We very regularly have sentences from slightly different nuances of similar grammar points specifically in caution sections when we think there is a possibility that users will mistake them in the future, or at some point in the learning process.
I’ll have a chat with the rest of the content team when they are awake (sorry, very late here), and we’ll then make a decision about whether a caution section will help users (will keep it), or hinder them (will delete it).
Yeah I mean the more I learn the more I see small differences/errors in the materials. There have been many situations where I showed Bunpro materials to a tutor and they were basically like “wtf”.
I’ve used these apps daily for several years:
Are there some errors in each of these? Yeah ofc. But I would be hugely disappointed if any of these didn’t exist.
IMO the goal of language and language-learning apps is to increase understanding. There is so much nuance in language and it’s impossible to be 100% precise at all times, even as a native speaker. Some errors are acceptable and it’s all still progress on the path to fluency.
Dude this thread is so frustrating to read. There’s a way to bring up mistakes and suggestions without doomsday clickbait about the inevitable collapse of Bunpro as a whole, and without publicly singling out individual staff members in what seems to be an attempt at public humiliation.
If I, a Westerner, felt that the whole approach to bringing up criticism here has been quite unnerving, I can’t imagine how Japanese people would feel…
To the Bunpro staff: I am very impressed with your level of courteousness. I frankly wanted to pull my hair out multiple times when reading the tone in some of these posts. And you all still took the opportunity to extract the feedback amidst the vitriol. Thank you for all that you do, and the way you go about doing it.
Hello, thank you for getting back to me! I was not expecting you to change your writeups or add new functions. As I pointed out, it is probably impossible to make everyone 100% happy. I just wanted to share that I felt the same about all the technical terms. If others like them, good for them, since I think users like me can simply skim over those terms. Some people may need even expect them.
As much as I personally don’t see much value in learning about different -詞 terms, I actually like the Fun Facts and other Kanji history additions a lot, since they often help reinforce some grammar or make it easier to understand the “why”.
Really appreciate the work you did so far. All in all, I am very happy with bunpro 
Well I don’t really see what’s so bad. If you got two years of good value out of bunpro why would it be hard to recommend? If it helped you get to where you are then it did it’s job, didn’t it? I’m not where you are in learning and I don’t know if I’ll ever get there since it’s just a hobby for me. But at this point it looks like you have a walking understanding of the language. That’s not a reason not to recommend this site. If someone wouldn’t recommend me this site just because “ya the end lessons and really advanced stuff isn’t completely fleshed out” I’d be very angry. For me I think bunpro does a great job on opening the door to japanese.
Hopefully caution sections aren’t deleted based on pseudo-academic navel-gazing by a few users on the forums. The point is for the learner to get a foothold so that native material can solidify their understanding. Associating different use cases for a word or sentence pattern, such as the caution sections and the where-did-this-phrase-come-from sections, is a great way to build mental sockets for a learner to fill up over time as they encounter example after example. I strongly disagree with the people saying that descriptions are too wordy.
The Bunpro staff has been more than patient with fielding complaints. (There must be a bucket of kittens at the Bunpro office to keep everyone calm.) But at this point it’s turning into tacit acceptance of grumpy behavior. There’s no way that someone able to read native articles started a thread complaining about an N5 grammar point in good faith.
I hope Bunpro keeps doing its thing. It’s been extremely helpful.
I don’t have a lot of experiences in Japanese, but I followed Bunpro since a few years now and I tend to believe the website is much better than before. Firstly the design, but also the grammar points are better, more sentences, suggestion mechanism etc…
I remember the verb conjugation which were hardly understandable when I started learning japanese and used Bunpro to learn new grammar points.
However, I realise that because of those “lengthy” grammar points, I have stopped to follow links listed in the ressources section. Considering that the details section is all I need to know about this grammar point. I was comforted in that way when I realised that the number of lessons was still increasing and one grammar point could be split up into several lessons depending on the usage.
