Yes, and not just both genders, but at least 3 different voice actors for each gender, preferably in different age groups so you can be exposed to different styles of pronunciation. As long as they clearly pronounce everything.
Well, just look at iKnow, they have the best voice actors of all Japanese learning sites period.
Yes, and not just both genders, but at least 3 different voice actors for each gender, preferably in different age groups so you can be exposed to different styles of pronunciation.
you do know this is a small niche grammar website right? I don’t know how much money they get from bunpro but I’m pretty sure it’s not enough to pay for 6 professional voice actors to record thousands of sentences in a studio level environment.
Yeh I think this is unreasonable for sure. Defs not needed.
It doesn’t really change the price 
The price depends on the number of lines that need to be produced.
They shouldn’t take their time on the missing audio. As we burn through sentences, they are gone forever in our study routine and the listening practice experience during reviews is gone (unless resetting or cram). There A LOT of missing audio too; half of N4 and all of N3-N1. I’d rather take this short term solution @Asher is offering (which sounds like a great solution) than ask for all these extra stipulations and wait even longer (and probably burn most of the content during the wait). Most of the content right now is pretty neutral to the speaker minus some exceptions.
I was hoping BP wound consider a separate miscellaneous non-N level section that could address colloquial and dialect content along with idioms and expressions useful for communication; this would be a great area to have voice actor variety and content that reflected different ages and genders.
@Asher Thank you for your post. And thank you @s1212z, @Jet, @Johnathan-Weir, @Litharrale, and @alyr_arkhon for your input.
The simple answer is: “Yes,” however, it is a little more complicated than that. While we have native Japanese support on the team, we are not equipped to record, mix or edit professional quality audio in house. We outsourced the first batch of audio and fully intended to continue working with the voice actress that we eventually settled on. However, we quickly realized that this would be easier said than done when we found sentences that needed to be rewritten either because they contained mistakes, we used grammar that was too advanced, or we thought that the grammar point could be better understood in a different context. Each rewritten sentence needed to have its audio replaced, which would sometimes lead to differences in audio levels and mix quality.
In addition to having sentences recorded again, we are still adding new grammar points and separating existing structures into more digestible chunks. New grammar/updated grammar is often placed between grammar points that already have audio, creating some gaps in content. As @Kuromaku and @conan alluded to, we thought that it would be better to wait until we had polished existing content thoroughly and had the majority of the content we wanted to add made available before we had new audio recorded.
That being said, we realize that continuing to push back the release of new audio for the sake of uniformity/quality may not be the best solution and that it can be detrimental to the way many people learn Japanese. We think that it is amazing that your partner recorded audio for Bunpro sentences and we would love to work with you both! We will be sending you a PM soon regarding the use of the audio on Bunpro and how best to credit to your partner for her hard work. Cheers!
I understand all your concerns. For me the bottom line was that I wanted to maximize my time being exposed to the grammar, regardless of it being perfect or not. Looking forward to hearing from you, I am sure a lot of people will get use out of this for sure, it certainly helped me at least.
Please don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Incremental but continuous progress with adding audio over time, even if it’s not of perfectly uniform quality, sounds much better than waiting for that perfect moment forever.
Also, in real life, my conversation partner is unlikely to be a pro actor in a studio. I’d like to be able to understand a store clerk, a bus driver, and so on, in a noisy environment no less. I actually like the current voice because it’s fast and sounds pretty natural, and that challenges me well.
While I doubt they will add audio with background noise, you’ve got a point here and passages with background noise actually do come up on the JLPT sometimes 
Please Please, we understand the need to keep the site’s quality up, but for audio, its better that its there rather than be perfect completely. It aids in our learning extremely.
+1
This is one of the main reasons I stopped using the site about half a year ago and did other things. Now I’m trying it again and disappointed there’s still no audio for N3 and N2. I think it was immensely helpful in both learning the grammar and making me actually stop and think about the senteces. I realize it’s a big undertaking, but even if there was audio for the first few sentences of a grammar point it would be so helpful.
@kenttran @sandalwood
Hey 
Good news!
The new audio is being added right now and there is A LOT OF IT!
Thanks @Asher!
Kuro sorry for the late reply, but from your perspective how do you feel about the new audio? We used a professional quality mic but my partner is certainly no voice actor and I am certainly no sound technician, so we are (trying) to get them as professional as possible… as non- professionals hahah. Would like your opinion compared to other audio (feel free to blast us, no hard feelings… so long as you tell us where you think we can improve 
).
