Feedback - Suggested Improvements/Feature Request

I like that you have all the example sentences for each grammar point and like to go through them, but I was wondering if there was a way to randomize those sentences to provide more reading practice for the grammar points I have learned. Basically same as the cram function, but with the answer already there.

It would be nice if you could add an option to manually pick your WaniKani level instead of pulling using the api key. I reset my WK in order to get 60 again, having no foresight that it would impact me on this platform as well. It would be nice to be able to fix this in the settings.

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I think there are two instances of the noun お餅, one in the N4 deck and one in the N5 deck.

One thing I’ve noticed in other apps I use is that quite a few of them use this system for feedback

I don’t know about the costs or if it would be worth, but might be interesting to check out (https://canny.io)

It might give bunpro a more straightforward way for people to upvote a feature. You guys can then evaluate the cost to implement and return for the users.

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In the “Review Activity” window it would be great if the graph had the same red/blue system for showing you the number of grammar vs vocab reviews. Also in the hover detail for each point on the graph it would be nice to have the separate number for each type.

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[Sorry, haven’t looked for this feature request yet. Apologies if it’s duplicate.]

As I was reading the Details of one of the grammar points, I came across a grammar term – in this case it happened to be 助動詞 (auxiliary verb), though the specific term is not crucial – which I didn’t know, and I thought: “Hey, since I’ve recently started trying the vocab reviews, maybe I’ll see if 助動詞 is available as vocab, so I can add it. Surely, I thought, a website devoted to grammar would have words about grammar in its vocab study, right?! :thinking:

Well, obviously, that is not necessarily so, or I wouldn’t be posting this request. :sweat_smile:

So, basically, this request comes in parts, some simpler/easier, some more complete/complex.

  1. Add a vocab deck for some/any/all of the Japanese terminology used within BunPro as an auxiliary deck that folks can include in their vocab study if they want. This feature alone would be useful in conjunction with the new Japanese-immersion feature for the BunPro website itself, too.
    • There could potentially be multiple/separate sub-groupings of these vocabs: Words used within grammar points, used to explain grammar, like 助動詞 (in English interface, but about Japanese grammar); words specific to the new Japanese-immersion interface (various buttons, menus, whatever will be new to someone trying the immersion mode); words used in general usage in Japanese versions of grammar points (assuming that immersion mode also includes translating grammar points directly into Japanese, not just English-with-Japanese-grammar-words).
  2. Potentially one (or maybe more, or maybe one with sub-decks or sub-groupings) for ‘grammar words as a whole’, even if they are not necessarily used withing BunPro’s grammar points itself. I’m not sure what criteria to use to decide if such a word belongs. Maybe there’s an existing textbook about Japanese language/grammar, that includes an index of such kinds of words? The idea here is just ‘for completeness’, so that it would include words that might not currently exist within the BunPro ‘world’, but are nevertheless common words (within the sphere of Japanese language-learning / linguistics). Nothing esoteric or anything, just words that people learning Japanese might come across as they are learning or even discussing Japanese with others.
  3. This is a much more general feature request, but along the same line of thought: Ability for users to collect their own assortment of currently-not-available-in-BunPro words for their own study (i.e. user-defined decks). For example, if this feature existed, I might have just added 助動詞 myself to my own vocab deck for useful grammar words to know.
    • As a bonus for the BunPro team, they could then collect statistics about which words people are adding for themselves, and if there are common ones then they could consider including them for the general userbase by adding them to some vocab deck or another (e.g. one or more of the vocab deck ideas from point #1 or #2.
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Great idea!
I’ll add the request internally :v:

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1 & 2:
Great ideas! It’d make a great little puchi deck for all those that are interested in diving a bit deeper into the terminology.

3:
Not sure where it is on the roadmap, but I’m pretty sure we’re planning on supporting user decks in the future!

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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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