Non-English speakers, how do you deal with Bunpro?

[danyramdas]

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I have Japanese students tell me that the lack of cases in English is something that makes it more complex whereas I have native English speaking friends who find cases in German and Japanese to be something that makes them more complex.
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So if I am reading this right:
Student A: Lack of English makes things more complex.
Student B: The exclusion of English makes it far more easier.

After reading this I see again why I prefer Minna no Nihongo above genki, which I have too. You english is not my native language and grammar side of things not my strong suit.

There I wish the grammar explanation used less english as that makes is hella complex for me.

[walter]

I would certainly love an Italian localisation. Or Spanish, in alternative. I am fluent in English but I do agree that it sometimes lacks the complexity needed to fully render the original Japanese meaning. Sometimes Romance languages have more ways of expressing such complexity than English does.

[Marcus.W]

I’m Swedish, but honestly I prefer that the focus is on improving and adding to the English language content, rather than on adding additional translations.

I’ve seen too many examples (in other areas) where translations are added but then not kept up to date with corrections and additions made on the English language content, resulting in a worse experience for the users of those languages instead of a better one.

@Jake

[Ochamame]

Isn’t there an option to add Notes that also show up in the SRS quizzes? If not, there should be.
Other than that, “synonym hell” isn’t a unique issue of non-native speakers. Every language has parts that are more complex and others less, so if those complexities don’t overlap 100% you can’t really translate things directly. German (and French, and Spanish) also has only two gramatically very distinct politeness levels, beyond ます you’d also have to “translate” by just adding more polite extra words. It’s well possible that one translation is easier to get the feel of if you’re more familiar with the language though. (Hence why, User Notes in quizzes would be great)
(Also dito on the focus on English instead of translating everything. Quality over quantity. IF you wanted to translate things I’d focus on languages of countries where people are less likely to already speak English. So, probably not most European countries.)

[Buntebunpou]

You can activate an option that shows you the grammar info below wrong answers and your notes are in there. But the problem usually is that you have to guess what is meant in the first place.

Bunpro does everything it can to help you with that. I really appreciate how much effort the team put into easing this problem, there are features only for that which cost a lot of time. But putting everything through a second foreign language is always a problem. They can’t solve that problem without translating everything.

When it comes to multiple options for the (more or less) same thing Japanese is quite extreme. It’s the sixth language I learn and the others don’t come even close in that regard. If you look up my example with “even” you’ll find 35 entries in a Japanese dictionary. Sure, not all of them are really valid but let it be 15 - that’s still quite extreme.

German has a lot of politeness levels. Grammar books just talk about addressing people with “Sie” and “du” but there is much more that is usually not being teached and you get it through immersion. E.g. the person at the counter in a hotel will use other phrases than a work colleague will use for the same thing while both are addressing you with “Sie”. Very similar to Japanese actually. If I want I can create the same sentence in ten or more variants that go from casual to ultra polite. And I can also make it more humble by changing parts. That can also be done to a certain degree with English but after my experience it’s much more limited I would say.

Anyway, that’s not my only point. Even if English and German are exactly the same for some grammar points (which they are for something like “doko”) it is still more difficult to go through English first. That is actually my main point, my examples unfortunately were a bit distracting from that.

[Mannelito]

There will be a point where you will have a lot of synonym ghosts hauting you, I had maybe 450 at the peak.

What I did was to do fewer reviews but focus more.
As Ive mostly studied while commuting, pecking away at a screen whilst wobbling on a commuter train was a pain in the ass. Also, I didnt feel like I was making progress even though I did 40+ reviews. So what I did was to put more effort into translating sentences and read linked resources, because it easier to read, occasionally look up words, and watch youtube on a train. It slowed down my review to 10 reviews a day at times but helped many other aspects of my japanese understanding.

Turn off the english translation and try your own, it might help.

[Buntebunpou]

Thanks! Yeah, I had the plan to analyze all the synonyms more carefully after finishing N3 (which will be in a week, yay). I also will take a long break before I start with N2, I’m starting to hate grammar and need a break after a streak of 300 days now.

May I ask how you did it? My plan was to create a huge spreadsheet with all Bunpro entries, adding translations in my native language and writing down tags I can filter (e.g. #combined_verb_with_te, #combined_verb_with_masu_stem, #koto, #iu, #sogar). I did that in a text file and it helped but it’s getting hard to see the big picture because of the huge amount of entries.

