@Pushindawood I just re-learned a grammar point I had removed from reviews several months ago. Once I did the initial review, it said my streak was 5 and that the review would show up again in a few days. I understand that there is a separate mechanism for resetting an item’s SRS status, but this was still unexpected. Could you add some type of prompt that shows up when you add an item to reviews that’s not at the starting SRS to ask if you want to also reset it?
@Pushindawood For notes, can you add the ability to do strikethrough? It would be really good for counter-examples to be able to cross out the incorrect parts.
Yes, I second that. Actually, what would be really cool would be in the “Readings” tab to be able to add other resources links and have them appear in the list, rather than as an invisible note… Just a suggestion!
@Anthropos888 Thank you for your feedback. We will start adding tags to video links so that it is clear that what you are clicking on is a video. @seanblue Thank you for your suggestions on improving the SRS and making it more dynamic. We will see what we can do. Cheers!
@airblaster Thank you for your comment. Setting furigana to ‘off’ in your settings just hides the furigana that appears above kanji and compound words. You can still click/tap to reveal the furigana. If you have furigana set to ‘on’ and click on a kanji to hide the furigana it will hide that kanji’s furigana sitewide. Let us know if you have any other questions. Cheers!
@Pirastrino Thank you for your question. We have the majority of possible answers set up to accept kanji, but have not implemented the code for it yet. We hope to have kanji answers available to you soon. Cheers!
@pcontrabass Thank you for your suggestions! We will see what we can do about implementing a better way to track the feedback/suggestions that we get and make that publically available. We will see what we can do about improving the way you visualize your progress and about incorporating an API endpoint to get you a list of items which you got incorrect. Cheers!
@seanblue We would like to add more formatting capabilities to the notes, such as strikethrough, in the future. Stay tuned. Cheers!
@Leilaure Thank you for your suggestion. We have added the ability to add your own links to Readings to the to-do list. Thank you for your patience. Cheers!
Not sure if suggested before, but it would be cool for those days in the stats’ section to be clickable, so that one could see which grammar points were learned in a specific time.
First, let me again say how happy I am with bunpro. It was a no-brainer for me to get a lifetime subscription within my first two weeks. I’m sure that more veteran users will naturally see a bit more room for improvement, but the constructive manner in which this community develops ideas and the obvious drive and responsiveness of the developers leave no doubt on my mind that this site will end up nothing short of perfect, and even has the potential to put other online learning resources under serious pressure.
That being said, I have one issue. I am well aware that this is a highly subjective matter and as I couldn’t seem to find it mentioned here yet, I might very well be alone with my opinion.
I don’t like the speaker’s voice of the example sentences. I often find the voice too juvenile, too unnaturally high-pitched, too かわいい. Not every sentence of course, but often I feel some eight year old girl is talking to me. Of course this is by no means any criticism of the speaker herself. She has a really lovely voice which certainly works great in anime or in games, but for a grammar learning site I find something more neutral would be preferable. I understand that a large part of the Japanese learning community (and especially early adopters of sites like wanikani or bunpro) developed interest for the Japanese language precisely through anime and thus don’t take issue, or it might even be that her voice makes a dry topic easier and more fun to learn for some. For myself who has never been into manga or anime (I know, I know. Please leave your pitchforks and torches stored away ) though, I find it more annoying than helpful. And if bunpro is to expand in the future, the key audience might also shift a bit more towards people who study Japanese for business etc. and I know that at least some grumpy westerners like myself are not particularly fond of too much cuteness among adults.
Again, I know this is highly subjective. I am certain that there are a million more urgent issues on your plate at this time. I am also a professional audio engineer and am well aware of the work and cost that recording audio for a website like this actually means. Of course, in an ideal world it would be great if the users could select between two different speakers, but the additional cost and workload to maintain two speakers (or even re-recording just one) are probably unjustifiable. I am also sure that you guys have your valid reasons why you went with the current speaker. But I also think that the voice design of the site is what makes the actual “soul” of bunpro, even more than the visual design does. Of course it’s incredibly important to have a good looking site (which in my opinion you definitely have), but at the end of the day, the visual design is always under constraint by usability. The voice design on the other hand is almost 100% an aesthetic decision (But even from a functional perspective, one could argue that for most people, lower voices are usually more pleasant to the ear).
