Could we please make Bunpro less frustrating?

Bunpro
#1

Not sure if this has been discussed before but since I get frustrated every day to the point where I want to punch the wall I had to make this thread. I find it incredibly frustrating when Bunpro throws 3-4 grammar points at me at once! I believe this is the right way to go but the way it is executed is just so devastatingly frustrating.

I believe it is a terrible idea to combine grammar points that someone just barely “learned” a while ago. Let me get a grammar point to a certain level of understanding before you add it to another grammar point. It also feels like I rarely encounter the base form of many grammar points…
It is always a fuckeroo of multiple things and sure I want that at some point of progress but not right after I learned a new grammar point!!

I wish example sentences were progress-aware and aware of the various grammar points used. They should only be used in reviews when a certain progress level is reached. Always learn the base form first and later mix and match.

In the beginning, this was doable with the past forms, negative forms etc. of things but now I am getting into more complicated stuff and it’s just mega frustrating.

I am writing this after spending 2 hours on reviews.

11 Likes
#2

Instead of using learn, I look at the deck and add the points I have already read/heard in anime/novels/drama, etc.
I strongly suggest to have a reading/watching material like this then come back to bunpro to study the topics after I listened to them in context.

7 Likes
#3

You can add grammar points individually if you prefer, or go to the general settings and set the learn batch to 1, that way you can just add 1 new grammar at the time and get it until whatever level you prefer before adding more.

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#4

That sounds very inconvenient to me and that is why I started doing Bunpro in the first place.

I have my settings on 3 atm after going down from 6. I don’t even find 6 that troubling. It’s just that I get my progress stalled by these grammar-killer combos. I could probably go smother and faster if the grammar combos were a bit more progress-oriented.

Taking everything waaay slower and spending so much more time on every point is in my opinion a bit unnecessary.

4 Likes
#5

I fully agree with this. It’s why I switched doing reviews on Anki mode.
It would be less frustrating if there would be a thorough explanation of all the different grammar being used in the answer when it’s often a combination of multiple grammar points being used.

7 Likes
#6

If that’s not possible, you should pick up the thing which is your ultimate motive for learning jp.
Do it slowly first if you want to reduce the stress.
The most easy thing for me is reading the lyrics of the j songs I like while listening to them.
(Searching [song name] lyrics jp/kanji/ eng with translation side by side)

Although Bunpro has sentences but they are not enough to get a topic to a complete level of understanding.
Using Bunpro solely is a bad idea, it’s not a primary source for learning but a review tool.

7 Likes
#7

I second orumi’s post 100%.
Never used the learn feature as I want to be even slightly familiar with any grammar point to learn it without frustration so I add them by myself whenever the specific interest is already there.

Curiosity is key in language learning and I feel the learn feature goes against that and does indeed bring lots of frustration… and you can use bunpro just as efficiently by bypassing it.

Bunpro is very strong at drilling and consilidating familiar knowledge, initial learning, IMO, not so much.
Throwing a grammar point at you out of any proactive interest sounds like a very outdated brute force approach to learning to me.

everyone has its own ways around bunpro,
But if you are that frustrated you might want to give this manual approach a go?

6 Likes
#8

I think an important study skill to remember here, which applies to Bunpro, Anki, and any other SRS software one might use, is to be generous and nice to yourself when grading reviews.

For example, if you manage to remember the correct grammar point but fumble one of those unusual grammar combinations, I recommend backspacing your answer, typing in the correct one, and then moving on. Unlike Anki, Bunpro does not have a nuanced grading option, so one can only count things as correct or incorrect ー and when it comes to those close calls, I would veer towards the “correct” end of the spectrum than not.

Of course, if you fail to remember the grammar point at all or in part, you should count the card as incorrect. But if you successfully recall the grammar point Bunpro is testing you on and fumble something extra, like maybe an additional suffix like ~ておく, or a dakuten sound change, or you missed a の, or something, try to note it down in your brain, promise you’ll be more careful next time, and then move on. In my experience, you’ll end up getting it right the third or fourth time it ends up in your review queue, anyway ー especially if you’re also doing extensive level-appropriate Japanese immersion which will expose you to these odd grammar combinations more often than Bunpro can.

13 Likes
#9

I just wanna ask a quick clarifying question. Are you guys talking about struggling with multiple conjugations and auxiliary words when answering the same question? Or are you talking about not fully understanding the rest of the grammar in the question sentences?

If you can give some specific examples it would be useful. As far as I’m aware if you study the lessons in the Bunpro order you should not be made to use things you haven’t studied yet. Equally the question sentences should build off of things that are in previous lessons only.

3 Likes
#10

It wasn’t my point, but from reading i i felt this.

A simple example would be learning the Te-form and next day something that utilizes the Te-Form heavily like Te-imasu. This way you dont know the Te form yet but will constantly fail the Te-Imasu form as well due to the early stages of learning the Te-Form.

I have seen similar things a couple of times as well. If it is more complicated grammar and later on it gets much more frustrating, I guess…

2 Likes
#11

The kind of design I think would solve this problem is setting prerequisites for certain grammar points, for example, you have to master the basic te form grammar point before you move on to the grammar points that use te, and so on.

What this would look like under the hood is a directed graph of grammar point nodes, where you need to have reached a certain level in all of the nodes that point into a new node to have it added to reviews.

