I dont plan to ever use any of the vocab resources at all. Im here strictly for the grammar srs. I use anki for vocab and Im too deeply invested in that to change now. Just my 2 cents.
3 Likes
I agree with this. I think grammar is more or less what they are selling, and I definitely think I got my money’s worth, but at the same time I feel like they’re losing focus and are just overextended now.
Bunpro is good for grammar mostly because there isn’t much competition. There are other resources of course, but there isn’t really anything that tries to make it easy to study grammar using an SRS. So bunpro has been immensely helpful for me because I like studying in that way and it works for me. But if I take a step back and compare bunpro to all the other resources I use, it feels like it’s maybe 30% of the grammar learning tool I actually want.
The most obvious example is probably that bunpro doesn’t even have content for all the basic conjugations. So when people ask for a way to practice basic conjugations I tend to recommend a phone app called Japanese Conjugation City. And to be honest, if only the content was expanded to cover more conjugations, it would still not be good. For example the basic う - Verbs grammar point has a table that explains how it works for all the ending kana, but it only tests five of them and it doesn’t test them independently. This is not suitable to learn or practice conjugations. It’s something that an SRS is actually good for, but the way bunpro is set up for grammar points isn’t the way to do it. For example, the app I mentioned can be configured to test conjugations on words based on how often the user gets a word from the database wrong, so if a user specifically has trouble with one of the possible endings, the app will catch that. Bunpro isn’t able to do that. If we’re talking about features that should be in a grammar learning tool, basically imitating this one app would take the top spot on my list, way above “vocabulary”.
Another thing that just feels like it wasn’t thought through properly is the move from an initial focus on bunpro’s own order toward marketing learning paths or decks. I think it’s immensely difficult to organise the content of an SRS so that it works for many different paths because it becomes nearly impossible to maintain a “+1” standard for grammar points where each successive point one learns only introduces exactly one thing. Bunpro completely fails with this, and for an SRS it’s catastrophic if cards end up testing more than one thing because the system can’t accurately evaluate what part the user actually didn’t understand. Being able to be usable by learners who already use a text book may be necessary to be able to get customers, but quality wise this was not an improvement, and if bunpro is supposed to overextend even more and become more of a one stop shop it was counterproductive and it would have been better to improve the experience for learners using bunpro’s path.
For slightly more advanced topics I’ve sometimes found that just learning what a pattern means isn’t really good enough on its own to be able to disambiguate different uses of similar structures. I think there are more exercises that work in a SRS than just filling out the blank, for example, evaluating sentences and being questioned on the meaning. I’ll just post some random examples from workbooks I have. These are not meant as things I would have expected bunpro to do, just examples for a direction I could see it being developed if it was to become a better grammar resource.
This one from a workbook called 日本語文法演習 時間を表す表現 asks whether -ている is used in the same way in two sentences or not (state or progressive).
This one from 日本語文法演習 自動詞・他動詞、使役、受身 asks which of two persons 自分 refers to in a sentence to drill a point related to the use of passive.
This one from 日本語文法演習 敬語を中心とした対人関係の表現 asks whether a sentence expresses disagreement:
That last one is a bit of a stretch since it’s just a bunch of different expressions, but let’s say there was a grammar point for ちょっと or 大丈夫, that kind of grammar point could use this style of question. And in general these exercises might seem like a stretch anyway, just because bunpro only does SRS and I’m already limiting these examples to things that work on SRS cards. But if I was asked what I’d want in a grammar resource, the answer is probably… not just SRS. And especially not more SRS for vocabulary.
But we did get vocabulary. To me this feels like a complete break with the current user base of bunpro. Bunpro started out as, and pretty much still is, a supplementary grammar resource for learners who have already invested some time into Japanese. It’s not currently suitable for complete beginners because there is no direction. In other words, it’s for learners who by and large already have a vocabulary tool of choice. Learners who may have gotten used to incredible flexibility of Anki, or maybe the fairly efficient handwriting reviews that Skritter does, or maybe they just have their own favourite SRS tool because the app stores are full of them. Bunpro’s vocabulary feature does nothing that these tools don’t do better, and probably cheaper in many cases.
I don’t buy into the “the team can do more than one thing at a time” argument either when it comes to vocabulary. That’s technically true, for example, taking resources off of the vocabulary content will not necessarily magically remove the mistakes in the new grammar explanations. But this isn’t just about implementing it. The presence of vocabulary will continually be a burden in that it has to be taken into account for every other development of bunpro as well.
