:bunpro_icon: Feedback - Suggested Improvements/Feature Request

[amzeratul]

I’ve just encountered this grammar review:

And because I couldn’t immediately recall “ireru”, two annoying things happened there:

1. I wasn’t sure if it was a u-verb or a ru-verb. I know that clicking on the last kana will tell me, but that makes me lose focus on the input and is a bit annoying. I wonder if we could just indicate it inside the brackets?

2. For some reason I read it as “haireru”… which would have been fine if I had also gotten the right grammar pattern (~nakute wa naranai) on my first attempt, as that would have flagged as “close”, but I instead assumed the other pattern (~nakute wa ikenai) and it just gave me a flat out “wrong” - I wonder if the fuzzy match could also apply to disambiguation hints? (To be clear, if I had written the verb correctly, it would have triggered it - it was the combination of wrong reading + incorrect assumption on pattern that caused the issue)

Thank you!

[thelizard]

I made the decision to follow the Tae Kim path because I’m not really aiming for a JLPT test but to understand “street Japanese” and I enjoyed Tae Kim’s explanations (before using Bunpro), which appear to focus on conversation. When I made this decision, I didn’t know how exactly Bunpro worked and went in half-blind based on the recommendation of countless Japanese-fluent friends who told me how amazing this is. (and they were right, Bunpro is amazing)

However, if I had received a strong warning when selecting the book to follow that discouraged me, I wouldn’t have selected the Tae Kim path in retrospec.

• getting certain N2/N3 points fairly early on, lead to non-understandable example sentences and the asusmption that I’m able to do some conjugations that I was completely unfamiliar with, which would have appeared before if I followed the JLPT path.
• I now have the following things in my review queue simultaneously at same-or-similar SRS levels which leads to trial & error (which grammar point does the system want to see?)
  – Verb［ない］ + なければ + いけない
  – Verb［ない］ + なければ + ならない
  – Verb［ない］+ なくては + いけない
  – Verb［ない］+ なくては + ならない

and it appears I will add two more ways of saying I must do something tomorrow.

I realized this is what I signed up for lol and I’m going to keep pushing through the Tae Kim path out of spite but I suggest adding some sort of warning in regards of how topic-based queue priority will behave inside the SRS queue when you have one or more largely interchangeable grammar points popping up in the same review.

On the plus side, those grammar points feel very strong already now because I keep having the luck of selecting the correct one last. So I now know 4 ways of expressing “I must” by heart 草

[additionalramen]

I use both Wanikani and Bunpro and really enjoy the fact that I can tell Bunpro which kanji and vocab I’ve already learned on Wanikani. I’ve noticed that Bunpro has a ton of vocab that contains the kanji I’ve learned on Wanikani but does not appear on Wanikani. At the same time, on Bunpro I often learn vocab words using kanji that I have yet to encounter on Wanikani, which makes those words harder to retain.

Would it be possible to create a deck sorting mechanism by which I can prioritize learning vocab words that contain kanji I’ve already learned on Wanikani? That way I could more easily fill in the “gaps” in Wanikani’s vocab list, reinforce the kanji I’ve learned, and get a more comprehensive grasp on the way those kanji are used to form words.

[discopatrick]

The ability to share a non-expiring (or at least longer-lasting) URL to my teacher would be useful.

If there’s some reason you can’t budge from the maximum of one week, then a compromise would be to allow me to refresh the URL before it has already expired.

Currently I have to wait until the URL has expired before I can refresh it for another week. If you disable and re-enable, it creates a new URL and the old one is then invalid.

[nikuotoko]

I know it’s been suggested before but I’d love to see a feature where you could remove a given example sentence form rotation. I am extremely keen to isolate just the word/grammar point I’m learning and find it very frustrating when words Bunpro grades as N2 or N1 show up in N4 and N5 grammar and vocab.

It helps a lot when a sentence is ‘frictionless’; it means you’re in comprehensible input territory. This is especially important I think on the ‘intermediate plateau’, when you are struggling to understand sentences in Japanese rather than translating them.

Way too often I find Bunpro example sentences incomprehensible, and it pushes me back to translation mode. While I can’t reasonably expect that every example sentence is within my ZPD, it would be great to filter out the ones that definitely aren’t.

