Great update for vocab but the change to grammar is extremely counter intuitive.
The hint explaining the grammar structure should be the final hint if you can’t figure it out from context. With the hint always there you are just rote memorising the grammar point with its english description instead of engaging with the Japanese.
At the very least this should have an option in settings to be turned off.
I really liked it when they created bunpro cloze to study vocabulary, but the problem is that in no update did they include bunpro cloze in the app…
This is a very good end goal, can these type hints themselves be converted to Japanese as well? Maybe I have missed it. But as of now they just show up in English.
I’m also not a fan of the change in order. I preferred the structure hint last, being first “gives it away”.
I am not sure programattically if we are able to make things within the hints clickable (programming isn’t my field), but I agree that it would be ideal! It would be a great opportunity to learn related words.
Thanks to @Daru , i found the right setting… Review English: Hide is what i was looking for.
But, could we have a separate setting for grammar and for vocabulary ?
Grammar isn’t my “cup of tea”, so i really like the full hints in order to know what i should look for,
On the other hand, for vocabulary, only minimal hints (japanese only) is really what i would like.
Any way to separate : hints for grammar / hints for vocabulary settings ?
What is a [special verb]?
Hi everyone, and thanks for the feedback so far!
While this change to the hint system really only applies to the vocab at the moment, it has also impacted the order of prompts sitewide. We have tested several orders in the past, and they have all come with their own issues. In deciding the current order, we were thinking mainly about what reflects the information that is most important to remember about a grammar point, and is respectful of the user’s time.
Initially, the grammar nuance hints were written with the goal of being memorized. This may seem like it is a bad thing or perhaps counter intuitive, but our hope is in fact that these hints are being memorized, as they contain small pieces of crucial information about specific grammar points that help identify them from others. This was done to combat ‘synonym hell’, something that has been a big pain point of many users for years, due to quite a few similar grammar points being unable to be distinguished purely based on the Japanese sentence, or even the translation. In this case, students would often memorize the sentence that the grammar point was seen in, rather than how to use the grammar point itself. This is primarily from where we decided that if anything was going to be memorized, a small piece of information that actually reflects a certain grammar point’s usage would be far more beneficial.
With the English hint, or showing the English sentence as a whole, it still leaves many potential answers for the vast majority of grammar points. Although it is definitely still possible to solve the questions this way, it is usually just a case of users cycling through all the ways they know how to say something until they pick the right one (data that we can see when writing/accepting alternative answers). This approach is not ideal as it can lead to even more confusion with things like ‘why is this grammar point not accepted here’, when the real answer is ‘actually several answers may be equally correct, but as this is a grammar srs service, naturally we must force all grammar points to be practiced equally’.
We are discussing internally about the user settings and how we can change them to allow a wider audience to choose what suits them best, but from a learning perspective, we do recommend that the hint be the primary ‘go to’ when learning, as they are designed to reinforce what one already knows about each and every grammar point.
Special verbs are verbs that have conjugation rules that do not follow the typical る-Verb or う-Verb pattern. There are very few of these in Japanese. One such example is くる.
this is what I would like.
I know Ghosts turned me off this site pretty heavily when I first joined here last year. I ended up with like 70+ ghosts really quick and was bogged down and dejected. So, I turned them off. After a bit, I missed them, so I turned them back on and got used to them. Now I couldn’t see myself turning them off again, even if I’ve ended up with 50+ ghosts on occasion.
Having the option to choose what combination of translations and hints we want would be very helpful.
Do you mean the word type, like [Noun]? If so, then yes, we already have all of the Japanese equivalent words in our database, so it is quite possible that we will make that available in Japanese as well in the near future.
I appreciate that the team believes that this change will result in a better product eventually for grammar site-wide, but in its current state, it is actually unusable for me. And most of the grammar I’m working on is in N3-N2, so how long will it be until these roll out? To be precise, I am not able to effectively study because I see the hint and immediately know what the answer should be because of that, which I don’t like.
I’m sorry, but I will find it very difficult to resubscribe if we don’t have a native way to customize this in the immediate future.
Yes, have it say [名詞].
For those who are curious about the context, they have been working on this for 4 years. This is a thread that I started 4 years ago discussing this exact concept. It may be useful to look back and see what has guided this development as well as how much development had been done.
If possible, could you give us a bit more information about what you don’t like about this? As the goal is memorization of the hint and forming a mental link between it and the grammar point, it sounds like it is working as intended (from a functionality perspective). You will still need to manually input the answer without being told what it is.
Guessing between several different grammar points still has its value of course, but what we were primarily wanting to avoid in this situation is the student spending a long time thinking about which grammar point fits best, when there may not actually be one.
I just noticed that this update hasn’t been applied to cram (or at least review style grammar cram). Is there a reason for that, or have you just not gotten around to it yet?
My issue is the same as a few others have stated - the hint makes it way too easy to memorize and to not actually think about the sentence. My goal with reviews isn’t speed, it’s retention.
Irregular verbs. — Dave
I tried doing some reviews on my phone (browser, safari), and the “nuance” description wouldn’t show up at all for me. There was zero difference between “nuance” and “nothing.” In fact, I couldn’t get it to show the grammar point description at all.
It works perfectly fine on my PC, but I couldn’t go through my reviews on my phone like I normally do. I imagine this is related to the update, as it never happened before.
This. “Hide” is the setting I was looking for, for vocab, but now it hides them from the grammar reviews.
I would be good if they could be separated because I also like to see the hints on the grammar reviews so I can know what I’m looking for.
