How possible is it to do reviews with no hints?

Bunpro
#23

I think the Cloze system and hints are incredibly frustrating and it’s “better than nothing” if you want to practice conjugating grammar points. I used minimal hints, but usually I need at least 1 hint.

If you want to do Cloze reviews, you have to optimise and learn the hints. But then you can over-optimise for the hints. This only becomes worse as you learn more synonyms. It helps if you’re only using Bunpro as your source of grammar since you’ll be familiar with the Bunpro logic around your hints.

Most textbooks give 2 types of questions:

  1. Select the correct grammar point.
  2. Conjugate the grammar point correctly.

Bunpro tries to do both at once with it’s hint system, which is really frustrating. It works if you hit your head against the wall enough, but it’s frustrating. The other aspect is that being able to do Bunpro grammar does not translate into writing output - you need to try forming full sentences independent too.

My recommendation (what I did) is do the Reading mode first, learn how to read well, get an innate understanding for the usage of the grammar and THEN once those cards are at Expert (or after you’ve completed the next level up of grammar, e.g. N4) go back and do the Cloze reviews.

FWIW I get around 66% accuracy using minimal hints. So I get a lot wrong.

I love Bunpro, it’s amazing, but the Cloze system is incredibly frustrating and no amount of tweaking with the wording of hints will fix that. Bunpro needs better systems to help users work with synonymous hints, even if it’s something as obtuse as a clue of the kana used.

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#24

I think this is a symptom of the fact that grammar itself isn’t really suited to Cloze like this–if you just have one sentence, with 0 outside context, it’s nigh impossible to figure out what the best thing to fill in the blank is. If you wanted to have enough context to actually figure out what would work, you’d probably need paragraphs before and after as well as a detailed description of the relationship between who is talking. As it is right now, there’s sometimes no way to know even how someone is feeling in the given example sentence, so even if you were a robot that could pull up every grammar point you learned that could logically fit in the sentence, there’d be no way to know which specific one was the right one.

So hints are necessary, but on the flip side, all of the sudden now you’re just memorizing how Bunpro refers to each point based on hints, and not really paying to how it gets used in context. Kinda a catch 22 here. If you want to learn, you need to be able to answer the questions correctly, but to answer the questions correctly, you need hints. But if you use hints, you won’t learn.

Of course, that’s an extreme representation of the situation, but I think you get my point.

4 Likes
#25

This is a great observation. I have seen parts of this echoed in other responses, but not as succinctly.

Do you have any ideas on a solution?

#26

I would never do this. I doubt this would even lead to better understanding.

1 Like
#27

The most effective thing I’ve done is to slow down and read through every sentence even after I’ve correctly answered, and just double-check if I do indeed know and understand what the grammar point is saying within the sentence.
Otherwise, you just run into an issue I just had when taking an N1 practice exam:
Whenever I would see a hint in my reviews talking about “not exceeding” something (or whatever the exact wording is), I would immediately know it was に越したことはない. But despite that being something I have Seasoned at this point, I completely forgot its meaning when it showed up on the mock test, because instead of remembering it based off its meaning, I remembered it based off of a few words that show up in its hint and its hint only.
I’ve solved this by easing off the rate at which I learn more items. I wanted to shoot for the moon and get through all the N1 terms by December, but I realized it simply would not be worth it to push myself this hard if it meant I no longer had the time to digest the new terms and felt I had to remember shortcuts in order to get it all done. I’m a few days away from learning all the N2 vocab and have already finished grammar, so once I close out N2 Vocab I’m going to stop doing new lessons entirely and just focus on Reviews, which will also hopefully get me more time to do some practical studying via reading books, taking mock tests, etc.

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#28

If you’re N3/N2 level and studying isn’t working, hit up a bunch of level 15-19 according to https://learnnatively.com/ content that looks entertaining to you and pick up grammar from that.

Normally I don’t recommend this, but I get a sense that you’re just kinda wandering without a real goal, and it’d be better for you to just go experience things than to sit down studying, at least for a while.

