Adventure/Ranked Mode (Or any Incentive for Reviews)

[bkmattias]

Hello everyone! I am Mattias (My first post )

Lately i have been thinking about what keeps me hooked to Bunpro. I like the sleek UI, as well as the good UX, the service is truly well structured, simple and i like the feeling of “building” my review hub for vocab and grammar upon this platform. It’s great for me to set a goal of daily vocabs and grammar points to learn because the bar filling itself gives me that tingling sensation that my human brain needs for continuity and self-achievement.

That being said, while i have a “concrete” reason to learn new things on the website, i feel like my brain (and possibly many others) needs a reason to do the reviews other than just the fact that i am learning;

Don’t get me wrong, i know that i am doing this to learn a language, but sometimes i like to be deceived into believing that learning is the consequence of doing something as fun as playing.(maybe it is!)

The concept of levelling is already present on the platform, which i really like, but for example WaniKani does this differently, making your reviews necessary to continue your journey, that truly pushes you to say “I really need to do my reviews ASAP to optimise my journey!”, a feeling that i don’t have on Bunpro and ends up making me slack a bit…

But all this preamble to say what??

Wouldn’t it be great to have something as Adventure mode, where going through a standard deck unlocks checkpoints in a path that you go through? This was inspired also from seeing the refferral tab, which i think suits the concept well.

The ‘meters’ are the ‘words’, and the stations could be subdivisions of the classic decks (such as the ‘Lessons’ which already exist.

All of this could be accompanied by some story and be rewarded with cosmetics! (Making my brain tingle and wanting to do more and more). Perhaps getting your reviews wrong makes you fall meters and doing poorly for a lot of times in a row sends you back to your previous checkpoint, losing the “falling immunity”.

Very similar to videogames ranking system, so yeah, you could say this is your ELO and Rank on the website (eg. League of Legends for who knows) so Bunpro Ranked mode!

I don’t know, at this point i am just brainstorming, but let me know, what do you think?

My gamer head would love to see something like this becoming reality!

A wonderful day to everyone! -Mattias

[frogg]

I see where you’re coming from, but I’d be worried to see too much gamification like this. My experience with these types of apps is that people end up focusing more on the leveling up and less on actual language learning and the last thing I want is for Bunpro to become another Duolingo

[FullMetalAlba]

BunPro’s biggest selling point to me is how customizable it is so I can craft my own learning strategy but I agree that having a default path to hold your hand for beginners would be really great, especially with some fun game-like interface.

Most likely they already have their hands full finalizing the vocabulary side of things but it would be so nice to see this once it’s polished.

I think there are resources out there like MaruMori which do this really well that BunPro can take inspiration from.

The above is an example of the levels as steps along a path, I believe duolingo also has a similar vibe.

[upadhyayjb32]

I think this could be a good idea. I’ve often wondered what it would be like if there was some kind of “climbing Mt. Fuji” type of way to show how far you’ve come while learning, or within the past month, or whatever.
However, if the Bunpro team implements something like this, (which I doubt they would ever do, at least not for a long while), I would love for it to be something that has to be manually enabled by the user. As someone who is used to Bunpro and how it acts, I would be comfortable with this sort of progress indicator being newly implemented, but if it was there from the start, and it couldn’t be turned off, I probably would never have continued using the website/app to begin with. I think I would have felt trapped like I did with most other Japanese learning services I’ve tried, especially those meant for new learners like Wanikani and the green bird one.

[Gacee]

I will chime in that I don’t think I like this idea very much. I think it would cost a lot of resources for a style of teaching that BunPro would be late to the game on.

I think if BunPro were to improve the way it teaches grammar, it should find ways to provide feedback to the user as they go along the BunPro grammar path / offer exercises that are outside of the SRS standard. I think gamification would just be a parallel way to do something they’re already offering that they would probably do worse than other services which prioritized gamification from the jump.

[Hairymini]

I appreciate all the effort into producing this post and I can see this integrated with the EXP and badge system.

However, as others have mentioned Bunpro is extremely customisable, and encouraging a specific path might be counterproductive. I’m not opposed to more gamification, but I don’t want it to be done in a heavy handed way.

[bkmattias]

Sure, it wasn’t in my original thought for it to be a specific path overall, this thought is to be intended as a ‘mode’ and not the whole platform itself.

It sounds clear in my mind because i am used to this kind of system in videogames, but “Ranked mode” is always an opt-in, you could use the Bunpro platform in its entirety without even touching the mountain to climb.