@Asher Well, I’d hate to say negative things, especially since you guys are doing this nice work
But if you want to hear my personal opinion - the main problem is the diction/enunciation. She needs to speak louder (as it helps with diction), open her mouth more when speaking vowels and pronounce everything more clearly without changing individual parts of the sentence too much (i.e. volume of individual parts) beyond what is considered the norm in speech. Also, try recording the same line several times and choosing the one which has the least speech artifacts and is the most clearly pronounced.
At the moment, I would not have accepted this if it was a paid job. I’m sorry for being negative, but that’s how I honestly feel.
And so that why I wrote above doesn’t sound like I’m just complaining pointlessly here’s a bit of background info: I did work with professional voice actors on some of my past projects, though it was in english. I also have acting education, though it’s been many years since that time and it was not professional. But we did have training specifically regarding speech. It really is very difficult to do properly. I can’t do it myself. But at least I have basic understanding of how it should be.
Hmmm my only concern with doing it that way is it will start to sound less and less like a real person talking, and more like a shadowing course. I think something to consider is what each individual person is looking for 
. For some people, much better diction will help, for others, they will hate it because it isn’t natural. Therefore they arent learning to listen. For example, my partner has better diction than almost all Japanese people I have met… not defending her, just stating that getting her to clearly pronounce things even more will detract from peoples goals to hear what real Japanese sounds like . On the other hand, if peoples goals are just watching anime etc, they are all pro voice actors, so diction is great. There are really many ways to look at it and it all comes back to who wants what from bunpro. A shadowing tool for perfect diction, a reference tool for real speech patterns, or just simply a casual example of sentences in use .
I think ideally there would be 3 options. Casual speech, perfect diction, and casual speech with background noise or even slang. But that is a bit of a pipe dream… and probably not necessary to actually learn the language. If I can ask, why do you feel perfect pronunciation is important? Compared to what you would hear from your typical Japanese person?
Well, I think it’s important to understand why we want to include audio for the sentences. And that is precisely to allow quickly soak up the sentence in your memory, not just through reading, but through listening as well. And to that end having very clearly pronounced sentences will really make it more efficient.
As an example please take a look at this deck and how sentences are pronounced there:
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/114060567
(I recommend downloading it and listening the sentence examples specifically, not just words)
As you can see the pronunciation is super clear and you don’t have to fight to understand what is being said. This way it allows you to focus on contents of the sentences rather than trying to decipher what is being said. We are here because we are learning grammar, rather than purely for listening practice. And there are many great resources for listening practice already.
I don’t try to convince you that I’m right, just sharing my opinion in hopes it can be useful. Please use it or not as you wish
And yes, to answer your final question - for this specific type of learning resource I do feel that perfect diction and enunciation is critical as it allows you to focus purely on contents of the sentence, rather than anything else.
Hmm for that deck, the individual word sounds perfect, but the sentence example diction sounds worse . It doesn’t sound correct as far as diction, it just sounds more emotive like a tv drama. Is that what you mean you want?
Edit- Maybe I would understand better if you sent me an example sentence of Harunas that you thought had bad diction? That way I can see what you mean. As for our reference, we are using the same type of speech they use in 新完全マスター。The textbooks that most closely follow the conversation style of the JLPT.
I totally agree with this too!!
What is perfect diction? Do you mean a TV voice? (like a newscaster?) I am struggling to figure out what you want. A japanese voice, or a tv accent. The guy in the anki deck has a very different speech pattern to Tokyo, so he doesn’t even pronounce some syllables. 
Edit- I agree it is super important too. But I can’t find one that isn’t like that on Bunpro, so please link me one so I know what to watch out for 
I finished around 2k sentences of the iKnow 6k deck (which the linked deck is a part of) and the voice actors are really phenomenal. The emotions put in every sentence are a huge help to recall those sentences and words later in conversations.
But the expressive style used for the iKnow sentences would maybe not fit a grammar tool like Bunpro. I’d maybe prefer a clear and calm intonation. I personally don’t like the comic voice of the former Bunpro voice actress so I always turned audio off. The new material sounds good to me, even though it is maybe a little bit too plain and could be slightly more expressive.