Bunpro can really help for shortening mining times. Either add the grammar points raw and just use all the available hints every time, or add self-study sentences and don’t worry about whether or not you’re memorizing them.

Second, I feel like you (and others in the thread) are equating certain methods to cheating. I don’t mean less effective, I mean “cheating” as in “I feel bad that I’m doing it this way and not this other way.” I know you’re not outright saying that, but even the title of the thread implies it, no? :slight_smile:

As I recommended before, I really think using all the hints with fill in the blank for grammar is superb, not cheating. Mid to upper “N4” books will get you 95% of N5-N2 grammar exposure over time to solidify everything.

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#29

I see you’re also deleting anki decks regularly. I am guessing what happens is you have a rough couple days, think you didn’t “learn it right” and get frustrated.

First: your retention score is not a letter grade.

Second: missing a card is not a personal failure, it means anki did not show you the card in time. You may need to hit ‘optimize fsrs’ if this happens often, as it shows that your intervals are too long for your desired retention. You should be doing this once a month anyway. Also: I have a feeling you don’t have ‘Suspend Leeches’ on. You shouldn’t turn that off. Leeches are leeches. They lower general retention and make things less efficient.

Finally: stop resetting or restarting SRS systems. This is counterproductive.

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#30

Disagree here. FSRS does not magically solve being frustrated at missing cards. Not using FSRS doesn’t mean that missing a card is the tool’s fault either.

Getting a card wrong can mean one failed in a way that has nothing to do with how often cards are shown to you such as being too tired to study, adding too many cards, being distracted or simply not spending enough time trying to recall an answer.

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#31

I mentioned it elsewhere, but I’m reading a novel currently. I watch a few dramas on the train/at home or listen to native podcasts as much as possible. I have conversations daily at lunch with Japanese coworkers in Japanese. I’m comfortable with what I’m comfortable with and wanted to use Bunpro as a scaffolded method of getting to the next level in conjunction with what I’m doing elsewhere and also pluck out some of the grammar likely to show up on the N2.

N2 in December. I probably would have passed it a few weeks ago, but I lost track of time in the reading section and I think I blew my chances. Apart from that, goals are more nebulous. Reading books and having more natural conversations about more difficult topics. If it appears that I am “wandering” it’s because I listened to too many random opinions on and off the internet claiming to have the “Right Way” to do things when I was just starting. Most people have no idea what SLA looks like and only pull from their experiences.

No, as I said elsewhere, I have tried all the methods Bunpro offers. I am strictly asking if it’s possible because I didn’t see success from having the hints on full-blast (or bread-crumbing them as I tried to answer). So I was wondering if I’d learned them accurately or had just appeared to have learned them and furthermore wondered if removing hints entirely would help the process.

I am aware of this. This is basically how I got to this point in Japanese, just blended with islands of time where I went super-heavy on grammar guides or vocab books in the sea of native input I’m getting. Another separate problem is that a lot of the methods people use for learning (light novels, VNs, manga, etc.) really do bore me or otherwise negate the joy of learning. So I’m happy to finally be at a level where I can learn from literary novels, which I enjoy much more.

#32

Thank you for your response. Yes, as I said right after that, it is very inefficient. I’ve currently been using the same deck for nearly a year, though many years and much time was wasted with decks that ended up deleted.

I even had about 30 of those study-rings you can find at muji/loft/etc. fully filled out with vocab. The cycle is often tied to the lowering of immersion. If I spend hours per day on SRS, I lose a lot of time reading or listening to native content. There has to be balance and when it’s out of balance, rather than fix it, I have a very poor habit of purging it.

#33

I think the solution is to have different question types:

  1. Asking the selection of the correct grammar point amongst a limited amount of similar grammar points. Sort of like JLPT questions.
  2. Asking the correct conjugation of grammar points.
  3. A fusion of the above where Bunpro shows a limited list of grammar points, and the user has to select the correct one. (This could be added as just a hint option with the current system.)

