Clarity on yellow text answers

Bunpro
#1

Hi there

I’ve been trialing Bunpro for about a week now and am finding it very useful, especially as someone who learned Japanese in quite a slapdash way and skipped over or didn’t fully absorb some of the finer points of the elementary grammar. I think the platform has a lot of potential to fill a big gap in a language learning ecosystem that has a billion dictionaries and flashcard apps, but not much in the way of focused grammar drills, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops in future.

To that end, I wanted to mention one area which I personally think could do wiith a rethink. At the moment, there are three possible results to typing in an answer that is grammatically correct, but not what the system is looking for:

  1. The answer is marked correct on basis of alternative grammar (e.g. answering そんなに in a review that is testing for あまり)
  2. Yellow text appears asking for a different answer to be given (e.g. answering しか or のほかに in the sentence 今まで漢字___、何も勉強していなかった when it is looking for 以外)
  3. The answer is marked incorrect (食べないまま for 食べないで in the sentence ‘i went to bed without eating’)

Additionally, the review system will also throw up yellow text if you’re “close” to a right answer, but have missed a particle (e.g. 嫌いだけど).

My issue is that the current system makes it occasionally ambiguous when you’ve made an actual mistake or not, and the level of that mistake. If you’re going to use the yellow text system for both mistakes and alternate grammar, then I think you should be explicit which is which. The most useful yellow texts in my mind are the ones that say “yes, this is a correct answer, but too formal”, or “the answer you have given carries this nuance, which is slightly different”. If the meaning of two phrases is totally interchangeable in every case, then it should also make that clear (I agree that you need a system to stop people using their preferred grammar in every case rather than learning alternative phrases that mean the same thing).

In terms of flagging up when alternative grammar is not recognised at all, it might be good to have a report system that attaches to specific example sentences, and not the grammar point itself - although I recognise this creates a lot more work for the developers - or is this the pointof the ‘Report Error’ button?

7 Likes
#2

Yep, that’s what it’s for!

2 Likes
#3

I made a post about this a few months ago myself!

…have certain answers flash GREEN warnings when the user’s attempted answer is perfectly valid, but is simply not the grammar being tested— YELLOW/ORANGE warnings (whichever color is currently in use) can be used to instead denote minor grammatical errors & unnatural/undesirable nuances.

That being said, there are over 700 grammar points now, with 12 sentences each, so that’s… already somewhere around 9,000 sentences that will need to have all their alternative answers checked (plus whatever gets added for N1).

 

Still… I’d consider this a very high priority. It’s important to know whether what we’re trying would work or not, even if it’s not the exact grammar the review was designed to elicit.

This is honestly 文プロ’s greatest strength: immediate feedback on Japanese grammar. The fact that it’s built into an SRS platform is just the cherry on top. That’s all the more reason for its feedback to be as on point as it can possibly be.

8 Likes
#4

For these cases, if it’s close enough I just use “OOPS” and put in the right answer… although it would be nice to have this be a real change.

#5

The problem is that some reviews have feedback that’s too ambiguous, i.e. “was my answer actually right (should flash green IMO), or did I just make a mistake that lots of people make?” (Should flash yellow here.)

A review isn’t very helpful if you have to move on wondering whether your answer was even acceptable. That’s a waste of your time.

3 Likes
#6

Yes, I think we’re on exactly the same page, Kai - sorry for missing that you’d already posted something on this. You’re right to point out the scale of the challenge and so I’m content to deal with it for now, but for Bunpro to really deliver on its potential I think this is the area it needs to get down perfectly - ultimately it’s much more important to me to have something that comprehensively catches all the nuances of a particular grammar point than to have a lot of examples of the same grammar (although ideally one day we can have both!)

Just a thought - I know that Bunpro has just completed its incorporation of the grammar in Tobira and Genki 1+2 (which I’m assuming means example sentences and explanations rather than just ordering the grammar in the same way as in those textbooks) - is there any plan for trying to incorporate something like the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar (published in 3 parts by The Japan Times)? I ask because I think it generally provides explanations and examples that are much more comprehensive than anything that can be found in the textbooks covered so far, and a digitisation of that - together with all the cross-referencing functionality we’ve been talking about above - would really be above and beyond anything else on the market today in terms of its usefulness to Japanese language learners.