Bunpro using rare kanji writings/"overusing" kanji

[spyfy]

Apologies if this has been mentioned/discussed before. I tried the forum search but couldn’t find a post on this.

Does someone know if there is a reason why Bunpro has a tendency to use rather uncommon kanji writings for expressions that nowadays are (to use jisho.org’s wording) “usually writing using kana alone”?

It seems to me that bunpro has a tendency for “radical kanji-ization”. For example, they write なぜ (why) as 何故. I am by no means an expert (only have been learning japanese for 2-3 years and am currently mostly working with the N4 level Bunpro decks) but not once have I seen it spelled using kanji in any of the material I am reading.

Another example is the N5(!) vocab card 咳が出る (to cough). Unless I am mistaken, 咳 isn’t even a jouyou kanji.

These are just two anecdotal examples. But my impression is that it is not a rare occurrence, i.e. that Bunpro is “overusing kanji”. It’s only really starting to bug me now, for example when I need to see the English translation for an example sentence, since a rather simple expression is written in a very weird way. That breaks my immersion and then I’m like “omg it’s just なぜ”.

And I would think for an app that also counts beginners to its audience it’s kind of strange to use a non-jouyou kanji in an N5 vocab card…

I love Bunpro otherwise, but since I feel I am going to use it for at least months to come, I think I need a sanity check: Am I just naive/completely off-base with my observation? Basically “Is it just me, or is it Bunpro?”

[travv0]

Bunpro does use a lot of kanji for words that more commonly don’t use them, and I agree that especially for lower levels it makes sense to show these in kana. However, the jouyou kanji aren’t actually very representative of what you’ll see in the wild, in my experience. 何故 for なぜ isn’t a particularly rare occurrence, and 咳 is by far the most common way to write せき, despite it not being a jouyou kanji. I’d think of the list of jouyou kanji as more of a bare minimum than a comprehensive list of the kanji you’ll see. (On the other hand, there are jouyou kanji you’ll likely rarely if ever see.)

[spyfy]

Thanks, that helps to understand things better! As mentioned I’m still pretty early on with this, and that’s maybe why I put too much emphasis on jouyou kanji. Those stick out to me in particular since I learned the 2200ish jouyou ones using Remembering The Kanji, so to me those sentences look like “a bucket full of things I at least roughly understand, with this one ‘weirdo’ inbetween”.

I also recall that there were a few grammar points where this occured to me, but now I can’t recall them. I’ll probably notice next time I’ll have to review it.

Seems like it’s “a bit just me and a bit Bunpro”

[keli13]

you’re not wrong. at least, i agree with you. even at N1 level stuff, there will be certain grammar points i learn from my textbooks which i then search on Bunpro to add to reviews. the textbook won’t make mention of any kanji, when suddenly on the bunpro listing it uses a (usually difficult/obscure) kanji for the grammar. however, the explanation on bunpro will then say that the kanji usage is actually quite rare and that the grammar is hardly seen written with the kanji.

thanks for bringing this up, i’ve actually been wondering about it for a good while now!

[Hairymini]

I wish there was a setting for this. Even at N1 and beyond there’s certain readings which use kanji which just aren’t used. I appreciate that where kanji and non-kanji forms are commonly used, kanji is preferable, but there’s many instances where the app is overzealous with kanji.

My native Japanese teacher pointed out several instances where the use of kanji would be very unnatural.

I’d like the option to at least have furigana over uncommon kanji, if not just use the kana form.

[travv0]

Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of grammar points that are almost always written in kana that show as kanji on Bunpro, as @keli13 mentioned. One more thing to note is that the jouyou kanji are specifically the list of kanji that all Japanese kids have to learn to write by hand. They can recognize many more than that, and with the advent of computers, people are no longer limited to “writing” only kanji they actually know how to handwrite, so that probably changed the landscape quite a bit.

[casual]

I also had the same impression while going through Bunpro.
The kanji forms will eventually be useful, for example LN series I’m reading now always spells なぜ as 何故, but I think they distract more than they help while learning grammar.
I think Bunpro should err on the side of simplicity, and go with hiragana only for anything that’s “usually hiragana”, at least for N5-N2.

[spyfy]

Thanks for sharing your impressions. It’s nice to hear I’m not the only one. That makes it feel less of a letdown if I have to resort to furigana or translation in those situations.

I would be curious why Bunpro chose this route. I’ve been using countless different learning tools over the last years (paid ones, free ones, some only briefly, some for months), and this is the first one where I am noticing “kanji zealousness”.

[Hairymini]

Don’t feel bad for using furigana. Though I wish there was a setting to hide furigana for words you’ve learned. There is one for Wanikani but not for Bunpro learned words.

[zconnor]

For me, at the current N4-N3 that I am at, I tend to personally not try to overfocus on the minor details of my Japanese learning process, as I know in the long run these kinds of things will be relatively insignificant, but I have some thoughts about this.

Regarding the usage of uncommon or rare kanji/vocab/grammar in Bunpro’s content, I think it is clear that the general philosophy of Bunpro is more cautious, comprehensive approach to covering the knowledge nedded to understand Japanese language content. Their goal is that in the process of using Bunpro’s systems, that you develop the ability to understand Japanese as you encounter, outside of Bunpro. This can be seen with the N levels of Bunpro tending to cover more grammar (on average) and more vocabulary (on average) than other N graded content, with the thinking that “Even if this word/kanji/grammar isn’t very common, and any one specific user may possibly never encounter it, having learned it won’t hurt their understanding of other content”.

