A review style that has you input FULL sentences

Bunpro
#1

I have been loving Bunpro so far but I think it would be great to add a review style in addition to the already existing options that has you fill in the FULL sentence. I know it might be hard based on the vocab you know vs what you do not know, but I think it would be a cool option to add along with the other revoiew options.

Something where it would ask you to write the FULL sentence “It would be better to sleep” in Japanese.

Does the feature already exist and I just don’t know where to find it?

5 Likes
#2

I agree. I have been looking around for this sort of thing, but it would be great if it was available in the one app.

#3

I think speechling has something like this?

I don’t know if this is what you were looking for, or if you meant you wanted to translate sentences.

2 Likes
#4

I agree this would be cool. I think the obstacle for implementation of something like this would be flexibility of grammar and the ability of BunPro to assess correct/ incorrect answers at a whole-sentence level.

It seems for single words there’s likely already some large amount of manual input from Devs for determining correct/ incorrect/ viable (but not intended) answers. At a sentence level, these viable answers probably multiply out to make this a tough feature.

6 Likes
#5

The two main challenges with this:

  1. It’s effectively impossible to give an objective grading on how correct a translation is, unless an AI was used.
  2. There are many correct ways to translate a sentence. Translation is an art form, and without a lot of additional context, it would be hard to explore all meaningful variations of translations for learning.
5 Likes
#6

I think it also has the potential to be very rage inducing; for example having to redo a full sentence when you make one mistake.

7 Likes
#7

This would be really cool but seems hard to implement in a good way. Perhaps it could be based on your progress and then state ways to translate it using grammar/vocab you know. Then leave it up to the user to mark it correct/incorrect. Some things could probably be automatic, for example seeing if the user inputted the correct conjugation etc

1 Like
#8

Getting the Genki Workbooks and answer sheets could be good for you, as they have you translating full sentences and they all build on everything in a nice way.

1 Like
#9

I dunno, AI in my experience has been really bad at determining if my (native level) English sentences are “correct” or not. Even if you type something in perfectly natural English or Japanese, it will give you something to “correct” about it. you have to smack it a few times with “focus on this word- this word and only this word” and you may eventually find success. I don’t think AI would be viable for this task either.

I think in full sentence questions, maybe instead of typing individual words, maybe have a branching chart of pre selected words and you click which one you think would come next? maybe out of a pool of similar words?

#10

It sounds like what you are wanting to practice in this scenario is output (which is a really important thing to practice) but in a sort of structured way. Others have pointed out why this would be difficult with software, and I agree. The most effective way to improve this, in my opinion, would be get a language exchange partner. Since you are interested in typing then you won’t have the headaches of trying to arrange speaking practice session and can focus on messaging - ask them to be honest about your tone and how natural it sounds.

Of course this method doesn’t give you the drill practice of something like Bunpro, but it does get you engaging with a real human which provides more useful feedback, and a little more natural variation of output based on real life context.

1 Like
#11

There was this post some months ago about an app in beta called Sakugo: https://sakugo.app/
It’s basically translating sentences from english to japanese using certain brackets like N5, N4 etc. It is using AI to generate and grade your sentences, which is pretty good 95% of the time. As other people have mentioned, I don’t think implementing something like this without AI would be easy considering the multitude of options available to say something :grimacing:

1 Like
#12

I’ll add to this that AI is not great with judging tone. It is probably good in monolingual situations, but I sometimes run my translations via AI for work and notice, despite my prompts, that it has missed the mark with some stuff. So AI as a means to an end of preparing you for the real world is probably good, but nothing beats exposure to the real world.