I don't understand what the reviews are asking me

Had no idea you could do that so I went and did the same. I’ve been speaking Japanese daily for 3 years and this makes is even harder to fill in some ambiguous reviews as there are 5-6 or even more different ways that you can say the same thing, so I not only have to deal with the ambiguousness of choosing between 2 or 3 of the things we studied up to that point, but I have all sort of random grammar that I learned outside of bunpro flowing into my head and making things 10 times as hard as I just can’t remember what I studied on bunpro and what not, so sometimes I write even 10 answers and I always get “lets try a different grammar point” before I even get to the more specific suggestions…

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This is the exact problem that I kept having

I also have this issue when doing reviews - especially the vocab decks.

Lately, my strategy has been to be more forgiving to myself when reviewing. If my input is marked wrong, I’ll hit “undo” and put in a different answer. This way, if I can eventually get it right (without revealing the answer), it’ll still be marked correct. I’ll only mark it as incorrect if I get the spelling wrong, or can’t think of the word. It sounds like that’s a common strategy.

寄る is the bane of my existence in these reviews…

Coming from WaniKani where the cards are Japanese → English, I am finding it more difficult to distinguish words. However, I do prefer the English → Japanese cards here, as I often find it tricky to recall words I learned on WaniKani without seeing the kanji first. When talking to other people, I often know that I learned a particular word in Japanese, but struggle to recall the word itself without that visual prompt.

Anyway, I’d love to see more hints and context added to the decks. For now, I’m just using the “trial by fire” approach with Bunpro :sweat_smile:

I think it would be nice if we could have a customizable hints that can show for each grammar point.

I think we all build our own mental models around how we learn Japanese, and I don’t think there’s going to be a single keyword/hint that works for everyone.

I always have a good laugh when I put in an answer and it says something like “let’s use more polite grammar” and I try like ten other ways to say what it’s looking for and keep getting the same message so I give up and put in a completely wrong answer and find out all it wanted was for me to use “です” instead of “だ”

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JUST came to gripe about how trying to figure out which ‘must’ form it wants is driving me absolutely nutbars. Especially when the ‘hint’ or description of the grammar point on-screen says “formal” and then the prompt says “can we try something less formal?” You JUST TOLD ME… !!!

Maybe give me a scenario. I’m writing a formal thesis. I’m talking to my boss. I’m talking to my friend. (Not that I fully know the difference yet, but I could learn to associate the one it wants with the prompt eventually)

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In fact I think it would be ok to straight up put in the hint, “use ~nakerebanaranai this time”. Once I can easily do each on command, maybe THEN worry about which to use when.

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There is a website called kaniwani (https://www.kaniwani.com/), which is basically the inverse of wanikani - it syncs up with wanikani levels and then gives you those world english → japanese. It can be helpful for getting wanikani words into your head, as wanikani itself is really just meant to be a kanji learning platform

Yeah, I’ve actually tried using that website before!

The issue ended up being that there were way too many synonyms, so it became very frustrating trying to cycle through all known words when prompted with the English word. I guess that’s the beauty of Kanji :sweat_smile:

Of course everyone has their own learning style, but i just try to supplement WaniKani with Bunpro and other resources. That’s been helping to strengthen my vocabulary recall.

It used to have the hint ‘think なる’ or ‘think 行く’, now I just always try both
なくていけない/なければならない

Not just ‘try again’, but wrong. It’s maddening.

Seriously here, was “Negative, Standard” supposed to clue me in not to answer with -nai to? I’m genuinely open to the idea that there is a difference, but I can’t seem to catch on to what the difference in the prompts is. If it DID want “-nai to” would it say ‘Casual’ instead of ‘Standard’ or something? And what is ‘Negative’ supposed to mean here?

Negitive refers to ない, as for the rest, I’ just as confused as you.

That happened to me a lot I got so angry lol, now I’m chilling with the Reading mode