Kana, GoKana, new Onboarding & more!

Good day fellow Bun-pros.
We’ve been toiling away at a new set of features, and finally get to announce them to you lovely people!


A big part of the Bunpro Experience™️ that was in dire need of a facelift was helping new users get off to the right start when first joining.

Once you finished signing up for Bunpro, you were asked a few questions, then thrown feet first into the fire.
There was no explanation of features, and you were basically out of luck if you couldn’t read hiragana and katakana.

We have added a bunch of new features to help make those first few steps when learning with Bunpro a little less painful.

To help remedy these issues, we present the following:


:sa: Bunpro’s Complete Guide to Learning Kana

On the Kana page, you’ll find a fully-featured tool for learning Hiragana/Katakana and all their combinations and modifications!

More Screenshots

Features:

  • All Hiragana, Katakana, and combinations
    • Split into bite-sized sections
    • Complete with description, fun facts, and other info
  • Pronunciation and typing info
  • Natively recorded audio
  • Mark each row of kana items as ‘Read’
    • Which enables…
  • Kana Practice Quizzes for drilling each of the items (with audio)

And…

Printable Kana charts, Bunpro-themed :bunprogold:

You’ll find them scattered throughout the Kana page, and aggregated in the Resources section at the bottom.

Here are some direct links to them too for those curious:

Once you’ve learnt all those darned kanas, you can test your knowledge, IN THE ARENA! :trumpet::crossed_swords::trumpet::crossed_swords:

Introducing…


favicon GoKana

We recently added GoKana, to Bunpro, a neat little app originally developed by Brody Smith!

It’s a neat little kana flashcard arcade game that features a leaderboard, native audio, sound feedback, and cool animations :sunglasses:

Compete for a high score in each of the many different hiragana/katakana combinations!

Screenshots


:world_map: Onboarding & Tour

An Onboarding is a process that helps new users quickly customize the product to their needs and hit the ground running. Our goal with this update was to create a smoother experience for all the people that are completely new to Bunpro, setting up for success in record time.

If you ever wanted to invite someone to join Bunpro, now’s a great time!

Onboarding

Features…

  • Level select
    • Select between not only N5 to N1 as your level, but also ‘Absolute Zero’ – which will take you through learning Kana before you start at N5
  • Optional textbook selection
    • Set a textbook as your Deck right during the Onboarding, otherwise choose between Grammar, Vocab or Both as your content type.
  • Pace Selection
    • With concrete indicator of items learned per day
  • Time to fnish
    • A indicator of how long it will take to finish your chosen Deck/contents
  • Confetti upon finishing Onboarding :tada:
Screenshots

All steps included

Tour

Through the Tour you’ll receive a much overdue intro to the Learn system (both the Lesson and Quiz steps ), the Summary and the Dashboard pages (including the Learn dropdown).

Screenshots

Only a few steps from the Tours are screenshotted.

Unfortunately while the Onboarding cannot be re-accessed by existing users, the Tour can!

Links to re-access the Tour for those that are curious

NOTE: Some parts of the Tour may be broken for existing (post-onboarding) users.


Anyway, that about wraps it up for this update!

The bad news:

  • Most of you are long-time users, who are well beyond benefitting from this new set of Bunpro-branded training wheels.

The good news

  • You get to use your battle-hardened prowess to dominate the leaderboard in GoKana. :sunglasses:

On a more serious note, with all this beginner-focused goodness now done and dusted, we now have cleared up time again to 100% focus on features that you can all enjoy!

:bug: As always, please let us know any feedback or bugs you find with this or any of our services, we read it all and it means a lot to us.

Thanks and as always, happy studying!
The Bunpro Team :bunprogold:

PS: App versions of GoKana and Kana will be out shortly 🙇‍♂️

56 Likes

Pretty cool features! Thanks for continuing to improve!

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Repping the team :muscle:

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I dethroned you and grabbed a few first places here and there while I was at it, but I don’t think it will last for long.

If someone is new to hiragana/katakana, I benefited from a flash game called Kana Warrior: Play Kana Warrior / かなウォリアー, a free online game on Kongregate
You can increment the amount of kana and customize it however you want to practice weak points or ones you mix up a lot.

4 Likes

You guys are so cool! This is the kind of experience it would have been awesome to have when first starting Bunpro! But hey, I stuck around anyways, didn’t I? :wink:

6 Likes

Thanks for sticking around everyone!

We can officially say that you handled us at our worst, and now you deserve us at our best 🫰

17 Likes

Meh, can’t enjoy the onboarding and even GoKana remains firmly out of my grasp. They’re right though. There is a considerable danger that I will not be doing my work.

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This looks great! :muscle:

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Same sinking ship as you, gome. But once work is over, we shall rise again.

2 Likes

Good day, fellow Bunnypros!

Go, kana, go! :star_struck:

Just a suggestion for the full hiragana chart to put the romaji equivalents in lower case (rather than UPPER CASE) so as to match the keyboard input on Bunpro.
Of course, the katakana chart is great as it is in that regard :smiley:

1 Like

I remember when this was a grammar app.

I feel weird about this update, as like…why? Is the goal for Bunpro to teach grammar or to be a one stop destination for all of Japanese?

Not to be a negative nancy or a contrarian for the sake of it, but it’s confusing to me as I liked Bunpro because I wanted to have deeper connections to grammar that I couldn’t get anywhere else. The moat so to speak. But this kana update I can find on so many other places elsewhere that’s similar in quality.

If I was a paying monthly user (I am a lifetime subscriber), I would be hesitant if I knew that’s what the devs were doing instead of digging deeper into the grammar.

3 Likes

You would be surprised by the amount of on site feedback and emails we have gotten over the years along the lines of “I signed up but how am I supposed to read the sentences.” or just the multitude of “I typed the right answer why doesn’t it accept it?” feedback, when it is just a kana typo error.

There is nothing wrong with those types of feedback, just it is time we have to invest answering them consistently. Having this update with support for new users helps mitigate that to some degree.

Until this update we have just had to point users to those other resources. While that isn’t the end of the world, it does feel bad from both the standpoint of the team’s broader mission of helping people learn Japanese and from a business standpoint.

While I can somewhat understand where you are coming from, I don’t think this update detracts at all, especially since putting the kana content together was a drop in the bucket compared to all the work that goes on behind the scenes from the content team, much of which isn’t visible like an update like this is.

21 Likes

nice, 5 k hiragana and 5 k katakana review batch when?

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Ironic.

8 Likes

I can’t wait to be inevitaby dethroned

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5 Likes

Y’all…we’re not absolute beginners anymore and this update wasn’t for us. What are we even doing here?

5 Likes

I’ll wait for the GoKanji update

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a idea of me that could be beneficial would be to create vocabulary hiragana or katakana decklist which draws out the items of the excisting lists and link it to the kana section for easy acess, so one could focus practice them after kana introduction. Sure, hiragana is wahtever since you could just read furigana, but the katakana part would be more important for that i figured.

regardless, props to the practice minigame, compared to excisting cheap kana steamgames, everything is pretty smooth and fast paced.

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Can we find this info anytime on learning deck info page or when you adjust pace settings? Or is it only during an onboarding?

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Hey all,

Looked at the Hiragana charts. Are you suuuuuure the stroke order is correct for な? Shouldn’t the 3rd and 4th be the other way around?

Cheers

5 Likes