick close to D&D, Pathfinder and 13th Age are obvious choices. If you prefer something a bit more raw, less polished maybe, deadlier, where survival is a goal in itself and combat may be better avoided, try one of the OSR systems, like DCC, LotFP, Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, etc. Lamentations of the Flame Princess is weird horror and explicitly 18+. If you want the feeling of D&D but with a system that focuses more on the story and the experience than on all the numbers in D&D, then try Dungeon World. A lot of people lauded Dungeon World for recreating the feeling they had when they first played D&D.
If you want to get further away from D&D, well, what direction do you want? Fantasy? SF? Cyberpunk? Historical? Martial arts? Horror? Steam punk? Espionage? Military? Old West? TV shows?
Aside from the dated and weird essentialization of Native American cultures, Shadowrun's setting is really good and fun.
Unfortunately it's hard to run a game with a decent narrative flow just because the combat system is so complicated. My group decided to shame people out of playing mages or riggers just because we didn't want to have to deal with simultaneously doing combat in cyberspace and the astral plane at once. It really puts a damper on having a fun game that flows. I wouldn't recommend it for someone new to pen&paper RPGs.
On the other hand, the tedium of combat gave us a strong incentive to talk our way out of problems instead of going the murder-hobo route.
If you want pure cyberpunk, take a look at R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2020.
If you like fantasy mixed in with your cyberpunk, Shadowrun is the gold standard. A word of warning: Shadowrun has a rather heavy, complex system, because it does absolutely everything. But I like it a lot.
Generic systems like GURPS and Savage Worlds can do cyberpunk of course, although I don't think GURPS Cyberpunk has been updated to the 4th edition. No doubt something exists for Savage Worlds, but I have no idea what.
There are other cyberpunk systems that I know very little about, but others are enthusiastic about, including Eclipse Phase (seems to include space and transhumanism, so it's probably not pure cyberpunk, but it might suit your taste), or Ex Machina.
Sprawl seems to be the Apocalypse World/Dungeon World adaptation for cyberpunk.
SF is much broader. The original SF RPG is of course Traveller, which is somewhat retro; the game predates computers and doesn't have many (any?) robots either. But if you want to travel around in a space ship, this is great.
Stars Without Number is an SF game that translates ideas from the OSR movement to the SciFi setting.
There are of course several different Star Wars games, including the original d6-based game by West End Games (recently republished by Fantasy Flight Games), the d20 (D&D-like) Saga Edition, and the Edge of the Empire-style games by Fantasy Flight.
GURPS is great at SciFi, and I'm sure Savage Worlds does it too.
Diaspora is a small but really cool hard SF game based on the Fate system. I love how you first generate the worlds together and then generate the party together. In space combat, dumping heat is a major concern.
Paranoia is weird dystopian funny SF. The Computer is your friend.
Starfinder is the SF version of Pathfinder. I assume the system is therefore D&D-related, but I honestly don't know.
Dark Heresy takes place in the Warhammer 40K universe.
Everything is moving to Go modules; unless you need compatibility with legacy tools I'd start updating and go ahead and use modules whenever possible. It will make your life easier in the future when you have to transition fewer things.
When I did my CHIP-8 [1] I collected a lot of background info and links, which you can find in the "History" and "Sources" topics of the readme.md there.
I have a small, open-source Chrome/Firefox extension that has about 260 active users.
I was considering porting it to Safari, but I can't justify the $99/year fee for it.