Dramatic title? Maybe. But please know that I’ve spent the last two years singing Bunpro’s praises as the single tool that got me out of a two-year rut and into actually learning Japanese. I’ve always said “if you’re only going to spend money on one Japanese resource, make it Bunpro”.
Back when I was using Bunpro every day, the N1 path still had about 20 grammar points and there were no “explanations” besides a legend pane that showed inflections. I would generally dive right into the SRS and trust the example sentences to do the work, which was a tactic that ended up serving me well. Since finishing out my subscription and largely leaving it behind me, I’ve continued recommending it to other people, but during that time the material itself has been changing without me realizing it, and in my opinion, it’s a change for the worse. The explanations are often overly verbose, full of pointless trivia, and (the reason I’m writing this post) occasionally containing complete nonsense.
This post is sort of a last-ditch effort to bring attention to these issues. I (and a bunch of my friends) have submitted feedback which (when not being ignored completely) has often been met with bewilderingly incorrect rebuttals. There are more I could bring up but I’ve already spent long enough on this post and for all I know nobody will even read it.
-
こそすれ
The explanation claims "The imperative form is used to contrast the clauses. " Anyone should be able to see that this is not the case. する’s imperative form is しろ (or せよ); すれ is the 仮定形 form (or 已然形 if we want to get really spicy). Feedback about this item has been ignored. -
Pronoun の
Another case where feedback was initially ignored and later only partially addressed. The article conflates two distinct usages of の; one where it represents a noun itself (面白いの, “an interesting [thing]”, and one where it is simply the の particle with the following noun omitted (田中の[ペン], “Tanaka’s [pen]”). Again, anyone should be able to see that these are not the same; despite the article’s claims to the contrary, 面白いの映画 is clearly ungrammatical. -
Prohibitive な
The article attempts to draw a connection between several distinct usages of the 終助詞 な, making the bold (and entirely unsubstantiated) claim that all of its uses are secretly identical and that its use as a prohibitive “…shows that something is for the speaker only […] you are literally saying ‘this (verb) is not for you!’”. Asher has responded to feedback by saying “this is actually correct”, “I recommend you read a grammar book for native speakers”, and other such unhelpful things without once providing any kind of reference. While trying to track down literally anything that would back up this claim, the only similarity I found between them is that they are both classified as 終助詞, which in and of itself means nothing – this article, for example, makes a clear distinction between three related usages (感動・疑問文・確認) and the unrelated 禁止 usage. This claim badly needs a source, and no, “just research it yourself” does not count.
I want to see Bunpro be the best it can be, and the recent changes have me concerned.I’ve been feeling the need to hedge my recommendation by saying “ignore the explanations and just use the example sentences”, but honestly it feels like what I loved about it in the first place – that it taught through exposure to carefully curated example sentences without getting bogged down in jargon – was just an accident. Bunpro’s tagline is “Simplifying Japanese Grammar”. I wish that was more of a guiding principle than it seems to be.