And while the visual design is extremely important, if it’s any good, it will be taken for granted by the users after a short period of time. But the speaker’s voice is what actively stays with the user through their entire experience.
I might blow this completely out of proportion and am I’m definitely biased regarding audio. The current speaker does not lower my love for bunpro one bit. I just thought I share my point of view, so that at least you’ve heard about it and maybe take it under consideration for the future development of your site.
Merry X-Mas everybody.
I agree, the current voice actor was not the best choice. For me (and I don’t know anything about sound recording) she doesn’t sound professional which might even have a negative effect for the whole site.
I just downloaded an Anki deck from the nihongoshark guy and he managed to record natural and professional sounding audio for thousands of sentences with female and male speakers for each sentence. So obviously it’s not impossible to find good speakers and record everything within a reasonable time frame.
I don’t know if this has been mentioned yet, but I just accidentally sent off an unfinished error report because I was switching between English and Japanese keyboard and hit enter one time too much.
So, maybe you could change the Send Report button to only clickable? Or maybe there is another solution to “fix” this (if anyone else sees the need for fixing).
Thanks
Yes, I mentioned this months ago but maybe the Bunpro programmer have a reason why they don’t want to change that behaviour
I am a new user studying for N3 right now but I love revising the subtle grammar construction rules for N5 and N4 so far!
One suggestion I haveis:
Would it be possible to take the existing sentences in the system and force users to type in more of the sentence or the entire sentence in Japanese?
This would of course be a different mode (Extreme mode maybe?) and may be useful for the section in JLPT where they get you to rearrange the elements of the sentence.
Another thing I am very curious about is, do you guys have any grand plans (in theory) after the inclusion of N1?
Thanks and keep up the good work!
Edit: Is it also possible to add in a 14px option for the font size? Small matter though.
I may suggest a miscellaneous section (outside the grammar points of the N levels) which would help people greatly on the language learning journey but not necessarily towards JLPT. Items such as onomatopoeia or idioms are extremely helpful but are painful to learn…an SRS format other than Anki could be great though. Also regional dialect/grammar would be great to distinguish (written and voice). Probably other items could fit in this category.
In regards to the voice actress, I think she does a great job. The words are clear and at a natural pace which is perfect for learning. I know other Japanese women who have a similar pitch range so don’t think it was a fair criticism from what I’m reading. All these sentences are completely out of context so the speed and rhythm have a different feeling if in real conversation. I just grateful for a grammar learning source that a direct audio example.
I just hope to hear more examples beyond N4 and would be great to get some regional distinction or a male counterpart.
@jprspereira Thank you for your feedback. Would you like to see an entire list of grammar points pop up and what time/date you studied them? Currently, mousing over the boxes displays how many items you added to reviews/items you have reviewed and on what date. How detailed were you thinking? Cheers!
@nantoka Thank you so much for your kind words and for becoming a Lifetime Member! You rock! @Anthropos888 Thank you both for your feedback on the speaker’s voice for audio. It took us quite a long time to find someone that did not sound too made-for-anime or too made-for-gaming. We received quite a lot of positive feedback on the way the voice sounded and decided to continue to use the same speaker for our sentences as we continued to add sentences to Bunpro. However, we have always wanted to add a male voice as well as have two recordings for each sentence, one normal speed and one a bit slower. We hope that once we added more content (additional sentences and textbooks to Paths) and have done some more polishing on the current content/features that we will be able to start adding more diverse audio to Bunpro. Thank you for your patience. Cheers!
@Myria @Jake Thank you for your feedback. We will see what we can do about finding a work-around. Cheers!
