Recent Change to Hint System (How to implement Hints vs. Context)

[Sidgr]

I was doing my reviews today and noticed that the part of the hint that is placed in brackets e.g. [polite-passive] didn’t show up right away, and also was the last hint to be revealed after the focus grammar and even after the full sentence.

This completely defeated the point of Bunpro for me. I can understand it not being revealed right away. But if I have to reveal the entire sentence to disambiguate what the question really is asking me, I have been denied the chance to fully understanding the sentence with no English.

I am not sure why this change was made, and if it became a configurable option I would be happy, as if some feel this way works for them that is good. But as a long time user I was very frustrated with this change.

Examples of when this type of hint is very useful. Every situation involving any word that roughly relates to [seems/appears/etc.] as all of these types of words denote a certain quality of confidence and nature of the evidence Being evaluated that is necessarily embedded in context and one cannot parse from the English focus grammar hint alone. This means that I either have to brute force the sentence which is a bad idea or I to guess each possible option, or I have to reveal the entire sentence before I even attempt to understand the the Japanese in Japanese.

Regards,

Sid

[Jake]

Hey Sidgr, we did indeed make some changes. We are currently going through all of the sentences to make sure that the necessary hints [casual], [polite - passive], [humble] etc were all correctly moved. They will no longer be shown in the orange bracketed nuance part of the sentence and will instead be moved to show as placeholder text in the _______ within the sentence itself.

We originally put the tense hints in the nuance area because it looked better than when it was tagged onto the end of the sentence, but since the tense of the answer isn’t really “nuance” material we decided to move it.

[Sidgr]

This feels like a reasonable place to put it. Personally it always felt like part of the question being asked in the same way that the target verb/counter/etc. was always just inherent to the question.

If this is the change that you are attempting to put into place, I think that I can live with this change; however, it now seems that there is an interim phase where the sentences I am studying may or may not have that requisite information in them. I am not sure if I should wait to study until this revision has taken place or not, as it is a particularly frustrating experience at the moment.

[Sidgr]

Here is an example, there are a few ways to interpret this sentence and what the grammar should be. Without a tip for masculine/feminine/other considerations it is impossible to know on the face of it what I should be putting. And again I can just answer every available option I can think of, but that defeats the point of having A specific kind of question for a specific grammar point.

[Anthropos888]

For me, Bunpro’s decision to hide the orange hint from the beginning changes the whole review process significantly in a positive way. My normal habit was to just look at the orange hint first and then type in the answer without reading or thinking much, because I could tell the answer in many cases just from the orange hint.

Now I am forced to read the sentence thoroughly and think about the grammar before I type in the answer.

That’s way better than before: although I had “review English” set to “hide” and focus mode “on”, the orange hint was always there right from the beginning and couldn’t be toggled.

But I agree that it might be better to have the following order:

1. nothing
2. hint
3. hint + orange hint
4. full translation + both hints

[Sidgr]

For me that is partially true but I always focused sentence understanding first. With some of the sentences that I have encountered with the new system of places the context in the blank space, I find that to be a really good system.

In general I’m most frustrated with this hint order and your order is close to what I think would have been ideal, but it this new style take it over maybe this would be obsolete.

1. Nothing
2. Focus Grammar
3. Context
4. Full sentence

But in writing this I think that it reveals the main problem.

The Context cannot be a hint, it has to be part of the question explicitly. I know there is another thread dedicated to this, concerning wa/ga and I think that these two problems are interlinked. Bunpro needs to find a better way to deliver context without ruining what makes it so good.

I commend the team for all of there efforts so far, this is just some of my current thoughts.

Edit: explicitly not implicitly

[seanblue]

My normal habit was to just look at the orange hint first and then type in the answer without reading or thinking much, because I could tell the answer in many cases just from the orange hint.

I did the same, which was terrible for my learning. However, I always viewed the English and found the orange hint a much bigger give-away than the English itself.

[GregX999]

I just noticed this change this evening. I think I like it in general. Especially when the hint shows up above the blank line. But some questions really need a hint of some kind. Like this one:

There’s no way to know you need the くれて part just by reading the English. I hope you’re planning to re-add appropriate hints to reviews like this one. And/or adjusting the English (ie: Thank you for saying those things for me.)

[GregX999]

Another example…

I was unsure if I had to use てくれる here (返してくれなさい).
I think after learning/reviewing so much grammar, it’s really easy to over complicate things / think they need to be more complex than they really do.

(But… just to be clear… overall, I like this new format. For 90% of the review questions. Makes me have to think more, as has been said by others in the thread.)

[Flame]

I was frustrated with this at first, but reading through the topic I see how it changes reviews for the better. Didn’t realize how much I relied on those hints without even trying to read a sentence. I, however, agree that some of the sentences are hit or miss as they are now.

