Some things are meant to go together: Hot chocolate & marshmallows 
, Nara deer & bowing for biscuits 
and Bunpro & an annual December Lifetime Sale! 
From now through the 7th of January 2024, all lifetime subscriptions will be on sale for $120 (down from their usual price of $150). As always, if you are currently subscribed and decide to upgrade, you will be prorated for any unused time on your current subscription.
We’d like to split this post into three categories - Past, Present, and Future. Let’s start by taking a look at an overview of additions and adjustments we made to the site in 2023!
Changes and Additions in 2023
Content
- N3 vocabulary fixes (Both furigana and English translations)
- N3 Vocab cloze
- All grammar explanations on site have been finished
- N5 and N4 alternate answers update
- Introduction of grammar hints in Japanese
- N1 grammar explanations part 2
- Vocab N5 and N4 sentence improvisations
- N1 grammar explanations (+ tooltips) part 1
- Vocab Hints
- N2 vocabulary fixes (furigana)
- Added furigana to all the structure sections of the website.
- All sentences on the site fixed to use one consistent style of formatting and punctuation.
- Nuance of all example sentences on the website either fixed or removed if the information was irrelevant.
- Male audio added for everything up to N3 grammar.
Website
- Color/Themes Update
- New Review system
- New Dashboard
- New Grammar/Vocab page revamp (blog style)
- Review Queue Order menu, Reading Review Type
- Support for Nuance, Separated Grammar/Vocab Default Hint settings
Mobile
- Inclusion of many of the features the website offers including
- Cram
- Decks
- New Review settings
- A full Interface overhaul to bring it inline with the website design.
Quite a busy year overall we’d have to say! Our theme this year was 快適（かいてき）, as a lot of the work this year revolved around making the platform as comfortable for users as possible. Things such as implementing new review styles, updates to improve accessibility, and features such as when reviews become due (among others) to making using Bunpro more pleasant all around.
The great news is that our few major, time-consuming updates this year will set us up for faster changes next year. While the list above is as comprehensive as possible, there are a lot of tweaks behind the scenes that get made on a weekly basis - small bugs, QoL features requested by you all, broad changes to content to unify style and formatting and so on.
As is tradition now, last year we laid out for you what we had on our horizons for 2023 to get you excited as a Bunpro user - let’s see how we did!
Looking back on our goals for 2023 from one year ago:
- Bunpro Grammar Write Ups for N1
- Done!
- Continuing to expand on the grammar we cover, hopefully getting to N0 grammar and slang this year.
- In progress - See our list of grammar we are planning on adding here
- Enhancements to review and ghost review creation, letting you get more practice in the areas you really need it.
- Done!
- Conjugation practice tool
- Hopefully in 2024
- Hopefully in 2024
- A big overhaul to vocab, this includes but isn’t limited to:
- Translations for vocab example sentences, more data points for vocab, including pitch accent and frequency.
- Done!
- Fill in the blank vocab reviews!
- Ongoing (N2 & N1 left)
- Private deck creation so you can make your own deck + ability to share them with others.
- Early 2024
- Other dialect decks (hopefully!)
- 2024
- Expanding upon and improving the mobile app, including (hopefully an offline mode)
- Great progress made, but still ongoing
- Overhaul of reviews on Bunpro
- Done!
- Translations for vocab example sentences, more data points for vocab, including pitch accent and frequency.
As seen above, for the most part we hit a lot of our goals that we laid out last year! However through internal dialogue and lots of great community feedback, some priorities needed to get shifted around and thus some items got slated for 2024. Bunpro continues to evolve year after year and while we do put a lot of effort into our next goals, we allow wiggle-room depending on various factors.
With all of the past and present behind us, it’s time now to look ahead to 2024 and see what’s in store for you all!
Our Goals for 2024
- Release 75-100 new grammar points from our list, including some N0 content.
- Full overhaul of decks including but not limited to: adjustments to the content in existing decks and a “Bunpro order”, ability to create and share your own decks.
- A better search
- Finishing and releasing N2 and N1 vocab sentences, translations and fill in the blank/reading reviews.
- New Reading Passages and an update to existing ones (rewriting to reflect and obey the new grammar ordering).
- A full release of the mobile app. Maybe even a full offline mode!
- While we have been teasing it for a long time, maybe 2024 will actually be the year of the Bunpro Merch store.
- With all the requests we get to add kanji info to the site, we might begin to explore what that looks like.
- Start adding the additional vocab lists as studyable decks with cloze translations, aiming for at least 5 new decks of 1000 words each translated in 2024, each with 8 example sentences.
- Add tense/similar information for ever single grammar review on the website (almost done!)
- Rerecording of all female audio on the website with a far better microphone! (N5 will be finished very soon!)
- Have already begun the beta production of a relatively large scale project that will integrate students even more with their external teachers and forms of study… More info coming!
- Japanese/English hints for N3, N2, and possibly even N1 vocab!
And that’s it! Another year in the books for Bunpro! We sound like a broken record at this point but so much of what we do is shaped by your feedback, both positive and negative. Bunpro would not be anywhere close to the site it is today without all of you, so thank you for everything you do! All of us here at the team hope that no matter how you spend the holidays, you have an enjoyable time.
See you in 2024!
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Here’s to a great 2024!
