POLL - Grammar explanation complexity

I answered ‘longer’, but I’d like to add the caveat that summaries are very useful for ‘best of both worlds’. Any ‘longer’ part could be summarized at the top of the page (even if just to say something like, “Exceptions are covered below.”)

I guess a main theme I want to get across is that, IMO, more info is always better, but it’s also the organization of that info that makes it more-usable or less-usable. Summaries are a good example of this. Having an extra ‘reference section’ to expand on things is another good example. You can make it easy for casual or cursory reading, but also provide additional information ‘off to the side’ so to speak.

I take a lot of inspiration for this approach from the concept of a Wiki. Of course everyone is familiar with Wikipedia, but not all wikis need to be ‘encyclopedic’. Indeed the first wikis ever were more for just collecting and sharing ‘good ideas’.

One of the most significant features of wikis are the usage of hyperlinks to refer to concepts/ideas by name, without having to explain the concept/idea every time; if someone wanted to know what you meant by some technical term, they would just click on it to quickly read that page about that specific term, then jump back to the original discussion where it was being used, and they’d be up-to-speed in no time.

You get to have concise explanations backed up by extensive documentation/reference (and discussion, in the original wikis, but that doesn’t apply so much in the BunPro grammar term situation*) at the same time. Like I keep saying, ‘best of both worlds’. :slight_smile:

[* Although maybe it does apply, since I also agree with several previous suggestions to have some way for users/community to crowd-source things like examples and references and whatnot, and in particular to provide feedback/ratings/whatever to help good suggestions bubble to the top of the heap.]

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Umm, might want to brainstorm some alternative names or something. I understand it’s meant as BunGrow, but IMO it is too easily seen as BungRow. Quite a different connotation! :sweat_smile:

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If you wanted to be cheeky you could reuse the furigana display for those (english word with japanese furigana or vice versa). After all even natives like to play with that format!

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It’s just my personal opinion but reading practice in the way Bunpro does it at the moment is grammar first. Essentially they used a ranked system which specifically targets grammar points taught in the section, and do not use any grammar that they have not taught.

That means that anything that is written that a user doesn’t understand most like is a vocabulary point which takes out the guess work of fully comprehending a sentence.

Adding reading practice enforces how grammar points act in the context of an entire passage, which is what I perceive as the entire point of Bunpro, which is reading Japanese comprehension.

What do you mean by “section”? I thought that reading practice was a completely separate module from the rest of the grammar? Or are you talking about N5/N4/N3…?

Only one I voted for was for more grammar comparisons.

The other issues I have are

-requested answers not matching what’s on the grammar page
Like, as an example, it may say “conditional” in the fill-in-the-blank box, but on the grammar point, “conditional” is nowhere to be found.

-not enough explanation for how verbs should be conjugated in certain grammar points
Not sure how best to describe this. Like sometimes I’m not sure if it needs a “ri” or a “te” at the end and I only find that out through reading example sentences or getting the sentences wrong enough times. And as someone else brought up, negative form and also past tense form being brought up along with “Casual/Polite” would be nice as well.

Ah, I meant that when you go to their reading practice section on Bunpro, they have like

[N3] Lesson 2 ,

and they specifically have written reading passages that utilize the grammar from N3 Section 2 (Bunpro Path). This helps me with remembering those specific grammar points and helps me understand them in a longer passage (instead of a single sentence).

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Oh I never made the connection, that’s neat.

I get easily confused with grammar terms like “conditional, volitional, etc” so if there is ever a way to explain it without using those, I would appreciate if the explanation does not completely rely on using these terms. It’s just a general learning issue I run into often, not specific to Bunpro.

Sorry to pick on your comment, but what you’re asking is akin to not using the common lingo in any area of expertise (not using medical terms in the medical field, musical terms in music, legal terms in law, scientific terms in science, etc). Imagine trying to describe things every single time.

The grammar terms you refer to are so ubiquitous in language learning that it’s going to be impossible to avoid them, so might as well learn them. They’re not hard. Conditional = If/When (A) occurs, (B) happens. Volitional = Let’s…, Potential = Can do…/Cannot do…, etc.

Probably not the best site, but it was the first that popped up when doing a search on Japanese verb forms:

https://www.coscom.co.jp/japaneseverb/japaneseverb01-jpr.html

HTH!

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The problem is that potential, volitional, passive, and causative forms are placed in the N4 category, so they’re just not taught to beginners for a really long time.

I think that’s a mistake, but now all Japanese courses have to follow that order or they’ll get blasted for putting “N4” material too early.

Anyway, I think it’s something Bunpro devs can address with more consistent editing and better use of tooltips, which I think they’ve gotten the message on by now.

That CosCom link is really good, I wish I saw that a long time ago. There’s also a link to conjugation tables for anyone who missed it.