Which actually makes me realise that I do not know the objectives of Bunpro, but I never took it as an exhaustive source for the grammar. Hence, the presence of a “ressources” section which I think is great! But maybe, considering the new format for lessons, a way to invite the reader to read them (at least some of the online ones) would be welcome.
Another suggestion which joins the criticism made above about the following point:
Same is happening now in N2 with bunpro, cant see any difference in “judging from” or “from the point of view” or “from the stand point” or “cant help but”…
Most of the time, sentences in bunpro are only valid sentences. However, to infer a rule, it could be nice to provide also invalid sentences.
For example this is how modern AI works: If we want to train an AI to recognize images with a cat, the dataset contains both images with a cat and images without a cat. Otherwise, the AI will likely give poor results.
Even though some Bunpro lessons contain invalid sentences, and even though I just finished the N5 lessons, I already feel the lack of invalid sentences for some grammar points. Considering the way Bunpro works, by relying on many examples, I think it would be nice to see in the future more “counter-examples”.
In any case, I don’t think it is harder to recommend the website on my side, it is rather easier. However, we should be careful about what Bunpro provides (and can provide) or/and its limitations.
I did not see any roadmap by the company behind Bunpro, but maybe that could help to understand better what should we expect in the future and what is the direction followed.
Small aside that “off” in English does literally work like this so its not like it is impossible.
The alarm was set off.
The alarm was turned off.
Actually, if one doesn’t understand the grammatical terminology in Japanese, they cannot place into intermediate Japanese classes in some places. For example, page 12 of the course listings for the Japanese-American Society of Washington DC Japanese Language School specifically asks, if one wishes to enroll in an intermediate or higher level course:
"
Can you understand grammar words in Japanese?
Example: 品詞、主語、述語、名詞、動詞、形容詞、形容動詞、自動詞、他動詞、不規則動詞, etc…
"
Course Listings Link
I think that Bunpro should include such language. Those who are not interested in it can simply ignore the information.
Dang!! Long thread, and not even that old. Harsh vibes too.
But hey, while we’re at it, I do want to throw in an anecdote re: writeup verbosity, but it’s actually a fairly nuanced statement. Let’s see how well that goes over 
For context as to why I can say what I’m about to say: my friends and I hold brief study groups every other Saturday evening, half as a social function and half to hold ourselves accountable for getting back to reviews if any of us have “fallen off the wagon.” So I get opportunities to see how different people engage with the Lesson-taking leg of learning.
My friends and I work through Lesson content very differently from each other. I’ve mentioned before, but I’m a very gut-feel learner, and also have a lot of bootstrapping in-place because of having learned chunks of the language phonetically first; my approach to Lessons is to glance at them, skim quickly over the writeup if at all, usually completely skip the examples, and start grinding away at the SRS.
I’m sure a lot of that almost-complete-disregard for the Lesson content is because I’m in large part just ironing out the wrinkles in stuff I “already know” and formalizing my understanding somewhat, but I approach learning new things the same way as well; I have a similar pattern even on WK when I’m looking at a new kanji that I don’t recognize for crap.
Meanwhile, one of the friends in my group is extremely rules-oriented, and he pours over the writeups and examples, which are absolutely essential to him, sometimes even complaining that they don’t say enough!
His learning pattern and mine have very poor affinity so it’s hard to share knowledge between us 
But I’ll say with absolute conviction that there’s immense value in having Lesson content that is both skimmable but which also goes deep into the weeds.
My suggestion? Could just summarize the most critical info in the first paragraph(s) or so, and then have a Read More thingy that sites like YouTube and Pixiv have taken up.
Alternatively, you could have a radio button switch, similarly to what you have for politeness registers in Lessons, or the Grammar / Vocab split you present on the dashboard, for choosing whether to see the “outline” or to show the “in-depth” writeup.
Anyway, if it makes y’all feel better, I’m definitely in the “No better product than BunPro, would highly recommend” camp-- Being a WIP comes with both big plusses but also caveats, but I think as long as the fact that it’s perpetually-WIP is clear and transparent, the positives vastly outweigh the drawbacks, and I’m always excited to see it grow!