[Houndstooth]

Now I am forced to read the sentence thoroughly and think about the grammar before I type in the answer.

I always viewed the English and found the orange hint a much bigger give-away than the English itself.

These guys took the words out of my mouth. I recently had the revelation that probably a good majority of the reason I struggle with nuances of similar grammar points is because instead of actually reading the sentence and trying to imagine what fits best, I was just reading the orange hints and learning the difference between wordings that correlated to a certain answer (almost like vocab) instead of learning how the grammar worked.

I was unsure if I had to use てくれる here (返してくれなさい).

In this case, attaching くれる wouldn’t make any sense, I don’t think, since it has 妹に and くれる (I believe) can only be used to describe actions being directed towards you. However, your previous example is valid, and in those cases I tend to use the undo function (though I’m very careful not to overdo it, and in some cases I let the SRS drop purely on principle).
If anyone with a deeper understanding wants to correct me, please do!

[jemmy_chaos]

Unfortunately they don’t all seem to have been correctly moved yet because I got loads wrong this morning because it didn’t tell me if it wanted casual or formal!

I can understand why you’ve done this but as a beginner I would really much rather have this on all the time so please can you make it a option, as it is to show the english or not.

[Kai]

In this case, attaching くれる wouldn’t make any sense, I don’t think, since it has 妹 に and くれる (I believe) can only be used to describe actions being directed towards you. However, your previous example is valid,

くれる and あげる are used to clarify a specific direction between “inside” and “outside” groups:

くれる = to give 内へ
あげる = to give 外へ

The bounds of your 内 (うち) and 外 (そと) are flexible depending on context (surprise!). If you’re speaking with a coworker for example, the boss of your company is decidedly above you both— and therefore definitely a part of your 外.

If you’re speaking to someone from another business, your boss is a part of →your← company, so in front of others, even your boss is a part of your 内 and should be referenced (by you) with humble, self-effacing words. Your boss, is of course, regarded as 外 by your business partner, who is almost assuredly addressing them (and you!) highly, using honorifics (keigo).

So, using くれる to reference a gift/favor given to one’s family member (外から内へ) is

 

Regarding the ～てくれてありがとう (ございます) structure, I can’t speak to exactly how common it is (versus simply ～てありがとう by itself) because it’s not something I’ve actively paid attention to, but it’s a seamless way to explicitly acknowledge that the person you’re speaking to has done the action for your 内’s benefit.

Maybe someone else here can speak with authority on the ratio of including/excluding くれて here, but I’ve personally just defaulted to throwing くれて (or its humble version, くださって) into almost all of my thank-you’s, figuring it’s safer to be over-appreciative than under-appreciative

(tagging @GregX999)

[Jake]

Sorry about that! We are working on getting all the nuance information separated from the tense information. If you notice any that aren’t working don’t hesitate to point them out via the feedback form.

In your user settings you can change the “Review English” setting to be “Hide”, “Hint”, “Show” or “More”.

@Flame @Houndstooth @seanblue @Anthropos888 @Sidgr Thank you for the feedback. Our aim is to cut down on the way the nuance gives the answer away which has definitely been an issue in the past. If you have any further thoughts, or feedback, especially criticisms, after using it more, please don’t hesitate to let us know!

[jamie]

“Can you say it in another way” is kind of annoying without further hint what grammar point should be used. I think it’s better to give more hints.

[monkeytunes]

I think the translation CSS isn’t loading properly on mobile. Everything looks great for me now in Chrome on my laptop, I can cycle through everything, looks peachy. But on Mobile (I use Chrome on Android, not the app), the text is the same color as the background, except for the orange hints. I can highlight some text and paste-it elsewhere, so I know it’s showing up, but it’s effectively invisible (bold “blue” words included). I use the [Modern] theme, so I don’t know if it’s different on other themes.

[seanblue]

Better not enough than too much.

[Kai]

Better not enough than too much.

Agreeing with this, even though the occasional vagaries can be a nuisance.

I’d prefer to have 文プロ coax me into producing all the grammar on my own, rather than just training me to recall it all upon seeing certain English “trigger words” for each point.

[Sidgr]

This considered instead of using nothing or English keywords, we could just included some basic Japanese Equivalents for example instead of saying masculine or feminine it could say：
男らしい/女らしい this is just one example and I not sure the most effective way to explain this, but again I find that the context needs to part of the question as it will always being included in natural language use. Excluding it here seems like a very bad step in Bunpro’s development.

[seanblue]

It’s not as easy as you make it out to be. The problem is that much of the time, the so-called context was just a magic English keyword/phrase that gave away the answer. For example, for ということ the context is “phrase to noun”. This so-called context is meaningless to me for actually understanding the grammar, but believe me, I sure did memorize that “phrase to noun” meant answer with ということ.