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Those are all very strict fields that you named so yes, they require it, except music which is more similar to language. It’s very easy and common in music to just say “loud” instead of “forte”, and many musicians don’t bother with the terms if they don’t need to. I’m just saying if there’s an explanation that doesn’t require using the terms and can be conveyed more personally, like the definitions you gave me, I would prefer that. Why bother worrying about the word “volitional” if I already know “Let’s…”? I don’t mind calling something “the ‘Let’s’ form”. I teach English learners and I don’t need to use language terms other than “noun” and “verb” to get the point across. Not even adjective or adverb, because they understand more easily if I just say “it describes”.

I saw ‘POLL’ in capitals and thought I was on a completely different forum for a moment :sweat_smile:

This will only make sense if you also use WaniKani

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Musicians who have formal training and degrees in Music definitely use the musical lingo everyday (Legato, Staccato, Sul Tasto, Rubato, Polyrhythmic, Atonal, Reharmonization, Tritone, Syncopation, Crescendo, etc). Even the musicians who don’t have a formal musical background know a lot of these terms (at least the ones I’ve performed with).

There are a TON of musical terms that musicians use frequently to communicate with one another. Can you express them in other ways? Sure. However, it’s simpler to use the terms we already have to describe these things. Same as in any field of expertise, such as in this case: Linguistics.

Anyway, I just don’t see a reason not to learn these terms given how frequently used and seen they are. You even said so yourself. All it takes is a Google search, like you would with anything you don’t know, to learn what they mean. That said, the BunPro team did asked us for our opinion on how to approach grammar explanations, so you are entitled to yours of course :+1:.

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@Jose7822, I basically agree with you, but I remember how stuck and frustrated I was in the beginning specifically because of conjugations. So maybe there’s a way to try to make everyone happy.

It feels like there could be a site wide toggle with three options:

  • technical (volitional form) - default
  • simplified (“let’s” form)
  • Japanese (意志形)

It may be better to just change the whole format of the articles:

  • the basic summary
  • then the technical explanation (close to what we have now)
  • then a version of the article written in Japanese only

Especially since Bunpro is rolling out hints in Japanese as a feature.

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Neutral comment: One of the reasons these terms are used is because they are standard so they broadly are the same across all resources thus making it easier to understand what a resource is talking about. Some of them condense a lot of information into one word (for example, I am not sure how you would simplify “causitive” without making it more confusing, especially in relation to the difference between the causitive in English and Japanese). Jargon generally exists for a reason. Maybe there are some egregious examples on Bunpro but I have yet to notice any.

Edit: Just to give a concrete example with the above discussed “Let’s” form. The Japanese volitional can be translated into English as “I will”, “Let’s”, and “Shall” - in some contexts you may even translate it to something that isn’t obviously volitional in English as we use a different grammatical form in English to express the same idea. I can expand on this example if it isn’t clear to anyone.

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I want to say that I really enjoy the way the Japanese terms are not “in the way” now, makes the grammatical explanations flow much better for me at least. It’s also makes the rest of the Japanese text in the explanations stand out more, and that’s the important part. Makes it easier to quickly scan the text if you’re looking for a particular detail or construction.

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I’ve been on vacation and been away from Bunpro for a few weeks. I see this change got implemented: English “technical” terms replace the Japanese, and clicking shows the Japanese with furigana.

Is there a way to configure settings such that the Japanese is shown in-line? Or replaces the English? That would be my preference (for a variety of reasons, to each their own).

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I wanted to give ideas I’ve been thinking about concerning two other possible sections. These would probably take a while to write up, but I thought I’d say something so that it can be food for thought.

First, it would be nice to have a section titled, ‘Easily Confused With’, where it would list one or two grammar points that are similar, but have a different meaning or nuance. For instance, this grammar point is tokoro de. Having tokoro ga in that section would be perfect. I had them floating around in my head, but I had to open a new tab and do a search to remind myself of both definitions. Also, having these easily confused grammar points tagged would allow an awesome option in Cram!

Second would be ‘Related Grammar’. For instance, ga mirareru is its own grammar point, but it uses the potential form. There have been so many times that a writeup will assume that I’m already familiar with a former grammar point, when in fact, the thing that it’s building on has been a bit of a leech for me. It does help to have these new grammar points, because they reinforce the prior grammar I’m having trouble with, but it would be nice to review the earlier points in the new grammar point. I did notice that in the ga mirareru grammar point in particular, the phrase ‘Potential form’ actually had a hotlink, which did help! However, the formatting of this was the same as regular text, so it was hard to see. I can understand trying to not make the writeup look like every single word is linking elsewhere (since I know you guys are integrating vocab), but maybe the solution is in letting these just have a lighter shade of blue or something (saying this from someone using the blue color scheme).

Something I love about Bunpro is how much they ask for feedback and use it. Thank you!

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This is a really small change, but something I personally would love to see is the “review” button changing colour/fading/getting darker when you have 0 reviews left to do for the moment. It’s such a small thing, but on WaniKani I noticed it feels so good to have that all-grey “No Reviews!” screen, it’s genuinely motivating to me to finish all my reviews.
Edit: I noticed that it turns grey on the website, but not the mobile app, fyi.

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