For example, the new textbook based decks have both grammar and vocabulary in the order that they appear in the textbook. So now the JLTP level based decks look bad in comparison because there’s no way to study N5 vocabulary in the order that it appears in the grammar points when studying the N5 grammar deck.
Vocabulary is also being linked from grammar points now, but oftentimes that just makes the experience worse. When I started using bunpro, I had the ability to click on words to toggle furigana for that word specifically and I thought it was the greatest thing because it elegantly addressed the fact that we don’t learn kanji and grammar in sync. Now there are words that have a vocabulary entry where this consequently doesn’t work anymore (especially on phone). And sometimes the vocabulary links aren’t even useful, for example there is a vocabulary entry for さん but not for おばあさん, so the 厳しいおばあさん from the ったら grammar point has her さん linked to a vocabulary entry that’s probably counterproductive because おばあ by itself isn’t really a word anymore in modern Japanese.
(Speaking of grandmothers, there is a card for お祖母さん which for some reason doesn’t come up when spelled in kana or as お婆さん. But also notice how this vocabulary card from the N5 vocabulary deck uses the kanji 祖 that is normally taught in N3 in a word that’s very often only spelled in kana anyway.)
I will admit that being able to bring up an English definition and more examples for how a word is used is a nice idea. But… in practice this ends up as just another thing that’s not good enough to replace what I’ve previously been using. Both macOS and iOS both have built-in Japanese dictionaries that can be used everywhere where text can be selected, the 10ten browser extension has better English definitions, and my commercial dictionaries are even better at both at the cost of having to copy the word manually or typing it in. So for me specifically this feature has zero value and sometimes breaks a different feature that I liked. This sort of conflict will keep happening just because the vocabulary feature exists.
25 Likes
Hey! First of all, thank you for choosing to support Bunpro by getting a lifetime membership! I also appreciate you taking the time to make a post when you didn’t feel that Bunpro was living up to it’s potential in a specific area. Bunpro wouldn’t be where it is now without the support and feedback everyone here provides.
At the end of the day, Bunpro isn’t ‘finished’. To be totally honest with you, it never will be. Not because we aren’t putting in the effort, but because we will always have something more we want to add, whether it be a feature, more examples, or something that integrates the site more effectively, etc.
I think @Megumin nailed it on the head when they said that ‘To reach that conclusion truthfully, you would need to be inside the Bunpro team.’
We generally aren’t too vocal about the grand plans we have for Bunpro. However, I would like to think (and maybe I am a bit biased 
) that what we have delivered to date, is something that is pretty valuable for Japanese learners.
That being said, I wholeheartedly believe that what we have done so far is only a small part of what we think Bunpro is actually capable of doing and that is what we are working toward. Maybe I simply convinced the team to drink the Kool-Aid 
too, but they seem to think what we have in store is pretty special as well.
I have written about this in the past but really it comes down to our development philosophy/attitude which heavily favors putting things out there early on rather than waiting until everything is 100% complete.
We do this because it lets users access the content or features right away, thus getting more value out of it in the long run, but also because we value everyone’s feedback and ultimately it is that feedback itself that helps us take it the extra mile.
To address your more immediate concerns about N1:
-
We actually have the N1 reading passages done, they are just awaiting translation and notes. (I understand this is less of a priority for you personally though)
-
New N1 grammar outside of the “core” is already in development. We did indeed pause that while we focused on other things like the N5, N4 and N3 writeups.
-
Lastly, the additional 6 example sentences have already been put into the pipeline to be worked on. This is a combination of new sentences, but also adjustments to old sentences that we have that weren’t up to the new standards we have put in place (what @Asher and @Fuga are working to apply to all of the content, starting in the lower levels currently).
I do agree that the extra examples could have come sooner, but it was a calculated choice to delay it because for N1 grammar there is often only one real nuance/use case due to how niche/rare the grammar is at that level, meaning that sometimes, just a handful of sentences is more than enough. On top of that, sometimes we actually struggle to write 12 sentences for a grammar point that native speakers themselves have perhaps never used.
This is the same reason we delayed adding a bunch of new N1 and even N0 grammar.
I don’t want what I wrote to sound dismissive of your concerns, or any of the other concerns raised in the replies. They are indeed valid concerns, but also ones we are already in the process of working to address/will be addressing at some point going forward.