Bunpro seems to be working towards being more of a tool and less of a system, though. I don’t think the devs are trying to make it the kind of thing that does all of the thinking for you, just something that makes your own study plan much more manageable. Not to mention that I’d rather have them working on implementing promised features and improving the UI and working on the mobile app more than creating some convoluted prerequisite system.

4 Likes
#12

I just tried to explain, I agree it is not really feasible to implement. For the lower levels following a Book and doing it parallel might be the best option.

2 Likes
#13

I’ll be honest, it sounds like you’re not spending enough time studying one grammar point until you add more. They compound together in sentences as you go. I don’t see a problem with this. This is real life and how japanese actually is. It’s really hard and you need to get used to seeing grammar combined as soon as possible.

I also used to get frustrated with this in the N5 stages of learning and realized I needed to slow down and use the other resources linked in those grammar points as well to better understand them, before adding more. I took my time, started reading, watching grammar breakdown videos, etc. Once you get out of the N5/N4 stage you really won’t have this problem anymore, because you’ll know all the basics.

17 Likes
#14

Exactly this.

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#15

It would be nice to have questions isolated to only the one studied grammar point until around ~Adept 1, 2 or 3, and then open the gates to all manner of combinations after that. I’ve had the experience many times of just learning a grammar point, and some of the very first questions (Beginner 1-4) wants to combine like three different learned grammar points together for a right answer. I’m sorry but no amount of studying or mastery of the previous grammar points makes this any less frustrating. I understand a combination of many grammar points gets one ready for navigating native Japanese, but in my opinion there should be some grace period for learners to get a handle on newly learned items without contending with previous material.

4 Likes
#16

Bunpro frustrates me a lot as well. The cloze formatting of the practice can fall into that “guess what the writer is thinking” trap sometimes. I feel mentally exhausted after practicing sometimes.

Having said that, it sounds like you’re going too fast and not doing enough immersion or output practice. I’d recommend watching and reading more untranslated content. I discovered cijapanese.com a while ago and that’s been an absolute godsend for me.

If you’re interested in outputting, I’d recommend langcorrect.com. The feedback you’ll get is of mixed quality since the users are all humans doing it for free, but it’s good for if you don’t interact with native speakers often. Just make up sentences using a grammar form (and vocabulary words you’ve recently missed, if you have any) and ask for feedback; that’s what I do a lot.

You’ve got to practice using the knowledge and building muscle memory. That’s how you become able to tell it all apart. But also remember, you’re supposed to be a little bit frustrated. That’s the brain changing to accommodate the new information.

3 Likes
#17

I think there are two separate but intertwined problems here, one is the natural frustration that occurs with SRS and flashcards in general, and another is how bunpro shows things that we haven’t quite yet mastered. For the first problem, I used to struggle with this a lot with different SRS options, and here is my (subjective) opinion, though please take it with a grain of salt since I am still just getting started:

This is a more internal problem than external one, and so some of my advice is just advise for generally managing emotions with relating to a hard topic. As I am a student, I have found that thinking of bunpro reviews as a sort of quiz helps with the natural frustration. Oftentimes I feel I keep getting things wrong in the moment, but I’m getting the same few points wrong, and in general I have gotten more cards correct than otherwise. I generally get around 80% on my flashcards, sometimes higher, sometimes lower, and it is far better to think of the 80% one has gotten right than the 20% one has gotten wrong. I find bunpro’s “gamification” (for lack of a better word) also helps with this, and the leveling system.
Additionally, don’t be afraid to press enter twice if you don’t know something. Most people say to sit and struggle with a problem until you’ve memorized it, but I find separating out things I struggle with into a cram session helps the most, and is far less frustrating, and there is even a button to do this once you finish reviews. The cram sessions also have a selector to cram commonly missed items, so I would recommend that as well.
Finally, make sure you aren’t learning too much, I’m currently doing 23 new flashcards a day, 3 of which are grammar, and I feel that is really pushing the limit, and would do far less if I wasn’t taking the JLPT soon. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

As for the second problem, I think using the extra resources when learning the grammar is really helpful. My personal recommendation is the Imabi articles that are linked, and as they are quite long, and quite good once you understand how to read them. Using more than one resource is best since sometimes the grammar won’t quite click mentally if you only use one. That is why the extra resources are linked, to study them before moving on. If you don’t have time for this though, then I would consider studying less cards.

3 Likes
#18

As part of ongoing polishing that we are doing at the moment in all of the levels, we have decided to also rearrange the sentences a little bit and change some of the answer styles. This should remove quite a big chunk of the problems you are experiencing.

Basically what we are planning on doing is rearranging the example sentence order so that the easiest sentences always appear at the beginning, and then editing the required answers so that they mostly only ask for the desired grammar, and don’t force you to type in other grammar patterns. We might still leave a few of those here and there in the last few sentences just for extra practice.

For example, if the grammar review is for ておく, but the answer that that you need to type in is ～ておいてくれたので, we will move the くれたので part out of the fill-in field, so that it is not longer something that the user needs to type. While this kind of review can be helpful, it definitely does result in frustration more than anything else. In our first pass, we will mainly just remove the really long obviously painful ones like this, but leave things that users should definitely be able to figure out by themselves, like basic conjugations of the target grammar.

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#19

To be honest I did not expect a change soon because this means a big overhaul of all the answers. Awesome to hear this is in the works already.

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#20

Thank the development guys! They have made lots of changes on the back end of the site recently which has allowed us on the content team to make fixes and polish things a lot faster than in the past :partying_face:.

4 Likes