And afterwards I planned picking at least the ones I have always trouble with and searching for clips via youglish.com or via ChatGPT in all my Japanese movies to get a feeling how they are used in reality.

But the amount of time needed for that is very scary.

That’s why I was asking here to get some impressions how others dealt with it. I chose Bunpro in the first place to save time but my planned approach kind of reverses that.

[JamesBunpro]

You slightly misread it. I teach English to Japanese students. Those students complain that the lack of grammatical case in the English language makes English “more complex” than Japanese (they don’t say it in these terms because they don’t know what grammatical case is). Equally, I have English speaking friends who are learning Japanese or German who find grammatical case makes those languages “more complex”. That is what I meant.

I brought it up because cases are something that are often brought up as “making German more complex/difficult” (case marking particles, in the instance of Japanese) but honestly it is so subjective. I think I could personally teach Japanese cases more easily than I could teach English word order and I teach English word order for a living. I think it is more difficult than Japanese cases marking personally but others feel the opposite so it just seems entirely subjective.

(Sorry for the tangent on this thread)

[Mannelito]

Honestly, I just checked synonyms as they popped up. Have ghosts on, dont forgive errors and all the weak points will accumulate in ghosts, adept and beginner. Then you just go into those sub-categories and check.

If I managed to bump up a grammar point to a higher SRS by luck, they usually get poked down to ghosts when you get them wrong at SRS10 or higher. Just be honest with yourself and see ghost reviews as an opportunity to hone a specific point of the language.

Also, being structured is good if it has a purpose, otherwise it is just distracting you from doing.

[Buntebunpou]

That’s interesting. I disabled ghosts because it didn’t see any use in it and after disabling them I actually good better. Never liked this grinding idea where you are bombarded by grammar points your brain obviously just can’t digest right now. After my experience that’s quite counterproductive, I often got much better after just taking a break from problematic stuff.

But your approach with ghosts is actually interesting.

Structuring the stuff I have problems with usually works for me. Especially as it shows you problems you didn’t even realize you’re having, e.g. when you learned a few thousand words and some are identical but have different meanings. The main problem is it just costs a lot of time which I don’t really have.

Maybe I should put everything into the user notes and parse that stuff via the Bunpro api. That way I could integrate that into my learning workflow. I did similar stuff with Anki and its flags and tags and that works very well.

[Buntebunpou]

Some parts of English are more complicated than Japanese, I can understand that thought if you’re just focussing on special areas. Different conjugations for singular and plural, articles (I have a car, the car over there, cars and bikes are vehicles), future tense…

And the worst part of English: the irregular pronuncitation like the g in vegetarian, vegetable and vegan. Same shit as kunyomi and onyomi in Japanese.

But the main problem for Japanese and American/European learners is just that the languages are so extremely different I would say. Doesn’t really matter whether you speak English or German, it’s still an extremely foreign language for us.

[Erz]

fellow german reporting in. currently working through n1 (passed jlpt 4 and 3)

i usually write a direct german translation of the grammar point that roughly fits into the notes that i get intuitively. the process of finding the right words yourself is already half of the learning.
in hard cases i use DeepL Translate: The world's most accurate translator to get a recommendation of the example sentences.

your fear of keigo later in n2 and n1 isnt really that justified. what i would warn you much more about is your plan of feeding anki with all this. you are trying to brute force memorize which is extremly exhausting and inefficient - perhaps even impossible.
you should spend the majority of time with content that is compelling to you. only then the language and things like keigo will seep into you naturally. i know anki is a dopamine spender that spares you the frustration of ambiguity when learning a language. but in the end anki gives soon diminishing returns compared to listening and reading. (god i wish i had this conclusion years ago - nowadays i strictly limit my anki time to 15 minutes per day)

subtle differences become clearer when you read an article or story about an interesting setting - not when bruteforce memorizing.

also: spend the majority of bunpro time with the example sentences.

