Recognition in Bunpro

Bunpro
#1

Actually, we are given an English sentence and we are asked to fill in the Japanese sentence and thus, we are working on production.
I’ve been troubled by this for quite a long time since I’m learning Japanese not to speak it but to understand content.
Although, I couldn’t find a way to make it work the other way.
The readings we got recently are great but it’s not the same as SRS’ing grammar points.

Being able to make Bunpro working as it is today is quite an achievement considering the difficulties of the grammar teaching and I couldn’t find a way to make it work from Japanese to English.

I just had a simple idea which may work ?

What about a multiple choice questions ?

What if we were given a sentence in Japanese and we had to pick the right translation between 4, 5, 6, or even 10 sentences ?

At first glance it sounds great to me. What do you guys think ?

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#2

You are correct, Bunpro is a site that is primarily focused on being able to reproduce and use the grammar that it teaches.

I was in exactly the same position as you, and I am sure if you search the forum history, you might even find some of my posts saying exactly the same thing :rofl:

However, don’t let that hurt your motivation. Recognition is much… much easier than production, and forcing you to actually remember the structure and input it, will result in much better memory retention for you in the long term.

The problem with a multiple choice question is that you are given a few different possibilities of what something can be, based on a question that you have already been presented with. This doesn’t actually help so much with recognition. Here’s why -

When you read a book, play a game, listen to the radio, or absorb any kind of native material, nobody is presenting you with any questions, and nobody is giving you a list of possibilities for what a certain word could mean. You have to decide what that word means compared to the thousands of other words that you have learned.

As a multiple choice question, you are not comparing it to the thousands of other words you know, you are comparing it to the other 5 or 10 that could have the meaning that you are being presented with. This will give you the feeling of knowing something, even if you don’t/can’t recognize it outside of the multiple choice scenario.

I still completely understand what you mean, but multiple choice is not the way to solve this. However, I can assure you that we are currently in the process of producing a hugeeee amount of material that will help with the problems you are describing. :partying_face: I can’t say what that material is just yet, but you will find out soon! :wink:

Until then, please trust the input system. :bowing_man: It works!

7 Likes
#3

Thanks for the reply.

The readings are already really nice, so I can’t wait for what’s next !

2 Likes
#4

i also use bunpro purely for recognition and not production, but i think typing in the answer is more effective then simply recognizing it (i use wanikani for the same reason). just give yourself unlimited “attempts” when inputting the answer.

4 Likes
#5

I’m kind of in the same boat as you, but I’m not practicing output because I’m waiting to learn to speak until after I reach fluent comprehension. That being said, if you’re only learning Japanese to understand content, then I recommend just sticking to outputting because like Asher said it’s much more effective in helping you learn and recognize the grammar. But, if you really want to you can do what I do:

Firstly you need to go to Settings>General>Reviews and in reviews there’s an option for “Review English” change this to “Hide”. Doing this makes it so when you do your reviews there’s no hints that tell you what grammar particle the review is in relation to. You’ll also want to turn “Auto Highlight Errors” off.

Secondly, for each review you want to purposely get it wrong. I typically just type in “a” and then enter. After doing this, you’ll press “a” again and it’ll fill in the spot with the grammar particle for that review. Now you can read/listen to the whole sentence with the grammar you’re reviewing filled in for you. Once you have an idea of what it means, show the English translation and see if you were right. If you understood what the grammar particle meant in the sentence (before looking at the English), simply copy the grammar, click backspace, and then paste it into the input and then repeat the process.

The most important thing about this is that you are being strict with yourself. If you understand what the grammar generally means, but didn’t understand how it was being used in the sentence then don’t pass it.

One more thing - I typically don’t mark a grammar particle right if I don’t understand the whole sentence, even if it’s due to a different grammar particle being the reason why I didn’t understand it.

Anyways, I hope that helps.

3 Likes
#6

i came to the same conclusion like you a while ago and use a workaround since then:
disable all translation and all hints. ghosts as well.
instantly fail the sentence to get it in its pure completeness - then try to understand the sentence as a whole with focus on the highlighted part. use audio too!
when i fail to understand a sentence i reset the grammar point and read alot of examples until the gist really sinks in.

that way you have bunpro in comprehension/immersion mode.
its alot more frustration free and faster without all the dreaded “can you say it any other way”. less brute force memorization - more japanese.

2 Likes
#7

Regarding a recognition mode, I wouldn’t want to use it as the main means, but I’d really love to see an additional recognition review mode based only the the grammar point (not the example sentences, since memorizing them could hurt the production review).
Actually I’m considering writing a small app using the BunPro API for just this.

1 Like
#8

Just took a closer look at the current API, it doesn’t seem to provide a way to retrieve all grammar points learned by the user.
So it probably doesn’t make much sense to do this that way.

#9

I wonder if the Bunpro team could put this in as an option? I’d like to continue using bunpro in it’s current format but it’d be cool to be able to press and button and do reviews in this way also.

1 Like