How to use Free Software to learn Japanese, and more.

Join our community

February 08, 2021 — Tatsumoto

Daily Japanese Thread is a friendly place for people learning Japanese through immersion. Join us to make friends, get help, ask questions, contribute to our projects and find countless new learning resources!

You can join us on Matrix or on Telegram.


Matrix

Starting Lounge: #join:midov.pl

We have a very rich and vibrant community on Matrix. Matrix is great because it's a completely libre communication protocol. Matrix is federated and consists of many servers, much like Email. Different Matrix servers are able to talk to each other. Before you join, install a Matrix client and register an account on one of the servers listed here. If you're new to Matrix, read Matrix quickstart guide.

Join us on Element

If the button above doesn't work, open your client of choice and join #join:midov.pl. If you can't or don't want to install a client program, use a web app (alternative).

When you join the community, you'll start in Starting Lounge. This is a room for new members. From there you can explore our community by following the links in the room's description. Note that matrix.org users aren't allowed to join any other rooms except Starting Lounge.

If you want to keep in touch from an Android device, install Element for Android.

Telegram

Telegram is a messenger with a focus on speed and security. Although Telegram is not ideal it is still better than many proprietary services. To use Telegram on GNU/Linux, install the official desktop client.

Join us on Telegram

Rules

  1. Speak English. Do not use your Japanese unless you're already fluent. Remember that talking is not practicing. Your time is better spent immersing.
  2. Be ethical. Do not post promotions or spam unrelated to learning Japanese. However, feel free to share with us your learning resources. Be minimally polite, don't troll and don't post porn.
  3. Stay on topic. Try to keep the conversation centered around immersion, software for language learning, Japanese language, the country and its culture. Everything else should be discussed in the room dedicated to off-topic which you'll find after you've joined.
  4. Read the guide. Most questions we get are already answered in our guide. Our members are volunteering their time to help everybody. Try to reduce the amount of reoccurring questions so that everyone has more time to immerse.
  5. No proprietary software. We don't use, support or recommend proprietary software. We use free/libre software because it is naturally more extensible and user-friendly.

Certain rooms may have their own sets of rules.

Questions

If you have a question specifically for me, ping me in the chat by prepending your message with @tatsumoto:4d2.org on Matrix or @tatsumoto on Telegram.

Community stickers

If you're a Telegram user, installing our community sticker pack is easy, you just click on the link. On Matrix, it's a little more tricky. You need to host your stickers yourself. See the stickerpicker GitHub repo and this video for detailed instructions. To use our Telegram stickers on Matrix, import them to your self-hosted repo using the sticker-import command or copy the URL of the pack I host for myself. To add the sticker pack to your Matrix account, follow the instructions here.