Feedback - Suggested Improvements/Feature Request

I cannot overstate just how much I love this idea. I did learn a lot of the grammar words from some JLPT prep courses I did on Udemy (they spoke only in Japanese), but as someone who is trying out the immersion feature (in which the grammar explanations are still in English—only the interface is in Japanese), having a deck with those specific vocabulary words would be so much easier than looking up each word I don’t know. (And sometimes my brain just ignores the walls of Japanese anyway because it “knows” what the text is supposed to mean. Practicing the vocabulary words would definitely make them easier for me to recognize.)

The app Drops, which I use just to focus on vocabulary, is organized into thematic decks of 12-17 words each. (I like it because it contains several of the languages that I’m studying all in one place.) So you have things like colors, food, hobbies, family, shops, school, restaurants, tools, and so on. They’ve recently also began including decks with short phrases like Tourist Essentials, On the Plane, On the Train, Food Safety. (I like these too, but I think they are more useful for a user like me who understands the underlying grammar and can read the kanji. Kanji can also be turned off.)
Important to note that there IS overlap between decks and it does keep track of the words you’ve learned so even if a word is part of more than one deck, it still only counts as one word.

All of that explaining about Drops was to chime in here and say that it might be worthwhile to create some thematic decks by which to organize the vocabulary.

TLDR: I think all @wct’s ideas are excellent.

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Ah, this is a nice distillation of the feature request:

  • For the BunPro team to add some ‘thematic decks’ (great term, @eclipse77x !)

Now, this is an especially good feature request (in my very humble opinion, if I do say so myself), especially when it’s boiled down to fairly small, utilitarian decks, because…:

In order for the dev team to make it easier for themselves to add quick, purpose-built thematic decks, they will necessarily find the need to make it easier in general to add quick, purpose-built decks. I.e. refactoring the code/database/system so that adding and working with decks (creation, editing, sorting, listing, grouping, etc.) will become much easier to do.

In general software development, all this kind of refactoring / code-improvement / reorganization without a specific goal runs the risk of becoming a lot of busy-work with no direct feedback to know if it’s really worth it. However, with a specific goal of “making it easier for us to add thematic decks”, then all that kind of refactoring has an immediate purpose and thus becomes more focused and less likely to veer off into vapourware-fantasy-land (which I speak from experience, ‘analysis paralysis’ being the bane of my software development career! :sweat_smile:).

So, if the dev team can work out some tools and interfaces to make adding thematic decks (such as the suggested BunPro Immersion Vocabulary deck) an easy and straightforward process within the website itself (i.e. rather than ‘hard-coding’ each new deck ‘by hand’ in the backend), then it would ‘just’ be a relatively simple step to open up some of those tools/interface to users to make their own small, purpose-built thematic decks. [All this is easier said than done, I understand! That’s why this is a feature request, after all! :sweat_smile:]

Or, from a different perspective, there’s another common motto in software development, which is to: “Eat your own dogfood.” In other words, instead of just mushing some stuff together and hoping the customers (the ‘dogs’) are getting what they need (a healthy and tasty ‘dogfood’), the developer (the ‘human’) directly uses the thing they expect the customer to use (i.e. ‘eating’ their own ‘dogfood’), so that they know from experience and vigorous hands-on usage that the product works well (is ‘healthy’) and also has a good, featureful, robust interface (that ‘tastes’ good).

Then, almost by magic (I said ‘almost’!) they will have developed the desired User-Definable Decks as a by-product of their own team wanting/needing tools to create small, purpose-built decks which themselves already have a good use case for existing as an additional feature that users already want/need.

It’s like, “Buy one, get one free!” Buy the “Thematic Decks (by BunPro team)” feature, get the “Thematic Decks (by anyone!)” feature for ‘free’! :nerd_face:

[ETA: Ah! Another common development strategy, especially in video games for instance, is for the developer to create a Level Editor, or World Editor first, which (crucially) works within the game itself. Then they use this editor to create the playable ‘levels’ or ‘world’ of the game, and disable the editor for the final game. (Of course, they can also (and often do) have a mode where the editor is re-enabled, for the players to use to create their own custom levels (e.g. to share with others to play).) Same idea here: Make a ‘deck editor’ within the website itself (but only accessible to devs/admins, initially), use it to make some small thematic decks, and then once the deck editor is working fairly well, open up partial access to it to users/customers so that they can create their own custom decks using the same deck editor the devs themselves use (but with restricted access of course).]

Anyway, this is just more brainstorming, etc. :sweat_smile: Take what’s useful, ignore the rest!

Thank you for that. My boss calls it “bottom-lining” and he loves it since he tends to be more verbose than most.