I mean, heck, being WIP means that if you buy Lifetime, that means that you get infinite free future value!
MY NIHONNGO IS BETTER THAN YOUR NIHONNGO.
->.<- no i wont speak it with you.
The amazing thing is that once you actually know Japanese you can just read through https://www.kokugobunpou.com/ in a couple of hours and learn all the fancy vocabulary you need to enrol in such a course (but if you actually know Japanese why would you want to enrol in such a course?).
The real question is, are you trying to learn Japanese, or are you trying to learn linguistic stuff about Japanese? And if the answer is the latter, why not focus on the former first?
And, yes. I want to do more than just 
this post, so I’ll say a few more words. Ironically
On one hand, yes, some of this contention helps BunPro grow as a product… but damn, man, the amount of ink spilled over nitpicking details that will never matter to anyone in this thread (and so many other places out there on the 'net) is painful to read.
No one product will ever be omnipotent in teaching anyone, and they’ll have to just jump into the real world of that language at some point and start taking the “live and learn” approach when they find out they tripped up.
There is a “good enough” point where it stops being worth anyone’s time or energy to hem and haw over points of the language, and recognizing when you’re there is important.
Unless it’s your job or you reeeeeeally just love linguistics. And if it’s the latter, bring your love to the table, not your ego, y’know?
I have read a couple times that an article on linguistics needs peer review. If that is the case is this forum not that? I am a bit disgusted by the appeal to authority. Peer review is not some catch all for truth. If you mean that people with adequate knowledge of a subject should go over the work and critique it where is it needed; That is literally this forum. And especially when it comes to language praxis you can ask a native with a relative high competency for comparison. Or consult the JAPANESE literature concerning the development of the language.
The idea that the Bunpro team should wait to give answers of albeit complicated or nuanced or in the weeds aspects of language until they submit a paper to who? Some golden linguist coven. Ridiculous.
This is not to say that they are right, but an obvious fact that most people who use Bunpro seem to to not understand. Is that it is ONLY a tool for learning about the language., and an SRS to reinforce aspects you have hopefully acquired through immersion in a Japanese context.
It is impossible, categorically, to use Bunpro exclusively to come to have the capacity to speak or write in Japanese. It is extraordinarily helpful in getting you there, precisely because there is a team of people who’s jobs it is too explore and structure Japanese grammar in a digestible in a constructive way.
I want even their crackpot and wild theories on grammar. However they should use prudence and tact when offering these ideas and have peer review here on the forum and us as customers should not take this site as gospel but investigate further to continue the advancement of this language and its learning.
The originator of this thread has every right to question and argue about the nuance of a point. But he was a bit rude. That is this his right. The Bunpro team is a bit recalcitrant as is there right. Let’s have a constructive conversation.
Source I am a philosopher of both science and language I have a piece of paper that says so. Allegedly that matters.
みんさん日本語上手ですな〜
（日本語で笑う）
Apologies ahead for the inevitable typos that I will edit. I’m writing on my lunch break have to go back to work.
This seems like an ugly thread but what I like about Bunpro is that the content while not 100% complete, or maybe not even 100% perfect, is comprehensive enough for nearly your whole Japanese learning journey. I really appreciate the coverage from N5-N1, and the frequent updates are extremely welcome, unlike Wanikani which hasn’t had a content update in years and is in desperate need of one. I would personally recommend this site to anyone.
Wow, there’s quite a bit to unpack here.
Okay, first of all no. Posting on a forum does not count as “peer review”. There’s no appeal to authority when you ask “Can you find me some academic literature that supports your claims?” People in these forums (including myself) do not count as experts in whatever stuff we are discussing. Heck, 99% of the population (including most language teachers) don’t fall into this “experts” group either. We tend to leave that category to actual published authors and researchers that literally spend their life studying the intricacies of certain specific aspects of the language (not even the whole of it). That’s usually what “peer review” means, it means you get reviewed by your peers, aka people who have done similar studies and are at the literal forefront of research for that field. Not a forum of Japanese learners.
