Add your own vocabulary?

Bunpro
#1

Hi there,

I’m like for 4 weeks in Tokyo and started to go through some real existential crisis, after not being able to talk, understand or just remember basic grammar patterns or vocab in everyday situations. I struggle a lot with anxiety, so blanking out in social situations is not something unknown to me. So this is more about myself than about Japanese as language.

I also get better day by day, started to make some friends and try to talk a lot and fight the horrendous 山のように積んだvocab review batch I ignored a while for some reasons. But talking to colleagues I noticed something beautiful: Fixed phrases like 大名出金 (coming late to work like a daimyo), 滝のみ (waterfall drinking, drinking without touching the lid of your bottle for hygienic purposes)，君の日ともに乾杯 (I cheer (in)to your pupils) which I found to be to beautiful to forget. 勿体無い！

Long story short: I would love to be able to build my own vocab decks and add them. Someone else feeling this way? If you would be able to do this, a sharing function would also be nice!

I know this could give some problems with quality control. Maybe a request form for vocabulary could solve this?

8 Likes
#2

I agree and think it’s a great idea. For me, I’ve been discovering a lot of new words just through BunPro grammar review sentences, only to find it doesn’t exist in the vocab decks. I would love to be able to add them as a custom vocab deck, even if I have to copy and paste it from Jisho, so I wouldn’t need a separate flash card app.

6 Likes
#3

Yeah I agree. Also making your own decks would help a lot for studying words you pick up while you are immersing in other content. This would make it a lot more personalized and give more focus on the learners goals.

Also the ability of making your own decks would basically replace Anki and other flash card apps.

3 Likes
#4

If this is something that doesn’t take much work for the devs then I am not against it but I will say that other SRS services are far far better for custom decks. The main thing Bunpro vocab has going for it is that it is essentially curated, having level appropriate example sentences etc etc, and works in the Bunpro “ecosystem”. Custom decks would have none of that. Outside of that selling point there is basically no reason to use Bunpro for vocab as far as I can see. If the main reason people have for wanting to add their own vocab is that it saves them from switching apps then I hate to say it but I don’t think I would support it (at the moment). From where I am sitting it looks like there is just too much other stuff to work on. I could be wrong though and I could also just be biased as I don’t use Bunpro for vocab and likely never will - if I had it my way the whole team would be slaving 24/7 to feed me more grammar (´～｀)ﾓｸﾞﾓｸﾞ

4 Likes
#5

I feel that the way Vocab is structured here is much better than other apps. The big difference for me is the fact it makes me actually learn the Vocab with Japanese definitions and makes me type the word in so it’s not just recognizing but making me think and having some output not just reading the japanese word and translating it to English in my head

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This way makes me learn how to describe things in Japanese while also learning the words themselves.

4 Likes
#6

If there were custom decks then you would have to add your own definitions etc anyway. Anki and other services are capable of cloze deletion style cards with Japanese definitions as well; you don’t need to use Bunpro to make that kind of deck. Bunpro’s approach to developing vocab seems to be a very curated and tailored experience and I don’t see the need (currently) for them to make a clone of something that already exists in a bunch of other places. As I said, if it is easy for them to do then I have no qualms but I am just worried about it eating time and resources when a bunch of “core” features are in beta as it is.

Having said all that I can see why the dev team might want to develop this feature sooner rather than later and my opposition is more just apprehension than a real complaint.

4 Likes
#7

Not being able to add those very specific words/colocations is also my only reason to not use Bunpro entirely for Vocab.

I usually search for the Vocab in Bunpro, and if it’s not there, I add it in another SRS soft.

Once the Vocab we currently have (including all the non-JLPT stuff) is polished (or maybe sooner), I’m sure we’ll either accept word addition requests or potentially create a custom-vocab feature

2 Likes