Hey, so I am trying bunpro and I really like it so far.
To me grammar is kinda boring and I was really excited to find bunpro which seems to simplify the process. I feel like bunpro is almost perfect but its just missing something to make it 100% user friendly.
First of all, some grammar points combine many different things into one grammar point and then some other ones only have 1 exact point.
Some super easy grammar points like ‘mashou’ are towards the end of N5? its the easiest grammar point as it requires you to memorize a single thing with no rules! anyway its not a big deal since I plan to do all of it anyway I suppose. The difficulty curve is just weird to me lol, some N5 grammar points seem like a huge pain without lots of immersion.
The biggest deal for me is the whole interface is a giant mess (in my eyes), I dont know what each grammar point belongs to, it would be so much simpler to have sections or tags like this:
Verb → Conjurgation → Te form
Adj → Conjurgation → past form
Then I could simply think “oh I need to work on my verb conjurgation today”, I can simply click the subcategories and find my grammar points there.
Another thing that would be cool is a small tag on each grammar point saying if this is useful for conversational speaking to random people on the street? or is it useful for formal documents in the government. Surely it makes sense to skip the useless grammar or leave it until last? (By useless I mean, useless for people who arent planning on working in Japanese companies).
Another feature I randomly thought of is the ability to make your own grammar rules cheatsheet.
On each grammar point there is a box that gives the rules. I ALWAYS seem to forget some weird combination and end up having to find that grammar point again the hard way, it would be so simple to be able to pin the stuff you want on your homescreen. Please see this famous chart from wikipedia: http://cghq.net/japanese/verbs/AMB_Japanese_Verbs.pdf
It makes the whole overview of Japanese easy to visualize and you can quickly remind yourself exactly what is where. If only bunpro was like that, simple and easy to reference.
Lastly, I just have to mention that in my perfect vision of learning Japanese, there should be a central database with every single grammar point. I dont know past N5 but from my research and reading this forum it seems that bunpro is missing a lot of grammar, especially the big thread “missing grammar list”. People on reddit are recommending a mixture of jlptsensei website, with bunpro as well as dictionary of japanese grammar on top. This seems very inneficient to me as a newbie. Bunpro seems to be missing a lot of really needed info for example:
imperative form, dou question, ze/zo endings, anime/manga speak, some very very common slang and shortening of words. People really want to watch anime asap and they would be missing a huge chunk of info. I just dont see why bunpro has to restrict to N5,N4,N3,N2,N1. Why not have N5B or something like N5 Bonus which has extra stuff on top of N5, getting people ready for manga and anime.
I just dont understand why bunpro seems to be branching out into vocabulary when their main selling point is grammar? and thats not fully complete yet? just seems weird to me since most people use other tools for vocab and I always hear bunpro praised on reddit for its grammar. Just seems like its trying to be too many things at once, anyway just my opinion though.
I really enjoyed reading the quick writeups from bunpro, hopefuly that would be done for every grammar point, I dont see why grammar has to be hard, when you can do quick summaries and then let immersion really nail it down later on. I don’t want to watch 1000 hours of misa lol, even though she is a lovely person, I just prefer to read the shortest summary possible and then work it out myself.
Thanks for your hard work on bunpro, I hope it continues improving.