If they err on the side of caution with frequently showing 何故 for なぜ, the worst outcome is still that the learner will recognize both in the wild. I think you could make the argument that this hurts output where a Bunpro user may use less common things based on the perceived frequency they see in Bunpro rather than what is in real life content, but I think this is a fair tradeoff to make as the main focus is developing the ability of a learner to first understand and be able to consume native content, and then from that the learner can derive the right approach to using more/less common vocab or grammar.

Overall I think establishing a very wide solid foundation of Japanese to build a house of knowledge from real content exposure is a valid approach to Japanese learning, and I feel at least in this case it’s not necessarily worth compromising that philosophy without a real concern that learners would develop an incorrect understanding of a given concept, in which case it would be worth making corrections or changes.

[spyfy]

@Hairymini I wish the exact same. I never used Wanikani, so I can only do “all furigana” or “no furigana”. The “all furigana” option doesn’t work for me. No matter how hard I try, my eyes focus almost exclusively on the furigana of all words then. So I go with “no furigana” and then hover over words as needed. I also use Satori Reader, and that one actually allows one to drop a list of known kanji.

@zconnor thank you for taking the time to explain this viewpoint. That does actually make a lot of sense. And I think you’re right with the “overfocus on minor details”. It’s easy to do that (I feel that there are people out there that spend 90% of the time to finetune their Japanese learning process by thinking about every detail, but then only have 10% left to actually use their learning methods).

And indeed, as probably came across in my first post, it is more about the motivational/letdown effect of it. And it’s probably best not to ruminate over it too much. Now that I know “I’m not crazy”, I think it will be much easier to just accept it and move on whenever this happens.

I overall do like the more comprehensive approach of Bunpro. In fact it was the very comprehensive grammar descriptions that originally got me hooked on Bunpro. Other apps/tools tell you that “から” and “ので” both mean “because”, but Bunpro actually takes time to explain the nuances between them. Same for all the different versions of “must”.

I guess if I pick a tool because it is more comprehensive in the grammar department, I kind of have to expect that the kanji usage is also more comprehensive.

[xyc1993]

Not about using kanji for “kana words” specifically but regarding rare kanji I would add that in fiction you can find really rare kanji. When I play japanese video games I see a lot of rare ones. For instance in FFXV I’ve seen 穢 (in a word 穢れる) and in Digimon Story Time Stranger 癪 in a word 小癪 or there was a word 傀儡. So I’d say fiction (probably leaning towards fantasy) will have rare kanji and it’s good to get used to the fact that yeah, there’s a lot of kanji outside of joyo list that you will occasionally encounter and that’s how the japanese in the wild can be.

[hx9]

Best way to work through this is to set to “all furigana” and manually check them off as you learn them, while leaving ‘usually kana’ and rarer kanji out of the list. Painful, but it will take less time than you think to get through them all. The setting they should think to add here is probably turning furigana off by SRS level and on a word by word basis rather than kanji by kanji basis.

Also, there’s a huge difference between N5 the test and N5 the most useful (citation needed) words / patterns. Even 魚 will have furigana on the N5 test. At what level do you need to know how to read it without furigana? I don’t know - that’s not documented well.

For reference, every word probably has “forms” that could theoretically be studied independently… here are just a few off the top of my head since I’ve seen all of these “forms” in the Dragon Quest Remake.

Standard Form

蛇、タクシー、いたずら

Children’s Book or Speech

ヘビ、はな

Kanji, but furigana is included because you’re a beginner

蛇。。。 but with furigana - へび

Kanji, but furigana is common because the reading isn’t what you’d expect

蛇。。。but with furigana - くちなわ

Kanji, but furigana because it’s an anime fighting move

蛇。。。but with furigana - スネーク

Robot/Affected Speech version

オレハ オイシイ ヘビ ダゼ

The “Sometimes Kanji” part of "usually kana"

筈。。。 no this isn’t へび、it’s はず。。。if only

[spyfy]

Omg, how did I not know the “check off furigana” thing? In the settings it says
Choose whether to show all, hide all or hide furigana based off of your progress in WaniKani.

And the options are called “On”, “Off”, and “WaniKani”.

I read this that there are only three options:

• “On” = All furigana on
• “Off” = No furigana at all (only at hover)
• “WaniKani” = Show based on WaniKani link

It never occurred to me that if I select “On” I can click on individual kanji to deactivate furigana on just them.

Is this documented somewhere? If not, I’ll post that in the “Suggested Improvements” thread.

@hx9, you’re a lifesaver Thanks!

[Asher]

As a simple explanation for why we actually do this, it is usually to make sure students are learning to recognize the more difficult form as part of the learning process.

For grammatical structures at least, it is very unlikely that someone would not recognize it because there is no kanji, but it is quite likely that they would not recognize it in its kanji form, so we preemptively expose people to it in order to prevent this from occurring when users start actually reading books etc.

Words like 何故, 筈, etc are actually very commonly written in kanji in books. We do try to avoid kanji on things that actually are quite rare to see in kanji in real life though, such as 此れ (これ), 其れ (それ), and others, even though they do still appear that way from time to time.

As for the non-jouyou kanji, we typically only use the extremely common ones like 騙す、咳、飴.