I’ve had this problem with bunpro for a really long time, just thought that perhaps I should say something about it. I think the structure has lots of notation that is just unnecessarily verbose. I like having the quick look, but IMO these are too brief.
Take for example the footnotes. What on earth do those mean? how does である relate to the な after な adjectives and optionally after nouns?
it means you can replace the thing with the other thing
well, in the first example, you can replace it with one of the two things separated by a comma, right? My point isn’t that I have specific questions about these things, I can look those up in the reference.
I’d rather see something like [な] Adjective + な, に対しても or に対しては or something. I guess my main complaint is that it just seems like a very dense set of information that even being half way through N3 on bunpro still feels really hard to parse. Even just with how close each form is, how the spacing is offset for one of them, having to jump between footnotes, that kind of thing.
I don’t have a solution, and I’m not saying these structure guides are bad, just that I surprisingly still have trouble with them even after lots of use. Maybe even just some formatting would make it easier to parse.
I just said that because you mentioned you didn’t know what the footnotes mean, like である and な
イギリス人がビールを好きなのに対して、フランス人は赤ワインが好きだ。
イギリス人がビールを好きであるのに対して、フランス人は赤ワインが好きだ。
Is what it means
Also fwiw, this specific structure entry is definitely the worst formatted one
Hi @shark_darpel. The structure sections are one of the areas we were/are still planning on revamping a bit in the near future. Part of the reason why a lot of them have quite a bit of information in them is that we have always avoided using too much grammar lingo in the past. This led to us perhaps listing 4 different things like:
Verb る/た + xyz
い Adjective (い) + xyz
な Adjective (な) + xyz
Noun + の + xyz
When really all a textbook would do is say:
普通形 + xyz
Due to it being assumed the learner knows what standard form is.
The second way is 100% a lot cleaner, but it also forces people who may not want to remember grammar terms to learn them.
Fortunately, we have recently implemented the tooltip system within the grammar descriptions that allows extra information to show up through a popup. We will probably be making use of this in the future to tidy up all of the annotation type stuff to show up in the tooltip instead as well. We apologize for the current experience being sub optimal 
.
No apologies necessary 
Bunpro is still the best grammar learning resource for Japanese by a country mile. Just thought the feedback might help 
There have been many iterations, and the Bunpro team seems to have settled on a fairly good local maximum. Without reading the legend they may be a little difficult to parse, but that is the nature of grammar. If you do reach the point where it is clear what they are saying, it is a very powerful tool.
As Asher alluded to, switching to a Japanese explanation would be a possible, higher maximum, but there is a big gap in between of dense incomprehensible mush. Though I look forward to it.