Oh, that’s my deck! To be honest, I made it because:
A) You have the option to refresh the deck’s progress, which will indicate that you have learned a certain number of words for this piece of media as a result of other decks. I think this is a cool feature, especially since I like to feel comfortable with the things I use for immersion.
B) I love the game!
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Calling it Postmortem first is wild 
Honestly, I think it’s really cool that you made a tool to make Bunpro work as how you want to use it. But I think it’s a failure on the team’s part that you had to do it in the first place.
I would say that’s a big problem overall with how I use Bunpro. Needs to be more opinionated.
Okami really is an amazing game. Thank you for your contributions. 
It was a mistake that was corrected. I used postmortem in the definition of “critique” rather than failure.
The fact that we can have a conversation and I can push back hard on the forums and share my opinion is worthy of praise by the users and the Bunpro staff. I think all of us just want the best product possible at the end of the day.
I know my opinions aren’t always popular, but I will always share them regardless.
I worked over ten years in a brutal startup environment that went from less than 100 customers to a publicly traded company. When you have cut your teeth for that long, you develop a sixth sense for unusual design choices.
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I think the issue needs to be looked at from a top-down perspective.
What I have observed is foundational issues overall with Bunpro. Where there are solutions to problems that are based on shaky foundations. (I apologize, as this is far exceeding the original intent of this thread, which was to show how many are using Community Decks)
Have you made an account and see what the onboarding process is like? I railed on them hard about the excessive modal box use (over 30!) and they did change it…but in an unsatisfactory manner. (10 modal boxes now is an improvement, I guess.)
The original intent of this site was to learn Japanese grammar. A very much needed niche in the Japanese learning community. Bunpro very quickly earned a lifetime subscription when I saw they went from N5-N1 in terms of grammar points. I don’t even think a website went this far in terms of content.
Then once the N5-N1 grammar points were added, the amount of refinement and polish (moat building) went on the back burner and overall Bunpro had no idea what they wanted to to. So, they added vocab. They added different language options for Japanese learners. They did things that are considered “naive” mistakes when expanding a business. Not saying that there is no value for those features, of course. It’s a matter of when you should do it.
I made a comment on another thread about Bunpro becoming a sharp knife and morphing into a Swiss Army tool that does nothing (does everything, but in a mediocre fashion). I think this is what we are seeing.
Remember there was talks of a conjugation tool? If you don’t, that’s fine as that was mentioned several years ago. This would’ve been a great addition to sharpen the figurative knife in the aspect of Japanese grammar (more moat building). But there’s nothing. Even now there’s just a prototype that hasn’t been worked on in a long time.
Don’t get me wrong, the team is still adding features and that is worthy of praise no matter how much I critique it. They truly have no incentive to add things, really. They could’ve just left it at grammar points and do slight updates in the same vein as Wanikani.
But Bunpro is not Wanikani. Bunpro is in a very unique position where they can become the biggest Japanese learning app on the internet, but they are doing it in the silliest of ways.
I am a firm believer that everything must be questioned to ascertain the truth of something. Is SRS even good for grammar? What’s the science behind it?
Is FSRS even a good match for Bunpro’s needs? When chatting privately, I got the impression that they didn’t know how the FSRS algorithm worked. That is a huge problem! I took a look at the FSRS algorithm and while it’s not hard if you have ML knowledge, it can be overwhelming.
I am listing off a bunch of random things, I get that. But if you look from a top-down perspective as to how everything fits together, it’s not fitting together well. They have good ideas in isolation that aren’t serving each other well as best as it should.
It’s sad for me to say, despite how much I love the site and the team behind it, I overall get the feeling that they have no longterm vision and are okay with taking half measures in a field where they shouldn’t.
I get why my posts may seem confusing and unpopular because I am directly saying that X isn’t good enough, gut it/change it. But I firmly believe that the team can make something great, they just need firm pushback to counterbalance the praise.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I fear this post and the direction the thread is taking may go beyond the original intent of this thread, so I will no longer post to it. But overall, the fact that there’s some good that can come of it will always be a win.
