Lifetime Sale, A Year in Review and 2024

Some things are meant to go together: Hot chocolate & marshmallows :coffee:, Nara deer & bowing for biscuits :deer: and Bunpro & an annual December Lifetime Sale! :bunprogold:

bowing-deer (1)


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

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 :sweat_smile:
  • 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!

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 :mag_right:
  • 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! :shushing_face:
  • 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!

96 Likes

Great to hear of the future goals. The future looks bright!

12 Likes

Thanks to all the bunpro team for all their hard work this year. It is really appreciated. The engagement with the community and your transparency is especially valued.

Have a great festive season

Misread as ‘bowling for biscuits’, quite the amusing thought for a moment.

18 Likes

Well that year went quickly… Good work as ever guys!

10 Likes

Yay! Looking forward to next year!

I bought a lifetime sub in last year’s sale and I must say that it was probably one of the best purchases that I made last year. It was definitely worth it!

11 Likes

Is releasing vocab learning delayed until 2025?

3 Likes
  • With all the requests we get to add kanji info to the site, we might begin to explore what that looks like.

Does this mean that at some point Bunpro will allow Kanji to be put in the input form rather than only hiragana? Or does it mean that you’ll be adding the ability to learn Kanji as we do with vocabulary?

Awesome work! I just got the lifetime subscription last month! I am really happy I did, what I really love about the site is that the SRS does catch my problem areas, and I can cram them.

Also, even though I know most of the vocabulary for the levels that you’ve added ( can’t wait for the next levels to be updated), doing them from the beginning with just Japanese definitions as hints is helping me to read Japanese-Japanese dictionaries at a better ease and comfort.

Thank you!

7 Likes

Amazing work! I love this website a lot and it has been soooo helpful! I have a lifetime sub already but I would for sure make purchases from a potential merch store :wink:

I have a quick question: does anyone know if the app will eventually show vocab as kanji after you get them correct? I understand why we have to input the answers as hiragana, but on the website you get to see the kanji after you get it right. On the app, it stays hiragana.

7 Likes

Great year!

And yes, more focus on the higher levels :pray:.

7 Likes

Thank you :bowing_woman:

Now can I have a biscuit plz :pleading_face:

8 Likes

Thank you, after a year of using this website I have purchased the lifetime sub. Looking forward to getting further into N2

5 Likes

Fantastic job and big kudos to the Bunpro team! It’s awesome to have seen the service expand and get polished since I first started using it in 2019. It’s such an awesome tool!

I also really appreciate the effort the team makes in responding to feedback/bug requests or grammar questions. Really makes you feel like people are dedicated to helping others learn this dope language!

Wishing y’all well, this new year!

6 Likes

Thanks to the whole team for all the great work this year! I’ve been using the site daily for years now and the improvements along the way have been wonderful.

Most excited for this one!

6 Likes

Nope, not delayed! Vocab will be coming out of beta in the not too distant future. Probably around the same time that the N2 and N1 decks are released as cloze.

7 Likes

As far as kanji goes, would be pretty neat to see you more tightly integrated with/working directly with WaniKani - but that’s a bit biased of me since I already use both of your services :slight_smile: Here’s to a great 2024!

6 Likes

I want to purchase the one year pass, maybe even lifetime. But are there any other ways aside from Paypal. I don’t have that and it’s too complicated for me. Is there a way to pay for this in Google Play? I looked all over the mobile app and couldn’t find it.

4 Likes

Congratz. Looking forward to another year and seeing what you guys come up with. Hopefully this time I dont take another extended break :sweat_smile:

As a side note, I believe people should be made aware of the myth that those gangster deer in Nara are polite. Most of them would harass us until they found other people to feed them. One even bit my girlfriend on the お尻 :rofl:

At least I managed to find this good boy at the end of the day.

11 Likes

Excited to see what spin you might be able to give to kanji that other tools don’t have!

6 Likes

Crossing fingers! Hopefully there’s something for us who lives in a tropical country too (coffee mugs would be great for my daily coffee/tea), although the hoodie posted back then looks darned cute!

6 Likes

I can literally find no fault with bunpro at all. The dev team is always listening, fixing bugs and improving the site/content and the community is awesome. Thank you for such an awesome year and here’s to a great next one!

8 Likes