I really like bunro for grammar, and I understand that vocab is still a very new feature and is in beta, but this just ain’t it. To be frank, I find that vocab just doesn’t stick when using bunpro.
Most of us are probably used to Anki for SRS and find that it works pretty well for what it does. One advantage that Bunpro has over Anki is that everything is provided for me and I don’t have to make my cards. But Anki is more flexible, which can help with any problems that may exist with it as a tool.
But putting Anki to the side, there are other useful SRS tools out there which I think Bunpro could learn from. For example, you may be familiar with the Kotoba bot for discord. Kotoba has something called “Conquest mode” which is an SRS feature where you are shown every card in a deck and you have to answer reading questions. If you get it wrong than it will come back later and you will be shown the card multiple times until you learn it. If you get it right the first time than you don’t see it anymore.
This is really good because it’s easy to go through an entire level very quickly, and I find that words I learned through context mode stick better than even words I learned through Anki. And you might be wondering how that might be since Kotoba only tests you on reading and word definitions are just an afterthought, and to be honest I’m not so sure why it is either. Bunpro can also test on input, but I find that this mode in Bunpro is very poor in comparison to what Kotoba bot offers. However, Bunpro does offer sentences for context and I think that’s a big advantage over Kotoba.
Of course I’m not saying this to bash Bunpro. I have a lifetime account, so of course I believe in Bunpro as a product and want it to be the best it can be. I just think that this particular feature could be better. Perhaps it needs more time in the oven, and more careful consideration regarding what the best way to learn vocabulary may be. After all, vocab is not grammar, and what works for grammar may not always work for vocab. I like this idea of testing readability through input which Bunpro and Kotoba use - I love this, actually - but I’m not so sure about the rest of the review functionality. For example, we have sentences and that’s awesome. But rather than having us read a sentence at a time which may take forever to review, why not create a handful of short stories using the words and give us that for the context and then allow us to review the words in a faster manner based on meaning alone? After all, Bunpro does have stories for reading practice now; wouldn’t it make more sense to combine to two features? One of Bunpro’s competitors also uses stories, and there are some very interesting studies which seem to indicate that graded reading is one of the most beneficial ways to learn any language (Including your native language).
And while we’re on the topic, I just want to say that some of the items in the vocab decks feel really random and make me feel as though the decks are completely machine generated and were never reviewed by a human before being released. Of course I am referring to the word stems which appear from time to time. There must be a better way to teach these?
You guys have made a great product for teaching grammar and I enjoy seeing it improve all the time. I think you can find a way to teach other concepts as well, and I look forward to watching Bunpro continue to improve.