@Juppy Thank you for your feedback! Having the ability to type in multiple entries for a sentence or the sentence in its entirety is something we have toyed with in the past. However, when you are asked to type in an entire sentence or multiple pieces the amount of variables that need to be accounted for greatly increases. This may be something that we will consider adding after we have made N1 available.
Right now we are focused on making more sentences available for N2, adding textbooks to Paths, and polishing current content as we make our way through all of the feedback that we have received. Once we feel that we have sufficiently caught up on feedback and the site is more responsive and intuitive, we will shift our focus to N1, adding multiple audio tracks to each sentence and adding new/additional grammar points across all JLPT levels. We will see about adding a 14px option to the site. Cheers!
@s1212z Thank you for your feedback. Very cool idea! Adding a miscellaneous section is something that we could definitely look into incorporating into Bunpro in the future. Thank you for your comment on the voice actress that we chose to record our sentences. We hope to add multiple tracks (both male, female, normals speed and slow speed) to each sentence in the future. Cheers!
Personally, I’d only care about knowing the entire list of grammar points (i.e. which items were learned that day).
Hi, I have a couple of quick suggestions.
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When I’m doing lessons and get to the example page, I scroll down to the bottom to listen to them all but then I have to scroll back up to the top to get to the next item. Maybe you could have either the navigation for the next lesson item (<< | >>)or the navigation to go to the reading material (Meaning| Examples|Readings) for the item (or both) at the bottom of the page too. It’s not that big of a deal to scroll back up but it’s nice if I don’t have to.
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This is a super picky thing that might not matter much but maybe others noticed it too. The links for “Study” goes to an HTML page called “/learn” but the link for “Review” goes to a page named “/study”. It’s just a tiny bit confusing.
I posted this as a topic in the Bunpro section a few days ago but realized it’s more appropriate in this thread:
Would it be possible to let the user set their timezone or perhaps the time GMT that their review counter moves to the next day for each 24hr cycle. For example, I am in JST timezone and today I did about 30 reviews in the morning, but because I did some last night, on my stats the number for yesterday is higher than what actually happened in real life. Also today it only says I did 2 reviews, when I did more. Thanks!
Thanks for the comments! Good point about how reconstructing an entire sentence may require the consideration of too many variables.
How about a full word-by-word sentence reconstruction / Listening option from the sentences/audio recordings that are already available? This way, we do not have to account for the different grammar variations since the user is supposed to type out the contents of the audio recording.
I think this has been mentioned above and I would really enjoy that feature too.
I imagine that would be easier to develop from a dev point of view?
Could be a quick win for marketing a new feature!
Please add the Japanese terms for verb conjugations in their respective grammar points. Example: passive, potential, conditional, causative, causative-passive and so on. It’s hard to ask Japanese people about the “causative-passive” - it would be easier to know the Japanese term. Even the Englisch terms “casual” and “polite” can cause misunderstandings, so the Japanese terms would be good to know.
Great idea!
I’ve turned off English on example sentences so I can try and translate them myself before I check how close I got. I’ve noticed pronouns are often added that aren’t in the sentence like:
From Verb[た]
I know enough Japanese that if I translated it (before looking) as “I played soccer here”. I know I’m not wrong. I’m just wondering if newer people to Japanese might not. Would it be possible to maybe put “We” in brackets or parentheses or some other formatting? This isn’t vital or urgent. I just thought it might be nice to make it clear in the English translation that the Japanese sentence doesn’t have “we” in it or even implies it (since we have no context).
I don’t know if this is necessary to do. Maybe no one is confused by it. I just thought I should mention it.
I would like to request that more of lesson notes are displayed before the ellipsis. Often I write a one line note as quick reference reminder, but cannot see all of it unless I click. For example here is a note I created which I was hoping would be completely shown when closed:
And here is how much is visible when closed:
This is a minor issue, but would improve the platform a bit in my opinion. Thanks again for all your hard work!