Monolingual Bunpro reviews

[casual]

I wanted to discuss a possibility of monolingual reviews in Bunpro, and see what the users and the staff think on the topic.

Here is what this could potentially look like:

The review prompt would be:

• in Japanese
• short and sweet
• close to the intended meaning of the sentence
• could be one of the other Bunpro synonyms, or not
• NOT an explanation or literal rephrasing of the target grammar
• could be different for different sentences testing the same grammar
• could also incorporate expected tense and politeness (e.g. きっとそうだ vs きっとそうでした)

What’s the goal?

This is still a production-focused review. It simulates (and stimulates) your thought process as you have a half-baked Japanese sentence in your head, and are trying to complete the baking.

What’s the difference with existing hint options?

a. No hint at all, except for “Standard, Progressive” etc tags
With no hints at all, for many sentences it’s not clear what the intended meaning is. I’d cautiously say only about half of all questions can be answered this way.

b. Japanese nuance hint

Japanese nuance hint is great, but it:

• has the POV of what the target grammar is, not what the whole sentence is intended to mean
• takes more time to parse than the actual sentence
• is probably impenetrable to users below a certain level due to focus on linguistics
• sometimes gives away the answer by being too literal

c. Translation hints

I hope everyone can agree that the end goal of learning is to formulate thoughts into sentences directly in Japanese. Not to first come up with an English sentence to say and then translate it.

The majority of English and Japanese words and constructions don’t match 1-to-1, especially in natural sentences, but more like many-to-many.
This means that the same prompt could be interpreted as leading to the right answer, and could also be interpreted to mean something completely different. At least that’s what it regularly feels like to me, with a caveat of not being a native English speaker.

d. English nuance hint

Combines downsides of options b and c with the benefit of being quick to read.

Now, of course creating a completely new field and filling it in for thousands of existing sentences and all future sentences might not be realistic for the content team. But hopefully such discussion can produce some more practical ideas.

[soundjona]

@casual

I hope everyone can agree that the end goal of learning is to formulate thoughts into sentences directly in Japanese. Not to first come up with an English sentence to say and then translate it.

I don’t really like the current online consensus that english translation are worthless.

To me, learning is a multiple step process, and I fear that most people try to find the ultimate solution where in fact, it’s the combination of those, and the effort put by the learner, that will make him learn or not.

はずだ/bound to is a very good example of this. For sure, it’s absolutely not a natural way to think in english. But the first step is to understand that はず share a meaning with “bound to”. Later, each time you hear in some japanese content …はずだ, you think “It is bound”. But then, you don’t even think “It is bound”, you think はずだ！".

So was the english translation that bad ? I don’t think at all. I think it’s a necessary step to go from “not understanding the bricks that compose the language” to “understanding the bricks, but now having to mesh them together through outside practice”.

But that outside practice will always need to happen, no Anki/Bunpro will replace that.

What you suggest to me would be more targeted to people that understand a lot of the meaning of what they read, but would like to have some “natural japanese->japanese” practice. Which to me, should happen not with example sentences, but with real life content, real people, not bound to a particular platform.

Don’t want to dismiss your idea, I think it could be interesting for some specific exercises, but I think it is really something different than what is bunpro right now.

Extra : It’s also why I never like when people say that JP->EN dictionnary are inferior than JP->JP, because they don’t carry the meaning of the word. When people say that, they often take an example of a word, a “one-english-word translation” of it, and then explain why the interpretation is different … in english. Maybe some japanese words can’t be translated 1:1 to english words, but japanese and non-japanese have the same perceptions of the world around them, maybe I don’t have a word to describe しまう accurately, but if someone explain it in full nuances and examples, it is totally doable in English.

[lashette]

I would personally adore having a monolingual or at least something very close. I currently have it to the lowest smallest hint so I don’t just look at the english translation and guess. But I would love if the team could figure out how to do circumlocution in japanese about what we should be saying, kinda dance around it. I don’t have my app/webpage in japanese so I’m wondering if the little hints in the cloze section are translated into japanese, that’d be cool too. For example (Low confidence, visual cue) into japanese would be great to keep my mind in that gear, so to speak.

I’ve found that forcing myself to take the harder path to lead to a lot more results. I used to read stuff exclusively with furigana, I used to have furigana in my anki reviews, all that. But I found that I only memorized the furigana but not the kanji. So I simply forced myself to only get the furigana on the word I’m learning, and only after checking. This would be in a similar vein.

[Noxsora]

hope bunpro is working on a “words used in the Japanese hint deck”.
I have seen them say that they’re working on a “words used in the Japanese UI” vocab deck and this is the next step after that.

Currently bunpro has both Japanese and English defintions. The Japanese deffintions are un-usable to anyone who still needs to refer to a definition. We definately arent getting rid of a English definiton- just want to make the Japanese defintion usful to people still learning

Jalup (died this summer )had better Japanese explanations. はず’s deffinition in webilo isn’t better: 相撲で、親指と他の指を広げ、矢筈の形にした手。これで相手のわきを押しつけて攻める。「—にかかる」「—押し」
Here is the Jalup defintion of 途中：物事を始めてから終わるまでの中。始めているけどまだ終わっていない。
And the webilo Thesaurus
どこかに向かう途中のこと

• みちみち* 道すがら* 途中* 道中* 行きがけ

今まさに、ある動作や作業に従事しているさま

• 最中* 途中* 中* さ中* している

When I am making my own cards i use weblio thesaurus and include any synonms i already know - or can guess from the kanji and the short discription. i use it with reading reviews. Use example sentences to learn the nuance.