I have a couple of questions about furigana on Bunpro:
Easy one first, since I sometimes do my vocab reviews with the hint set to Nuance to try to read some dictionary definition style japanese, I used the furigana on those to help with learning the typically used words there. But reaching the N4 vocab deck, I noticed there is no longer furigana present. Is that only in the N5 vocab deck nuance?
Second and more generally, I feel that the way that the furigana toggling behaves doesn’t seem to make sense to me. For some context, the way I have approached learning kanji is through the Ringotan app, which I only use for learning to write the kanji, and also to add some familiarity with the 4 or so most common (usually) words, but the vocab there I don’t directly study, it’s just to get a feel for the general meaning and readings (though I don’t explicitly memorize any readings).
Now on Bunpro, as I study more grammar and vocab, I am always trying to read many of the sentences aloud as I study, and so the furigana being present helps, but I try to turn off the furigana for any vocab as soon as I feel that I recognize it enough to give me chances to properly recall the reading.
What confuses me is that when toggling off the reading for a word, say 学生, that I now feel confident in recognizing as I read, my understanding is that all words with either 学 or 生 in them now have furigana toggled off. So if I now come across 誕生日 or 学ぶ they won’t show furigana, so I turn it back on, but now the furigana for 学生 has also been turned back on. I may not have the exact understanding of the system as it works, but this is the sort of situation I seem to come across often, which is words I do know with furigana showing again, and words I don’t know at all with furigana not showing.
Now I will acknowledge that perhaps the (maybe?) more common approach when learning kanji is that all of the readings are memorized at the time of learning the kanji, but unless you learn every vocab word using the kanji, it seems it wouldn’t still then be easy to know when coming across an unfamiliar word in kanji that you would know which readings to use (although over time I have improved this sense on my own). It feels to me that just learning kanji readings in vocab context makes the most sense.
Now there may be changes in the pipeline for this, but to me, having the furigana reading toggle be tied to just the word makes sense, and I seem to remember seeing that there is to be an expansion of Bunpro identifying full vocab words when clicking, and so maybe this kind of change would come along with that. Alternatively, at least maybe some page listing which kanji I do or do not have furigana toggled on and off for so I have a sense of what the system is actaully doing when I toggle it on or off would be nice.
Edit: Random extra thought I had later, maybe it would also be interesting to be able to set furigana showing by SRS level, since I also tend to use seeing the furigana as an unconscious indicator of if I know that word or not.
Thank you for reading my essay