We do truly endeavor to do right by each and every user who places their trust and support in us. We won’t always get it right the first time around, but I would like to think we are quick to act to fix things or make adjustments when needed
27 Likes
100% this. The testing method on BP is very good for a beginner in IMO and have actively recommended it to others to subscribe. And I think it helps with productive output for sure. But on the later N2/N1, I’m not sure the same testing method or approach should be considered or could be modified (and since the N1 realm is still being finalized and discussed, definitely worth a mention). I’ve found it to be a synonym nightmare in some respects trying to fish for the correct grammar point sometimes when I have all the points added. Certainly, I want to limit the reference of english to the least amount possible and I’m not sure if I need to be practicing productive output when comprehension and listening are more critical stage of learning and usefulness; I’ve gone another study path to address this but I hope to return when a bit more improved just to see what the experience is like again.
I’ve tested natives on the platform and they have gotten stuck on what the system wants as well for an entry. I’ve defended the system because I really like BP but if natives are getting stuck themselves I have some concerns on the expected outcome for a learner. I think what was normally happening for me is that the sentence gets pushed to a ghost and I end up memorizing the sentence for the correct answer (typically) which may help on the next SRS level or maybe the ghost process starts again. And while there is benefit learning grammar structure like this because sentence memorization does work in some respects, the user experience is can often be frustrating rather than fulfilling which is important for motivation.
That said, grammar review is not the only content now which is great; I really like the reading practice that is now available, such an excellent idea (hopefully on new app soon where I would use it more). And while I don’t use the vocab decks per se, I do enjoy reading the context sentences time to time just for practice. It would make it more useful if the deck list had a drop down menu to show the context sentences to practice reading rather than a tab launch on the vocab point as I don’t want to add to review. And I’ve always used the grammar glossary, that alone has been worth the subscription to me and entries are getting better too.
This is true, it is fair to say that there are likely more beginner users than advanced. But keep in mind that some need N1 for their next stage of their career and can’t move forward without it, this is significantly life changing; it’s more than just a personal study milestone. Also, and not surprising, it is consistently lowest pass rate of all the N levels and advanced materials are typically under represented compared to beginner materials.
However it’s nice to see BunPro so active and making progress both on content and platform plus new app. There was an ominous email a few years that the site might close down so I don’t know if there was a changing of the guard to restructure or not but nonetheless, the activity is great to see even if not exactly what I was looking for at the moment.
15 Likes
These are great points, and they are why I have always thought Bunpro tests learners the wrong way, at least for initial learning. In my humble opnion (and I’m ready and willing to be proven wrong), leaners should be tested entirely in Japanese (with optional English translations as an aid), instead of being presented a snippet of English that has to be translated into Japanese to fit the sentence. I would go so far as to say the way learners are currently tested is flawed. I say that because it orients us toward an English-first approach to learning new grammar. It inverts the recognition → comprehension → utilization pathway.
As @s1212z points out, even natives have difficulty with the current system. I think a better way would be to have either an example sentence with a description of what’s expected and then multiple choice answers, or an example sentence with blanks to be filled out (similar to how it is now) with a detailed description of what’s expected. Perhaps there could even be exercises like, “Make this sentence polite,” where you have to edit what’s provided to use polite forms. Another could be, “Make this sentence very formal, as it might appear in a public address,” and then the user is expected to modify the highlighted phrase to be more suitable (e.g. modiying にあたって into にさいして). Testing grammar points with very similar English equivalents (e.g. わけにはいかない and てはいられない) by framing the questions in such as way as to highlight the nuance differences rather than leaving the learner to figure them out themselves, would also be a big help. Sometimes this simply cannot be done entirely with an example sentence–sometimes you need several, or you need a context description to tease this out.
With so many things being so closely synynomous in English, it can be very difficult to distinguish what’s expected. The difficulty increases as you go through the levels because the near-synonyms become more numerous and the hints actually get worse.
I hate to “pile on” like this, but it’s something I’ve thought about so frequently I feel that I had to say it. I realize what I’m proposing is a significant change that, even if the Bunpro team agreed, would take a long time to implement. It probably won’t happen at all. But that’s a real drag because the current testing system strikes me as being inadequate, and sometimes even counterproductive. In my case, I get frustrated by how little information is offered to find the correct answer, and I end up trying several different ones, using the “Oops!” function to undo wrong answers.
That is highly likely, and I believe it’s true for everyone. It’s one of the critical deficiencies of SRS in general. You end up visually recognizing the item you’re being tested on instead of comprehending the underlying concept. Your response then becomes conditioned on the visual stimulus instead of verbal comprehension. @nekoyama’s suggestions about alternate means of testing could to help break learners out of that cycle, but again, that’s a huge effort for the Bunpro staff, and I wouldn’t blame them for not taking it up for that reason.