[pratansyah]

I would like to suggest that we can switch review type (Fill-in/Translate) based on the progress(adept/seasoned/expert) because I find that reading kanji and remembering a particular vocab without any visual cue are 2 different things. I found this out while using AI where I asked them to to create english sentences for me to be translated. I know that my progress is already in adept or even seasoned but I just can’t remember the pronounciation of the word without the Kanji.

[rururun]

Regarding custom sentences, it seems that you can only add them for the fill-in-the-blank style of reviews. It would be great if there was an option to target the other review types when adding custom sentences.

[ndv]

I’d like to have more feedback when I get things wrong. Sometimes it works really well, e.g. telling me that I nearly got it right but need to put it into past tense, but very often it just stays red with no clue as to why. I come up against this a lot when I’m reviewing a grammar point for the first time and don’t really know what it’s asking for.

Quite often I actually get the grammar point right but conjugate the word wrongly, which results in no feedback, and I think that case ought to be possible to handle.

[burgerkingler]

Is there an option to “Cram all bookmarked items” or similar? I usually bookmark items I have repeated trouble with, and it would be really cool if there was some quick way to just have them already in a review queue whenever I have an extra bit of time.

[PabloElBaka]

For cram sessions, it would be nice if we could search for vocabulary not by lesson but by mastery. For example, being able to select all the vocabulary we have at the adept or beginner level.

[Jake]

@PabloElBaka There is a “Special” tab that has bookmarked items as well as items by SRS level

[burgerkingler]

Bless

[mrnoone]

@Basilion
In the mobile app? I will look into this!

[anon11472814]

This suggestion is regarding the iPhone app.
When using the search function it would be nice if, after you’ve searched for and clicked on a vocab item, the current most recent search was still active when clicking the “go back-arrow” on the upper left.

So for example if I search 肉 and clicked on 豚肉, it would be great if when clicking the back button 肉 was still an active search so that I could easily view like 牛肉、筋肉、焼肉 and so on, without having to make a new search for 肉 every single time.

[mrnoone]

Hey @FubuMiOkaKoro !
Will make sure to fix this with next release!
Cheers

[Basilion]

Yes, in the IOS app.

[4lex1v]

Hi! Would it make sense to add a quick-cram button to the “Examples” section in grammar points or to the grammar point itself? Don’t think there’s one at the moment, only for “Synonyms” and “Related” grammar.

[ndv]

As someone who tends to use the keyboard rather than the mouse, I’m really confused and sometimes frustrated by the behaviour of the enter key. If I can’t work out the right answer to a question, sometimes pressing enter twice will reveal the correct answer so that I can learn it, so I got into the habit of doing that.

But other times, pressing enter twice just marks the question wrong, so it creates a ghost without showing the answer. This is super frustrating when learning a new grammar point, because if I don’t get to see what the answer was I won’t know it the next time it comes around either. There also doesn’t seem to be a way to go back, so I can’t undo the wrong answer or even find out what the grammar point was so that I can read about it.

I don’t know what I’m doing differently in the two cases, but if I figure it out I’ll post it here. It would be really helpful in general to have a button that goes back to the previous question.

[ndv]

The same thing happens if I think I got an answer right but actually got it wrong:

type correct answer, press enter twice → mark correct and go to the next question

type wrong answer, press enter twice → mark as wrong and create ghost, with no chance to undo or find out what went wrong

usually this happens if the question seems easy (hence I don’t wait to find out if I got it right) but is actually asking for something else - in which case I do actually need to see the answer, so I can work out what it was asking for.

Basically I don’t think “mark this question as wrong, but don’t tell me the right answer” is an action I would want to perform very often, so it shouldn’t be something you can easily do by mistake. One way to fix it would be to have an “I don’t know” button that you have to click with the mouse. When you click it it tells you the right answer, and the only ways to go to the next question are to type a correct answer or press “I don’t know”. That way there’s no possibility that I could ever press anything on the keyboard that would skip showing the answer if I got it wrong.

[ndv]

Also, it sometimes happens just when I’m trying to guess the answer. I try one thing, it doesn’t like it, I try another, that’s no good either, try another — oops, I pressed the wrong button, now the question has disappeared and I can’t get it back or find out what the answer was.