Learning vocab issues

After being confused about it for months, I’ve finally figured out how to add vocab to my reviews, but I’ve found a few issues/inconsistencies.

Firstly, there are three lessons I’ve done that involve romaji characters: Tしゃつ, Lサイズ and Wしゃつ. When I have to give an answer, both Tしゃつ and Lサイズ I only have to write the katakana, but for Wしゃつ not only do I now have to write the W, I have to write it as わい, which seems quite inconsistent.

When doing lessons, often it shows the Japanese word, but by default not what it means. I have to click “Show English”. Seems silly, as since I’m doing the lesson, obviously I don’t know what the English is? Also, this doesn’t apply for all words. いらしゃいませ for example had a “Show English” button, whereas インド showed the English translation by default. Again, inconsistent, and would make sense to have an option somewhere to either always show or hide the English translation.

For good morning, there are two vocab points: おはよう and おはようございます, for both casual and polite speech. However when I’m asked to input one, the question doesn’t say whether it wants the polite or casual, and if I input casual instead of polite (or vice-versa) I’m marked wrong, instead of in grammar points where it would prompt you to reconsider your answer. I’ve found this also applies to umm being either エトー or あのー.

When doing vocab lessons, the default size of three, and I can’t find anywhere to change this. My lesson size in the settings is set to 5, so it seems to not follow this setting.

Also with lessons, since I’ve just discovered vocab, there are hundreds to learn. It would be good to know how many I’ve learnt in a single session so I don’t overwhelm myself. At the moment the only way I’ve found I can find out how many lessons I’ve done is to go to my homepage and check how many vocab reviews I’ve got coming up. Also knowing how many vocab words there are to learn in the deck would be good. For example, if there’s only 20 words left to learn, it’d be good to know so you could make the decision to power through and finish the deck off.

Also with lessons, it would be nice to be able to set a vocab deck as your default deck for lessons, instead of having to locate it in the deck page. Even better would be the ability to set all N5 knowledge (vocab and grammar mix) as your default deck.

It would be nice in the vocab search if you could write in romaji, like you can in the grammar search, instead of having to change your keyboard IME.

Despite my complaints, I’m glad I found that you can learn vocab on this site. I think it’s a great addition and I’m quite excited about having all N5 knowledge (except kanji) on a single teaching resource.

2 Likes

Ok, the more I do reviews and get exposed to new sentences, it just infuriates me more.
I just had a sentence: ‘Are you 10?’ ‘Nope, I’m 11.’, where I had to put in the word nope. I thought いいえ was suitable, seems perfectly fine to maybe, though maybe a little rude. Nope. Should be ううん.

I’ve barely been doing vocab words for 24 hours and I’m already wishing I could remove them from my reviews.

Again, I think it’s a great addition, but I think it needs a lot of fine tuning to meet the standard of the grammar section. So far from what I’ve read, it seems the emphasis has been on adding as many words as possible, whereas I think it would be more suitable to add just say N5 words, and get them tweaked and working properly before adding more and more.

2 Likes

Thanks for all the feedback!

Cloze-style (fill-in-the-blank) questions for Vocab are still very very new (AFAIK we haven’t even officially announced them yet).
There are ~900 Grammar Points that have been meticulously crafted for use with Cloze questions over the years that Bunpro has been around. We’ve only just recently added the ability to do Cloze for Vocab, and there are 20,000 vocab words, and we’re in the process of giving each of them their own sentences. It’s realistically gonna take a loooong time of polish to get the experience right for them.

In the meantime, two options to consider:

  • Use Vocab in it’s current state, and if you see a place where an alternate-answer should be accepted, or a hint given, create some feedback for the question.
    • This option doesn’t solve your frustrations, but will help us polish the Vocab content until it’s in a state where the user experience is much better
  • Set the Review Type for your Deck to Manual Input / Flashcard
    • The other question styles for Vocab reviews might be what you’re after in the interim

Also, a much better vocab/grammar-point search feature is in our development pipeline.

Doesn’t answer all your questions, but hopefully it helps!

Thanks,
Sean

1 Like