Are the official vocab decks still maintained?

Bunpro
#1

After studying all the grammar points from N5 through to N1 with Bunpro and having a really good experience, I thought it would be good to go through and pick up any vocabulary that I’m still missing from my other studies and began studying the N5 deck, quickly setting anything to ‘mastered’ that I already knew comfortably. But my overall experience was so much poorer than with the Grammar decks that it’s hard to believe the vocab decks are a maintained feature. For example:

  • The robot audio is wrong in a very significant proportion of vocabulary cards, both in the word audio and example sentence audio. I’d estimate at least 10-15% of words. I know opinions vary about the importance of correct intonation, but for me personally hearing the wrong intonation multiple times is a huge dealbreaker.
  • The intonation diagrams seem wrong about 5% of the time too.
  • Words that I don’t think are ever commonly written with kanji are introduced in kanji instead of hiragana or katakana.
  • Less important, but frequently there have been words from N3 or higher in the N5 deck like 天の川. There must have been at least 20 or so that are clearly not N5 level.

It feels like they’re not being given the care and attention that the grammar decks have been. I’m disappointed because I was looking forward to filling up my progress bars for vocabulary like I’ve been doing for grammar, but it feels like such a poor experience in comparison that I’m inclined to just stop completely. Are they still maintained or are they gradually falling into disrepair because they’re not really a first-class feature of Bunpro?

9 Likes
#2

The vocab decks aren’t as polished as the grammar but there is a lot more of them. I have logged a few typo bugs and things, on the occasions that I’m right (not always) the Bunpro team fix them fast. Honestly my experience has been they’re improving, while conceding the grammar is much better.

8 Likes
#3

Rather than not being maintained, they are still in a state of polish. There are still quite a few things that we want to do with vocab that we are working on one at a time. In regard to your specific points -

TTS audio - This is currently a lot better than what it was in the past, and we constantly fix errors when we find them. We will also probably upgrade our TTS in general at some point in the future if a far more accurate TTS software comes out.
Pitch accent diagrams - Again, this is something that we often fix, and are actually planning on going through all of this very soon to make sure it is 100% accurate.
Kanji words - This is more of a stylistic choice, as we usually feel it is useful to be able to read the kanji version of most words, even if you won’t see them very often. In the example sentences, we often use a mix of both the kanji reading and the kana reading if one is more common than the other.
Rare words - All of these rare words actually come from the Genki textbook, as we initially integrated this vocab into the N5 and N4 decks when we created them. We are planning on removing them in favor of more common vocabulary in the very near future.

You are correct in that the grammar decks are far more polished, but this is only because vocab is a far newer product. So rather than looking at something in disrepair, you are actually just looking at something that is still in its infancy. We intend for it to be just as polished as grammar eventually, and are constantly working on adding new things to it. We will actually be recording human audio for the N5 deck very soon in order to get rid of TTS completely, but due to there being so many sentences, this is something that will take some time.

19 Likes
#4

Thanks for the reply, I understand that they’re comparatively early in development and I realise trade offs have to be made when deciding what to focus your efforts on. I think I’ll just take a break for a year or two and use something else until the vocab decks eventually reach the standard that the grammar decks are at.

3 Likes
#5

I was wondering why they’re so packed in batches of 1000 like they are. I imagine it’s extremely daunting for someone coming in hoping to go through them. (especially brand new N5 guys)
Why not a natural per-level amount like typical N-Level lists? But I suppose as others have noted it seems to be second to grammar. But despite that if yall are confident with the placements in terms of NLevel I suppose that’s something we should be happy with

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#6

What is a natural per-level amount like typical N-level lists? I am not familiar with what other lists look like

1 Like
#7

N5 seems to be around 800 vocab, the higher levels obviously gets more.

Personally, I would be someone who rather learns too much than too little for a test, so the 1000 vocab bunpro gives you, seem reassuring to me. But looking at a bunch of JLPT tests, it seems a lot of people prefer to just learn “auf Lücke”, meaning just the majority of things and hoping for the best :sweat_smile: So 1000 vocab might seem daunting and overkill.

5 Likes
#8

Also included items are (direct English)Katakana loan words, particles and premade phrases. I personally dont count these in my own vocab library but their included.

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#9

Im personally a huge fan of having expressions in because colocations and idioms are pretty important, and katakana loanwords are important too because they are often spelled unexpectedly and not always pronounced how you would think either- I always struggle with ベジタリアン not being ベジテリアン for example. I would be sad if they got removed

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#10

I think some ordering would help - currently 共通語 (a word I’m almost certain I haven’t seen in three years of fairly intense real-language study but the Bunpro team tells me is common enough for the N5 deck) comes before ありがとうございます in the deck.

#11

It’s cause they got inspired by the genki books. A lot of those “why are they even here” words came from the themed genki bonus pages :joy: bunpro team already said, they’ll overhaul those. Not sure if those words had ever been on the N5 test or if they were just added to genki to make a well rounded in classroom discussion.

#12

That makes sense. It’s hard to get back into the headspace of what it was like to be at N5 level but I don’t think I would’ve wanted to learn ‘砕けた言い方’ when I could be learning, like, りんご and こんばんは

2 Likes
#13

Just as an observation, there are only around 650 items tagged as #jlpt-n5 in jisho.org (which I know isn’t a perfect resource, but seems like a reasonable point of comparison). Lots of the items in the N5 deck seem like they’re not really vocabulary as much as arbitrary short sentence fragments - why ‘熱がある’ and not just 熱, for example?

1 Like
#14

TTS audio - This is currently a lot better than what it was in the past, and we constantly fix errors when we find them. We will also probably upgrade our TTS in general at some point in the future if a far more accurate TTS software comes out.

Can I gently push back on this notion? The TTS audio is noticeably less accurate than even the built in screen reader in MacOS (which itself is fairly bad) or Google Translate, and whatever Migaku are using for their machine TTS is much more accurate, so I think it’s worth pursuing.