Since you’ve brought up the subject of hard-coding, I’ll add on: I think it’s important to ensure that the decks are built in such a way that they only reference the vocabulary terms that are added, so that if anything having to do with that term needs to be changed, it’s changed for all decks it’s been added to. What do they call that in Database lingo again? A many-to-one relationship? (The decks being the many and the vocabulary being the one.)

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Nice! I’ll remember that for myself!

:eyes: :flushed:
‘wct’ might as well stand for ‘Wall of Copious Text’! :sweat_smile:

Thankfully, I’m pretty sure they’ve got that baked in already, as far as I can tell. :+1:

Yeah, I think you got it. Either that or one-to-many… Or maybe they are synonymous, I forget, but I agree with your gist. In general programming terms it has many names, like ‘access by reference’ – even including names for when it should have been done but wasn’t, like: ‘Copy-paste programming’, or the more jocular Copy Pasta, in reference to the other well-known programming phenomenon, Spaghetti Code.

Wall of copious text. Love that!

There’s both a one-to-many relationship and a many-to-one relationship and I think they differ. Not the best example because there are exceptions but: One department can have many employees (one-to-many), and (or the most part) each employee can only be assigned to one department (many-to-one). That’s a blast from the past. Haven’t done database work in years!

I remember spaghetti code. My assembly language professor was hardcore against it and would take of a lot of points!

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Feature Request: Auto-furigana integration between BunPro and BunPro forums

[Quick note: There may actually already be some kind of feature like this (without BunPro integration, but at least a nice markup tag) available from the forum’s developer / plugin-community. I have no idea about that, but may be worth looking into first.]

I just started reading the Have you written your Japanese Sentence today? thread, and noticed a couple of things:
Observations:

  1. There is/was a request to allow ‘spoilers’ tags to be used in the forum – which makes sense for such a thread, since you want to be able to try to read other peoples’ sentences without ‘giving it away’ with a translation visible. Currently, it looks like most people just use the ‘Hide Details’ tag, which more or less solves that problem.
  2. The OP includes instructions for hand-coding furigana as ‘ruby’ text, using HTML ruby tags et al. This manual HTML coding is painful for many people, to say the least. And it’s hard to remember the correct format without looking it up somewhere.
  3. But including furigana completely out in the open kinda hurts the BunPro-user-experience where we routinely have some furigana shown for unknown kanji, and some hidden for known kanji.
  4. Unfortunately, there’s no way within the forums currently to hide furigana ruby text such as by using a ‘spoiler’ tag or a ‘hide details’ tag. Even if the ‘spoiler’ tag were enabled, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t work within the context of HTML ruby tags. And it certainly doesn’t work with ‘hide details’.

So, feature request for the forums (for the BunPro-user-experience as a whole!):

  1. Augment the forums so that adding furigana to text (generally kanji, but maybe more generally as well?) is a ‘native’ feature of the BP forum. I.e. like ‘Hide Details’ or ‘Spoiler’ or ‘Build Poll’ menu options, there is a specific menu option in the forum post/reply editor, such as ‘Furigana’ or ‘Add Furigana’, or perhaps the less Japanese-specific ‘Add Ruby Text’.
    • If text/kanji is currently selected, then the (internal) ruby tags will wrap around that selected text.
    • The formatting text, generated by this feature, will resemble other markup tags common in these kinds of forums. For example, like this:
      [furigana="かんじ"]漢字[/furigana],
      or perhaps more appropriately, call the tag ‘kanji’ or maybe ‘kana’, like:
      [kana="かんじ"]漢字[/kana].
  2. The result of such a tag would be displayed as ruby/furigana that can be clicked to show/hide it, just like in the BunPro website proper! Examples:
    On: 漢字かんじ
    Off: 漢字
    (Hopefully can massage the styling so that it’s smaller / doesn’t add so much space between lines)
  3. Even better, integrate this forum feature with BunPro itself, so that the user’s furigana preferences are followed: If the user has furigana turned off, don’t show it. If they have it on, then show it.
  4. Better still, if the selected text is actually a kanji item in BunPro (such as those that get synced with WaniKani), then automatically populate the furigana/ruby with the correct kana, like so:
    [furigana]漢字[/furigana] renders as 漢字かんじ automatically, since 漢字 is a BP kanji (I’m assuming), with the corresponding kana “かんじ” already known by the BP database.
  5. Even better still (!), if the kanji exists in BP, and the user has preferences for that particular kanji (on or off), then such automatically-linked kanji will have their furigana/ruby on or off according to the user’s individual settings!
  6. Even more better still (!!), extend the single-use [furigana] tag, perhaps with an option such as [furigana auto=“on”] … [/furigana], which will process the entire contents within the tagged text, find any kanji which exist within BP’s system, and automatically add furigana/ruby to each kanji match, again following the user’s individual preferences.