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I think this thread does bring some interesting insight in regards to trying to critique the direction the staff is going. Ive only been around the site for about half a year now and when I joined I was still in the beginning of my learning stage. So for me, at that time, the Grammar was a big draw for me, much as Wanikani was used for Kanji, and at that time was hardly using Anki. Now I have my workflow for everything and what have you. However, I think you said something interesting up top,
I dont know if you lurk in the suggestion thread but a lot of people really get hung up on vocab. Myself initially included. Much of the feedback and suggestions is about upgrading that portion of the site. I have to assume(since you said you worked at a start-up so you can confirm) that taking your users suggestions/feedback is considered valuable. Give the people what they want, but at the same time, its not what Bunpro was building towards.
As you mentioned above, Wani is deeply engrained in the kanji teaching. Thats what they do, and they teach vocab because its part of Kanji. That is where they stopped and I respect that (While at the same time hating it and wishing they would provide more in terms of listening). But that is not what the team is for.
Anki is an everything tool, which is amazing. and while learning it is not hard per say, it does take time. For Japanese where you would need to add, for just one card(in my preference), the English, Japanese, Sentence, and Audio of the standalone and sentence; that is all very time consuming. So the community made decks are YEARS old. I think the common 2k core deck most people use floats around 8 years old? And according to the uploader on ANKI its HIS version he reuploaded since the original got lost to time.
Anyway, to make a long story short, Grammar did have a hole that bunpro filled, and I think theyve done a good job(although they could shine some things up) but when the main point is done, how do they get other users and grow as all businesses want? And I think Vocab was that answer, as the people demanded. And without vocab, you cant study the Grammar. Much in the way you cant study the Kanji without also studying Vocab.
Going in the direction of Anki for Vocab makes sense since that seems to be the golden standard, and they are community deck driven. Anyway, I ask you this from your aforementioned start-up experience. Do you think the team should internally check-in with its original goals, or pivot and change what they wanted and were and rebrand so to speak.
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I disagree on a very fundamental level here. I’ve been writing software professionally for the past 14 years as a developer. Before that there were quite a few years I did that for just myself. If I consider everyone who uses something I’ve written, and how many use it in ways I didn’t specify or consider… If it was a failure, I’d currently be experiencing a solid 6 digit amount of daily failures.
I can’t have long debates today because I’m completely hungover after I was in a succubus themed shisha bar in shinjuku until 4 AM because the staff was making a great effort going comprehensible-input mode on me to entertain my “barely capable of smalltalk” ass. This is very relevant to this thread because I occasionally used bunpro on my phone as a dictionary during that time, when I didn’t understand some word she said. Probably also something the devs hadn’t really intended. Much rather than a failure, I think it’s amazing and accidentally the best JP-EN dictionary I ever found for my phone.
Another example: many many years ago I had a rather tastelessly modded Golf GTI. A weird phase… It looked ridiculous but I loved it. But not a lot of parts were the way VW intended anymore. Changing the car because I wanted it to be different would have been VW’s failure by your logic. Which I think is very hard to argue.
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I’m also kinda split on this whole thing… I made the tool to extract a CSV from manga/pdfs/subtitles etc. and I made a bunch of decks with it too, and I was happy to see anyone use them or my tool at all, but I’ve always seen them as the sort of thing I’ll use later when I have a more solid foundation of vocab to just fill in the gaps. Say for example you wanna read a sci-fi novel or whatever, and your japanese is pretty good already, a community deck allows you to target specific words that actually appear in the book. The thing is just that this narrows down the potential user base from all users to advanced users who studied all their previous vocab on bunpro, which is another huge gap probably, so I think maybe the whole concept is just rather niche in general. But I guess JPDB is pretty popular with its decks too… I guess it’s the disconnect between this being a learning platform attractive to new learners, and the feature being something more useful for advanced learners. And you just end up with a rather small adoption rate, but it’s still probably the best tool available for the people who do use it in certain use cases.
Another note: These are only published decks. People could privately make decks considering it’s pretty low-effort with the tool I made and just never upload them. I’d imagine the type of people who could benefit a lot from this tool might be doing this more than you’d expect, but who knows.
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I was avoiding chiming in as I wasn’t sure if this thread was including custom, but unpublished decks or was purely focused on the Community (ie published) side of things.
Personally, I’ve been exporting my imiwa? vocab lists and importing them to Bunpro as a way to cherry pick words I want to learn. I haven’t published any of them since they’re just a hodgepodge of words I’ve looked up while reading. Or, it feels misleading to upload it as a Community Deck as people may think it’s a comprehensive overview of all vocabulary in a particular piece of media, when really it’s only a small fraction of the total vocab.
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