Finally, to echo the sentiments of many other people, I have come wish vocab was never added to the site. I, too, fear it will be a major distraction from grammar, which to me is really Bunpro’s major selling point. Tools for learning vocab are a dime a dozen, but there are few options that rise to Bunpro’s level regarding grammar–in English, anyway.
I do realize the Bunpro team continues to work on the site, and that’s great. I guess the bummer for me is I don’t anticipate being able to benefit from it too much because I’m continuing to learn and grow in my understanding of the language at the same time. The window of opportunity for me to benefit from new content is closing. I’ll end up having to pursue other means of learning when I exhaust the Bunpro grammar points (which will only take a couple more weeks). It is for that reason, I decided not to purchase a lifetime subscription (well, that, plus no one ever responded to my inquiry about buying another year in advance before the discount expired).
10 Likes
…(笑)
1 Like
I’ve reached this point as well in N2. But, honestly, I’m kind of okay with it. When I bought my lifetime subscription of Bunpro I mostly just wanted it to help me memorize the grammar points themselves; I figured their nuances would come over time with exposure to them via conversations or books.
I agree that Bunpro could do a much better job, but since I’ve never used the site to be a comprehensive resource for learning grammar I guess their faults have never existed within my realm of use. For my grammar studies, Bunpro is the bones and 新完全マスター is the muscle. But, I will admit, I also find all effort being put into vocabulary kind of frustrating as that wasn’t the reason why I came here either.
7 Likes
The topic of the thread has migrated quite a bit, but I do wanna go ahead and chip in here real quick, a dozen or so posts later, to say that I agree with what people are saying about synonym hell during reviews, and memorizing sentences specifically.
I’m developing a very fine-tuned sensitivity to BunPro’s specific hints for how it wants me to fill in blanks in example sentences where I can’t just intuit the answer. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not, but it is a nagging concern that maybe the most of my learning is going towards the specifics of my platform, and not the actual subject matter. And going monolingual on BunPro seems like an absolutely impossible task unless the entire database of hints is rewritten in Japanese. Actually, that’d be cool… Can we do that? 
But yeah, there’s often some sentences where 100 different things could work in the blank and you have to at least use the first-stage hint to get an idea of what the prompt wants.
For ghosts, I’m also not going to say that memorizing specific sentences is a completely ineffective way to learn grammatical constructs-- In fact, I have vivid memories of doing it as a child for some things and learning English grammar that way-- but I wonder if there isn’t a better or more efficient way sometimes.
That said: I’m happy to pay other people to worry about these problems for me, and just sit back and Review. Seriously, being on the dev team for an app like this sounds super fun, until you also think about having to worry over this kind of stuff for your job, and then it starts to seem positively hellish! 
6 Likes
I know this thread has already gotten quite tangential… but I just want to say as someone who studied language teaching/learning and taught English in school a number of years, the point about natives getting stuck is something I can relate to, albeit for English and not Japanese. Back when I was teaching, I’d have to look through a bunch of different textbooks and worksheets as reference when I’m creating my own resources, and occasionally I’d try to work on some of the exercises I come across. I’d normally get the questions wrong if they are just a list of numbered questions with one-liners that are either asked out of context or are not authentic enough. What’s interesting is, I kinda see the same thing here on Bunpro.
There are a lot of things I appreciate about BP, and it’s clear to me that the BP team spent a lot of time writing the grammar points and building the system, but I honestly struggled a lot with learning new grammar material, and out of frustration I also resorted to memorizing the sentences for the correct answer. I’m still on the trial subscription since it’s just my first month, but I most likely won’t be a subscriber since I found YouTube to be way more helpful in presenting and explaining the points that I kept getting stuck on.
5 Likes
Very succinctly put. I’m hitting this point myself.
3 Likes
The synonym nightmare is brutal. I had it really bad for a while in N2 and I have a feeling I’ve forgotten some of the burnt N5/N4 stuff since I’ve over-written it with newer grammar. I wish there was a mode where we could learn the nuance of different synonyms and test our understanding of that.
4 Likes
When I see the english words “from” and “perspective” in some configuration in a prompt I start breaking out in a cold sweat.
2 Likes
I know what you mean. から言うと・から見ると・にしたら・という点から考えると, they all have very similar English renderings. Without remembering the nuance of each (very hard to do when you’re just learning them for the first time), it’s very challenging to remember which one is best for a given context.