Without restricting the options, the synonym problem gets worse. These ideas aren’t new, they’re the format of questions seen in textbooks. The main challenge is making the questions hard so you cannot metagame. However, given that the JLPT makes their questions hard, I believe this is possible.

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#34

Answering the question on topic title:

Yes, it’s possible once you understand the vocab of the sentences. Before you know that - no harm looking on hints to get the nuance right. I’d most likely leave one target word in english just so you don’t need to spend time thinking what’s the sentence about.

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#35

One of the reasons I strongly recommend doing the reading mode is that it is very hard to properly understand the nuance if you don’t know the meaning of the sentence. And Bunpro’s sentences are very diverse and not “textbook” so it’s especially important here.

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#36

I don’t think it is. I’m doing N5, N4 where I understand all vocab and maybe in 40% of all sentences it’s just not clear from the context what it wants. But I don’t feel bad for turning 4th hint to see what exactly it wants from me.

#37

My impression of Bunpro is that it is built on the typical Japanese learning solution of “in this situation use xy formula” which we see in Jdramas. …and this method is actually not the best or most effective to learn the language.
It has its uses in certain situations. For me, it is for reviewing known grammar points with the aim of identifying the same grammar points in other media, usually books, and understand their proper use. For others, well some of them explained how they use Bunpro here.

I have this feeling based on the forum that Bunpro users are very fond of the site and very loyal, (Exhibit A - the thread on AI) while most of them still finds the hints and how the whole system works frustrating (Exhibit B - the whole thread on the hints which fill you with rage) and the SRS system needs improvement (Exhibit C - several threads on this).

It smells like cognitive dissonance.

#38

You don’t need to treat Anki as sacred. The only thing you really can’t do is use the hard button as your version of ‘again’. Though even that can be fixed with an addon.

There are strategies you can use to reduce workload if things are getting away from you. One way is to drop your leech threshold by a couple misses, or take the top 20% most lapsed young cards, mark them as leeches and suspend them (there are people who recommend doing this periodically anyway). Then you can put all your marked leeches in a filtered deck when things have calmed down.

#39

It’s built on a teaching strategy called 文型練習, the same thing that text books like Genki and Minna no Nihongo use. There’s a reason it’s so widely used: it’s much more effective than other methods of teaching japanese. They tried other methods previously, and those mostly failed at teaching people japanese.

It’s based on the premise that people do not learn grammar from first principles, building sentences out from the blueprint of grammar rules each time from scratch, but rather learn language by imitating entire clauses and sentences they’ve heard. There is a lot of empirical study that supports this. It’s recently caught on among the influencer grammar guru types as “chunking,” and they act like they’ve discovered this whole new method, despite it being used for thirty-odd years by the textbooks they badmouth.

Yes, you can learn a language just by imitating a large number of sentence patterns. In fact, you already have done that at least once.

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#40

I’m loyal because after 8 years learning Japanese it’s the best resource I’ve used. If there’s any better app/site, please do share it. Yes Bunpro is flawed, especially the default settings, but it does work.

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#41

I read your reply, but I’m not sure how to respond. It seems like you already know enough Japanese to do what you want to do and N2 seems like unnecessary effort.

But if all you’re looking for is an answer to your question, I’ll just be bold and say no, it’s not. The hints are absolutely necessary.

To be fair, if there isn’t a system by which people can find that correct method, then I feel the defaults would be a Bunpro’s official recommendation. Other than trial and error, how else would people find an appropriate methodology?

I’m a Bunpro superfan that figured it out on my own, but as someone who has a group of people following in my footsteps, setting them up to not be completely overwhlemed was its own crazy learning experience :sweat_smile:.

A large part of that was adapting things to Wanikani’s level pacing which is something I’ve been fine tuning as I observe some folks approaching N4 with the WK / BP pairing.

2 Likes
#42

I feel like I’m developing a bad habit by not reading the sentences now D: I’ve got so many reviews that trying to read each sentence would easily double my review time and leave me with no time to learn my daily goal, how do you guys do it? Is it more feasible to switch to doing that once n5 vocab is complete?