With such integration in the forums, then users writing their daily sentences in the above-mentioned thread could just enclose the whole sentence in a single tag like this (assuming ‘auto=“on”’ by default):
[furigana]今最初の日本語の文章を書きました![/furigana]

And it would render as this for a complete beginner:
いま最初さいしょ日本語にほんご文章ぶんしょうきました!

Or like this for someone intermediate:
最初さいしょの日本語の文章ぶんしょうを書きました!

(And of course, if the user clicks on one of the kanji without furigana, then it would show the hidden furigana, and also correctly update the user’s preferences for that particular kanji on the main BP site.)

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A good feature would be the integration of questions with the graded readers. For example, you have a paragraph of text you read and try to translate then have several questions that are related to the text that you answer

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I really wish there was a way to turn off the Japanese linguistical terms in the information sections. My brain is already hard at work understanding the descriptions of the new grammar - adding difficult kanji words that I don’t need to know really doesn’t help. Not having them makes it (at least for me) more readable, and it also looks a lot less cluttered and less intimidating:

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Hi there, and thanks for getting in touch! We have discussed this exact idea a few times amongst the team, and are in the process of working toward something somewhat similar. We have not decided exactly how we are going to achieve this yet, but will do our best to come up with something very similar to what you described. :blush:

Note - This is something that we would ‘like’ to do and have noticed ourselves, but whether it will definitely become a feature or not yet rests more on what we are capable of doing development wise.

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I think it’d be cool if you could learn vocabulary with sentences.
The word you need to translate could be highlighted, so you can practice reading and study new vocabulary at the same time!

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Listening Comprehension Tests

Other than closing my eyes after typing an answer, it would be useful for listening comprehension

I feel to hear the sentence then select the correct English sentence from multiple choice or something would be helpful. Is there a plug-in or plans to do something similar? I have Discord and real life with Japanese friends, but a bit more formal study would be great for planning on 能力試験, I think, versus purely casual speech on topics I’m familiar with (usually games or weather).

Could just be an extra tab or something I guess… click button to play the clip. Click to reveal multiple choice answers and have them be 4 random sentences (maybe from the same N-level?), where one is correct.

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Oh, this is a nice idea. I know I would definitely benefit from some more listening comprehension training myself!

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This one might be a bit controversial, but I’d like to be able to set vacation mode to turn on automatically on weekends (or at whatever other specified intervals a user might desire).

For the past two years, I’ve been studying every single day for several hours and it’s gotten to the point where it is exhausting to have to think about and plan around. My husband took me on a two-week vacation and it was so nice not having to worry about streaks, days studied, accuracy percentages and all of that and so I thought, “Well, what if I just left the weekends to take a break from studying?”

It would be so nice to be able to do that without having reviews piling up and without having to remember to turn on vacation mode every Friday.

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If you simply refrain from doing any reviews on the weekends, some of the time BP will be rescheduling reviews to be 1 week or 2 weeks in the future. For the other cases, when the scheduling is shorter than 1 week, you can simply leave any that fall on a weekend until the coming Monday. And for those that are 1 month or longer, likewise just leave them till Monday.

It actually sounds to me (based on my own experiences) that you might be taking on too many reviews/lessons if you find it difficult/impossible to take any kind of break without coming back in a couple of days to a giant, overwhelming stack of reviews. It might be worth considering slowing down your overall pace so that it’s not as exhausting to think about and plan around. One of my first shifts to a slower, gentler, more sustainable pace was to slow down enough to the point where I could ask myself: “If I were to take a break for one week and come back, would the review stack pile up so much that it would be painful or overwhelming to start tackling it again?” If the answer is “Yes,” then I keep slowing down. Once it got to the point where I could confidently answer “No,” that’s when I started to feel a lot less stress trying to maintain my pace for long periods of time.

Maybe for you, you might only need to ask yourself about taking just two days off (one weekend), and whether or not Monday would be overwhelming or not. If you can get it to the point where you can handle the extra stack on Monday without feeling stressed or overwhelmed (like say by spreading it out through the rest of the week maybe), then maybe that would be all you need to do, instead of having to always switch vacation mode on and off. Just some ideas for ya! :sweat_smile:

I appreciate the suggestions. My overall pace is 2 grammar points and 8 vocabulary words per day. It’s not a lot to keep up with, generally I would have something like 60-80 reviews per day. (Though when I turned vacation mode back on it seems to have bugged and now I have 130-160 per day and it seems like the reviews I do just keep coming back the next day.)