3 Likes
NB: I should state that I wrote the following reply immediately upon reading the quoted section just below this note. I probably jumped the gun and should have read all of Jake’s post first, as he does address some/most of my initial misgivings. Sorry for that, Jake! Anyway, still just going to leave it as-is since it may still be useful feedback in some way anyway. 
To be honest, as a programmer and software developer myself, this sentiment is very foreboding to me.
I suspect that the issue raised in this thread is not so much a question of what the team’s intentions are, but rather how the team prioritizes things and – perhaps most importantly – how their development efforts are structured in order to make progress towards the chosen priorities in a steady, consistent, and focused way.
It has become widely established in most of software development (and certainly in the kind of website market in which BunPro resides) that steady progress towards product development is (generally) best achieved with an iterative, incremental approach (sometimes called things like ‘release early, release often’, ‘continuous integration’, and other related terms).
This means not just releasing individual features in an iterative way, but to release a fully functional product in an iterative way.
For example, a storefront ‘should’ (by this logic) make sure it can:
- display its products,
- handle basic product selection (e.g. a simple ‘shopping basket’),
- handle payment processing (perhaps redirecting to an existing payment processor like PayPal or whatever, rather than developing a complex integrated ‘check out’ system which keeps the user on-site the whole time),
- handle product inventory,
- process orders in a timely fashion,
- ensure product delivery (probably via an existing delivery service),
- handle customer feedback, especially things like returns, etc.
- have all the business side of things handled, like paying taxes, salaries, etc.
Only once this ‘version 1.0’ of the storefront is up and running, from beginning to end, ‘should’ the business then begin adding on the next product-iteration’s worth of additional features (such as, say, handling coupons, etc.) and specializations to the existing fully-functional system.
In other words, the product’s feature set should be prioritized and planned into ‘iterations’ (not 100% perfectly, only to the extent needed to decide what belongs in the ‘current iteration’, deferring the detailed decisions about future iterations for later), with defined ‘milestones’ which define “How can we tell when this current iteration is done?” and at least a rough timeframe to help limit feature creep and other such diversions.
Such ‘iterations’ can be broken down (or combined together) to whatever scales (plural) make sense for the company. E.g. long term ‘vision’-type scales all the way up to several years long, mid-long term ‘business’-type scales of fiscal years and quarters, mid-term ‘project’-type scales of months, short-mid term ‘release’ scales of weeks to months, all the way down to ‘integration’ scales of a single week at a time, ‘feature-development’ scales of days to weeks, ‘working’ scales of a single day at a time, and even ‘unit-development’ scales of a few hours to maybe a day.
It can all be adapted to any business model or culture, and ‘good enough’ is better than ‘perfect’, but the key thing is that development is structured such that things can be ordered (according to priority) and defined (at least to the extent that people can easily know when some specific version of a feature/task is objectively ‘done’ or not).
This way, instead of saying something like:
… Bunpro isn’t ‘finished’. To be totally honest with you, it never will be … because we will always have something more we want to add, …
one might instead be able to say,
"Bunpro as a whole is an ongoing project, and will never be 100% perfectly ‘finished’. However, our plans specifically for BunPro release X.Y.Z (currently on target for such and such season/date/timeframe [link to BunPro feature roadmap]) include:
- Completing a minimum of X example sentences for all existing N1 grammar points.
- Completing all other basic features for N1, so that we have a complete end-to-end Japanese grammar SRS product covering at least JLPT N5 to N1 (even if that means we’ll have to spend a little bit of extra time in the future upgrading N1 to the current level of quality/features that we have for N5/N4).
What I’m recommending above isn’t just for the benefit of the customers (though, to be clear, it is to a significant extent for the benefit of the customers, as this will ultimately hone BunPro closer and closer to what your customers (as a whole) actually want, and value for customers is usually what makes value for the business), but it would also very much benefit the product development team, providing clearer goals, clearer signals of actual concrete progress, a regular ‘sense of completion’ as each new ‘iteration’ is successfully completed, etc. etc. Not to mention the overall benefits it would have to the company and the product as well!
Anyway, just me blurting out my thoughts on the potential perils of software development and ideas of how to bypass them towards ever more successful developments in the future! Please take it all with a grain of salt, as I obviously know very little of how the BunPro team actually operate.
I will say, however, on the positive side of things, that I’ve been very very impressed in the past by the BunPro team’s very professional attitude towards listening to feedback and doing their best to incorporate such feedback as they can. I’ve been a lifetime subscriber for a couple of years now and the team has made incredible progress since I first joined.