I don’t think anyone claimed they need to publish peer reviewed papers if they want to engage in forum discussion. However if you’re making certain claims that don’t seem to be supported by any literature whatsoever, and especially as one of the leading Japanese grammar learning platforms, surely you can understand people might be a bit sceptical if you don’t provide any sources. This is even more important if you do put those crackpot theories into your own (paid) grammar explanations as facts that then people use to study and learn from. You want to have your own separate “fun” blog with whatever written on it? Go wild, it might actually be interesting to read.
For what it’s worth I agree with your opinion about the tone of the thread, but it’s good to understand that before this thread was created there had been multiple feedback tickets going back and forth with staff pushing back on all of these points saying “No, we are correct” despite the fact that, indeed, they were not correct. Had this thread not been made (and likely with the tone it was made in), nothing would’ve likely changed.
You seem to literally not understand the words you just said. It literally does.
I’ll clarify. I explicit REGECT exactly the notion that a panel of experts does or does not decide truth value of statements made by lay people. The modern version of peer review in academia is broken and gamed.
The category of a published author is someone with who a great deal of respect can come. Their opinions can carry a great weight but it does not make it truth.
This is not too say the ant lay person necessarily is correct about their presuppositions are not faulty in a myriad of ways. Neither does it make their necessarily wrong.
I agree the lack of general citation of the language or commentaries related to the point in question shows a lack of critical examination that in all cases Is not desired.
That is the point.
I don’t know how to put this without being rude but you are literally one of the original instigators for the “tone” of this thread.
Before you brought it up only two people had mentioned peer review. Jake floated the possibility of submitting the Bunpro team’s theories for peer review. In response I mentioned that they would probably need to get a lot more rigorous if they planned to do so. No one said anything about whether peer review is valuable, whether it is working properly or broken, or anything of the sort. And no one suggested Bunpro needed to do academic peer review in order to deploy their product.
What I said is that linguistic training, such as what you would receive in a graduate (and even an undergraduate) program in linguistics, is useful and Bunpro should consider consulting those with such training if they intend to make novel contributions in the field of Japanese grammar (which Jake suggested they may intend to do).
peer review /ˌpɪə rɪˈvjuː/ noun
- evaluation of scientific, academic, or professional work by others working in the same field.
I understand your skepticism towards the academic process and I do agree that it could be better but posting on a language learning forum is still not a better substitute for that. Even if you want to go by the most lax definition of what “peer review” might mean, someone working at Bunpro whose task is to teach grammar and someone who’s a language learner/beginner who’s learning that grammar discussing the same theory (with mostly no sources btw) still does not count as peer reviews. It’s like a teacher coming up with some new theory and explaining it to their students and having their students go “wow that’s cool” and then them claiming it’s been “peer reviewed”. The teacher and the students aren’t peers.
Regardless of any of this, this point is a bit silly anyway. All people have been asking for is to substantiate claims that were being made with some actual evidence (or even just some effort beyond “trust me bro”) and as you can see those claims have now been removed because they really weren’t helpful or useful (or correct). We all have our own ideas of how the language might work and can use our intuition to have a shared understanding (based on what we studied and what we acquired through experience) and that’s the reason why we don’t need to be citing academic papers every time something grammar/language related comes up, but if you go a bit beyond that and make claims about stuff that doesn’t hold to even the thinnest of layman scrutinies, I think it’s reasonable to ask for a bit more than that to back your claims. Especially if you put it forward from a place of authority.
My tone might be a bit direct but I don’t think I’ve been really rude or disrespectful, or even an “original instigator”. I only posted twice earlier in the thread asking for sources (mainly from curiosity and honest desire to discover new things) and shared my own personal opinions and findings (after reading some of the literature, despite being outside of my domain and clearly acknowledging that).
On the other hand I’ve seen a few people that seemed to have joined this thread with only the intention to criticise the people asking for revisions, showing an incomplete understanding of what the problem was with the wrong explanations, and actively claiming to have no interest in the internal workings of the language and yet feel like they need to provide an opinion on how such details should be explained even if incorrect.