Wouldn’t not doing reviews for Saturday and Sunday just leave me with 3x as many reviews for Mondays? And wouldn’t shifting the reviews in that way would make Mondays always have a bigger batch than other days? And knowing they were there and that I was not doing them on purpose would just … really bother me.

That’s what I was referring to when I said

In other words, imagine the most-ideal level of reviews you could want, where you are able to take Sat and Sun off. Sure some reviews would get scheduled for Sat and Sun, but you just let them gather for Monday. But you don’t have to do all of those reviews on Monday. You could, for example, do half of them (3 days-worth divided by 2 is 1.5 days-worth, so, in effect, only 50% more than usual). Then, on Tuesday, there would be 2.5 days-worth, and you could do another 1.5 days-worth, so on Wednesday you’d only have 2 days-worth, etc. By the time you get to Friday, you’ll be back down to 1 days-worth, so you’ll have spread out all the ‘extra’ reviews across the week.

And, if you’ve worked it down to the ideal level of reviews, then in fact “1.5 days-worth” will really just be ‘a normal days-worth’ at your ideal rate.

In other words, if Monday’s stack is too big, then just slow down your new lessons until it becomes small enough again that it’s not scary to face.

It’s the same thing with vacation mode. The reviews are still there, and you’re deliberately not doing them on purpose … because you want to have free time on the weekends, right? :sweat_smile:

But ultimately, I can’t help you with that question. It’s a matter of personal priorities and motivations. What’s more important to you: Stress-free quality time on weekends, or forcing yourself to always do all the reviews all the time?

As long as you progress weekly on your reviews, it really ‘shouldn’t’ matter if some days you have a bigger stack and other days you’re able to finish the whole stack. Again, if the Monday stack seems too big/daunting, that’s a cue that your weekly load of reviews is too many; and then all you need to do is slow down your lessons until that Monday stack isn’t so big and scary.

The key point is that for the past two years you’ve been doing reviews every day, i.e. 7 days per week. Well, if you really want to have free time on the weekends, you basically need to reduce that by 2 days-worth of reviews per week, down to 5 days per week. Of course your currently-scheduled reviews are still scheduled at your old rate of 7 days-worth per week. So by not doing reviews on the weekends, you’ve (temporarily) bumped up your reviews per day by 7/5 = 1.4 times, in other words, 40% more reviews per day! So, it’s either turn vacation mode on/off all the time, or use the SRS system to slow down the number of reviews you’re getting overall, until it gets back down to a more manageable rate of 1 days-worth of reviews per day.

Anyway, it’s just a suggestion. Maybe try it out for a week or two and see how it goes. Or maybe not. Just an idea.

Requesting a better keyboard-only support. It’s not only fun for keyboard enthusiasts(I really dislike using trackpad or mouse with a laptop), but also considered a good practice from accessibility standpoint. Right now the are couple of rough spots.

  • On dashboard I can’t use vimium, press “tab”/“shift-tab” to activate “hourly”/“daily” buttons and smashing enter in Caret mode also does not activate them, and I want to see them without leaving comfort of the keyboard.

.

Almost everything I can click, I can also access via keyboard. Two buttons are the only exception.

  • ‘Learn new grammar’ mode also has small annoyances like this, but not critical: to go from one item to study to the next one, I can use right arrow. To start quiz I can press “enter”. I can’t figure out how to navigate “summary”/“continue”, but at least I can return to dashboard by changing the url
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As everyone is aware the cram page options are a little lacking, but can get the job done for larger sets of grammar.

One thing i’d love to have added is:

From the homepage when clicking on the progress of which level grammar points are at:
Beginner|Adept|Seasoned|Expert|Master|Ghosts
(And for each of these, it has a sub level 1,2,3 etc.)

It would be great to be able to cram either:

  1. the entire subset - for eg, Beginner 1,2,3
  2. just the subset - for eg, ‘Beginner 1’.

I feel this would be a clear directive of which grammar points to cram, as currently I just find myself loading up an entire JLPT level and aiming to complete 50 questions which is more of a ‘I hope I hit those target grammar points’ - I understand you can select certain grammar points for cram, but the process to manage sets that I need to cram is too much input each time so using the ‘progress’ information to select content for cramming instead would be much quicker for the user as well as easier in making the selection itself.

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I think you’ll be happy to know that we have some big changes planned for cram in the near-future! I don’t want to give away too much quite yet, but it’s nice to hear that people’s suggestions are pretty much on the same page as things we’re discussing behind-the-scenes! It’s probably the one thing I’m most looking forward to :cowboy_hat_face:

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Ooh, I’ll keep my eye out for that then! I don’t actually use Cram as much as I’d like to in its current (slightly cumbersome) state, but with a bit of overhaul I’d be all for utilising it a lot more!

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