Anyhow, please don’t take this feedback as harsh criticism or as lecturing (if it comes across that way, I apologize in advance! I don’t have the time to go over it and edit out any such tone that may have unintentionally slipped in. 
). It is meant only as food for thought, and as one person’s general opinion on software development overall; with the goal of sharing ideas and experiences, from a fellow-developer’s point of view, and with the intention of benefiting BunPro’s customers, staff, and overall business.
7 Likes
I really love these ideas! Perhaps there could be a shift in how things are done the more advanced you get? Since I do agree that once you hit N2 (even a bit in N3), the system now is not ideal.
4 Likes
I am not sure the staff has read this book, but I think that all of you have a professional imperative to.
2 Likes
To add to that the implicit part of this conversation is that it does not make financial sense for Bunpro to work on the N1 stuff. They will naturally always make more money making N5s happy. It’s a cold hard business truth. Which makes it a bitter taste for you I imagine. You did in fact pay for that specific part. However, Most don’t, most settle for much less. I like to believe that Bunpro wants to make the best possible product. This doesn’t change reality.
So how can the staff make the site more useful for self studying for those at the higher end? I personally think they are and have been moving in the right direction. I disagree that the testing scheme is not good at either level, just that the context hints absolutely need to be translated into Japanese. And the default options should encourage as little reliance on English as possible.
However again, is this a product that work, or a product that sells. That depends.
7 Likes
To me the blurbs on that website make me absolutely not want to buy or read that book. A fearless polyglot that just absorbs languages in literally no time! A French scrabble champion that speaks no French! A champion public speaker!
All my bs detectors need to go take a nap.
As to your other point: the good people of Bunpro need to eventually get N1 in order to attract new beginners as well. For instance: Wanikani sells being able to learn all joyo kanji. It doesn’t matter that most of their customers don’t make it past the first few hundred. The product being sold is the whole package and the possibility of learning it all.
The same goes for Bunpro.
(In fact I get the impression that the guys on the Bunpro team don’t even need to descend to that level of commercial cynicism. Because they seem actually well intended, interested and impassioned. So I am sure N2 and N1 will be fine in time. Regardless of commercial impetus.)
5 Likes
Never really been much of a fan of the self improvement style book genre. They generally all tend to boil down to the message of -have self discipline-, of which the time spent reading could be better spent having self discipline in a field you actually want to improve .
In saying that though, I am actually a big fan of the self improvement genre when it comes to Japanese audiobooks 
. They’re usually an easy listen and packed full of super useful daily vocab and idioms etc.
A modifiable Japanese to English hint system is something I would love to work on in the near future, as I 1000% agree that the Bunpro experience with little to no English involved in the review process would be epic 
. In a way, synonym hell cannot be avoided. Some sentences simply have many ways they can be expressed, with each and every answer being completely natural. However, a revised/improved hint system that leads users toward the correct answer, rather than simply away from the wrong answer would reduce the mental strain of figuring out which answer a question wants by a huge margin.
4 Likes
I understand the reservation, but that’s a mistake on the broader point of the actual book.
In all three cases → The Polyglot guy, focus on actually being able to speak to people in the language, how to get past reservation of outputting, openly admits to struggling to Asian languages especially.
French Scrabble guy → literally does not speak French and Its more a meditation of vocabulary and fact acquisition, a point which the author himself questions the usefulness in different learning outcomes.
Third → public speaking champion, its literally just that, but also how to receive and filter feedback for it to be useful for ones learning. (This section in particular is what I felt was relevant to this overall conversation)
In general I’m not pushing a random self help book.
Again, I get that. This is not that, cheesy advertisements aside this book is way more focused on what strategies people actually use for self directed learning, and what systems are more or less backed up by clinical research. I understand the reservation to hear a book go on and on about just try harder, focus, and you will improve, but really this is not that.
I don’t even agree with every conclusion in the book, in particular while I agree with the overall methods to reach intermediate level in a language, the author lacks the experience to connect that to the progression into advanced language learning, however the content is still in the book. And I most certainly would not expect the staff to agree either, but articulating the exactly where the philosophy of this site differs will help clear up the fissure I clearly see.
The point is, you have a community of people knowingly or not attempting to undertake this kind of ultralearning process. And I if you want to be a tool that actually aligns with that goal, it is worth checking out.
That’s my final thought on the matter, take or leave it.
3 Likes