[RYAN1]

I’m an Arabian and to me the used english to educate people japanese on this site is somewhat off (?) compared to the ones I have been to, as though english isn’t really my language and I really am terrible at it when it comes to express stuff using it, as I’ve seen many japanese learning resources offer good interpretation for the given context in English, this one is kinda off, but I wouldn’t suggest you to add “Arabic” when you hadn’t even added other langs, but yeah as long as it’s understandable, fine by me, also I’m here because I like the features this site offering, keep the great work up (:

[simias]

Honestly if you want to know if there’s a market this is the last place you should ask. Obviously anybody using Bunpro right now and commenting in these forums is going to be at least somewhat functional in English. Personally I’m a French native speaker but I have zero interest in a French Bunpro because my English is decent enough that it doesn’t create too much friction in my studies.

However I’m sure that there are many French-speaking people who don’t have a solid grasp of English and could use something like Bunpro to help in their Japanese studies. How many would that be? Unclear.

Note that looking at Duolingo for instance, they do not offer a Japanese track for French, German or Spanish speakers at the moment. Does it mean that there’s not enough demand or that it’s just an untapped market? Who knows…

[simias]

Digging more on Duolingo, I think the only source language other than English that lets you learn Japanese is Chinese. I guess it makes sense to target the Chinese market for that, it’s huge and there’s probably significant interest in Japanese learning there too.

However I’m not convinced that Chinese people would approach Japanese grammar the way us westies do, I don’t know if a straight translation of Bunpro would work without some deeper changes in the lessons.

[albcasahu]

I love languages, so whenever something comes up that I don’t understand in English, I just use it as an opportunity to learn about it. But I’m a bit of a language nerd and I’m not in a rush to learn Japanese

[EPBBass]

Hello,

I am also from germany and firstly, someone said that only germany would benefit from a german translation. But there is also austria and swiss which both (at least to some degree) could use a german bunpro version. That said, I don’t think it should be localised,at least for now.

A lot of people in Europe, especially the younger generations, are quite fliud in english due to it being taught in most schools from a very early age and of the most media ist consumed in english, e.g. youtube, sometimes movies and series and of course many many other things on the internet.

RIght now I am struggling with some grammar points which sometimes translet as you must and sometimes as you have to do XY (or the negative form)… Can’t put a finger on it why thou…

TL:DR English is fine for me.

[Antsa]

Finnish speaker here! I certainly have had my own philosophical sessions related to this issue if it can even be called one. Learning a language through a proxy language (English) definitely has its own problems, though I have noticed that it has also helped me improve my English a bit as well.

I’m a bit unsure how I’d grade my English proficiency, like I can read through English content without thinking about the fact that its in English. Its like a brain toggle of a sort I guess. Grammar related vocabulary is an entirely different problem though, since all of my grammar education has been done in Finnish. Like I can understand the grammar explanations, but the abstract grammar words like “nominalization” and “auxiliary verbs” go mostly over my head and I have no clue what they mean without looking them up separately. In these cases the example sentences however have filled the holes quite nicely and I rely on them a lot.

As for vocabulary Anki cards, I used to mass produce them in English with browser plugins etc., but found myself not getting anything out of them. Like I understand what the cards are saying, but its difficult to grasp the core meaning. For sentences and kanji English has been fine, but for vocab these days I create all of the cards in Finnish manually. It certainly adds a lot to the effort required and I have a massive slew of scripts to help with that. I find it quite funny how I need Google Translate a lot when translating English vocabulary to Finnish even though I know what the words mean . Also in some cases I have to look for Japanese example sentences when the English translations are too vague to directly translate to Finnish.

Studying a language through a proxy language is like an onion with its layers. You slowly get rid of the layers one by one trying to cut out the middleman:

1. Japanese → English → Finnish → Mentalese
2. Japanese → Finnish → Mentalese
3. Japanese → Mentalese

The progress is a bit slow with complex things like grammar, but I hope it gets easier over time

If I had to come up with some way to improve this, maybe there could be a page in Bunpro that would explain out some grammar words that are commonly used in the explanations but aren’t common in the normal language? I know that explaining English grammar doesn’t really fit a website meant for teaching Japanese grammar, but it would probably be of some use to non-native English speakers. This way there wouldn’t be a need to translate the entire website, but non-native speakers would still have a way to get more out of the grammar explanations.

Edit: Maybe one quick way to add grammar word explanations would be to link the words to their wordnik.com definitions or something

[username2]

I add new unknown words into my Anki, also practicing English on forum like now, thus effectively learning 2 language with a price of 1. Best deal ever, thank you Bunpro!

[I-k-d]

I’m a native english speaker and I struggle to understand some of the definitions, I often go onto other sites to learn how to use the points.