Related Grammar Synonyms need to be updated

[rustx]

This gets worse the further you get into Bunpro.

Early on in N5/N4 this is handled relatively well, most points have a few related grammar points and its generally always aware during review time when you’ve used one that was close but not quite right. But the further you progress into Bunpro the worse this gets and soon you find that the majority of grammar points are taught with apparently 0 related synonyms.

It gets frustrating later on as half of the time the review grammar points know of the synonym EVEN if its not listed as related, with the other half of the time the grammar point flat out marking synonyms as being wrong even if the meaning is almost identical.

This problem is especially bad with N3 onwards, a lot of the time if you have a N3 point but have progressed into N2, that N3 point is completely unaware of the new N2 synonyms you have learned and will flat out mark it wrong even when the correct word type (EG noun / verb) is used correctly but its just not the exact grammar point that is wanted.

This all culminates at N1 level where it is by far the worst and many grammar points are unaware of even other N1 points. I’ve ran into this example which forced me into making this thread.

を余儀なくさせる (JLPT N1) | Bunpro

を余儀なくされる (JLPT N1) | Bunpro

These two grammar points are completely identical in meaning, the difference is the target they are used with. One of them straight mentions the other however these are still NOT listed as related, and reviews CAN completely flat out mark it wrong if you use one another instead of hinting.

[veritas_nz]

Will chime in on this quickly:

RE related grammar on the Grammar Point pages:
You’ll be happy to know that the Related Grammar system is gonna get a clean out.
One of our Content Team members is gonna go through each Grammar Point manually and update the related items.

RE related grammar during the Quiz:
Synonym-hell can (at the very least) be fixed by us adding more of the detailed yellow hints that guide you toward the right answer.
We’ve been much better at responding to and actioning on feedback recently, so suggestions are way more likely to get added.

[rustx]

Thanks for the quick response!

Those two things would greatly help.

In addition to those or maybe its already planned, at the time of reviews I feel the related/synonym hell could be helped a lot if it wasn’t so strict when the meaning is similar. Theres some examples where you’ll even be provided a hint telling you how to fix it but then at the same time it will hard mark your answer wrong in red.

[casual]

A pass of reviewing synonyms and adding new yellow hints would definitely be welcome.

I also think it might be interesting to communicate 2 different “fail” states to the user: fail because attempted answer is just not in the system, and fail because it IS in the system as a wrong answer (with a note: ungrammatical, or different meaning).

Currently even if I feel like my answer makes a correct sentence, if it’s marked as wrong, it is much easier to just backspace it and try a different option, than to try and submit a question/feedback about it. So in the end I cannot distinguish why it was wrong: is it a valid synonym that’s not in the system, or is the meaning different from the one requested. To be fair, sometimes I might be trying words and constructions that are not even a grammar item on Bunpro.

[Alerean]

This seems like it’ll go a long way towards improving it. I’ve had similar situations where I’ve gone through some different possible answers only to finally have a message guiding me towards an abbreviated version or something totally different to what I was attempting (despite not asking for that in the question or hint etc ).

[nminer]

Looking forward to this!

Not sure if this is already on the Content team’s radar, but one thing I do want to mention as an additional pain point is that currently a lot of the nuance hints presented when you get a question wrong aren’t particularly helpful since the nuances themselves weren’t taught in the grammar point so the first time you’re exposed to a grammar point’s nuance is when getting it wrong and being presented with a hint. I don’t have a screenshot of a specific grammar point, but for example I’ve noticed hints like “stronger nuance” or “weaker nuance” used a lot, but then those nuances are never mentioned in the grammar point’s explanation in relation to other synonyms.

[veritas_nz]

A pass of reviewing synonyms and adding new yellow hints would definitely be welcome.

I also think it might be interesting to communicate 2 different “fail” states to the user: fail because attempted answer is just not in the system, and fail because it IS in the system as a wrong answer (with a note: ungrammatical, or different meaning).

Currently even if I feel like my answer makes a correct sentence, if it’s marked as wrong, it is much easier to just backspace it and try a different option, than to try and submit a question/feedback about it. So in the end I cannot distinguish why it was wrong: is it a valid synonym that’s not in the system, or is the meaning different from the one requested. To be fair, sometimes I might be trying words and constructions that are not even a grammar item on Bunpro.

---

This is actually a project that I believe is underway.

Sometimes you’ll get a hint that shows in red instead of orange.
These are answers marked explicitly as wrong.

I fully agree with you that this is a pretty frustrating part of using Bunpro.
Will see if I can get this project bumped up a bit more in terms of priority.

[rustx]

Going to mention this one in N1 as I’ve noticed it in particular. Lots of the N1 ones are really bad for not having any ‘related’ grammar points, but at the very least when during reviews sometimes they are aware of other points.

However this one

に即して (JLPT N1) | Bunpro

In particular seems to be completely unaware of any other points that have a similar meaning as it always hard marks everything as red wrong if you try a similar one EG such as と並んで

[rustx]

Reviving this thread again for two more that I’ve probably failed collectively at least 30+ times over and over again.

かたわら (JLPT N1) | Bunpro

かたがた (JLPT N1) | Bunpro

They have very similar kanji (One radical difference), have similar meanings (While, In addition to)
Are used in an almost identical way (Only verbs, or after a noun)

Yet if you try and interchange these ever, the system will mark you wrong 100% of the time.
Also not surprising these are N1 grammar points as N1 is notoriously bad for synonyms which I’ve already mentioned in this thread.

[rustx]

Today I ran into the original topic issue listed again.

I tried this: を余儀よぎなくさせる (with correct past tense) and it was immediately marked hard wrong with no hint.

When the desired answer was the grammar point を余儀よぎなくされる (past tense)

Was for this sentence.

I’m slowly reducing my reviews over time, but this same issue is likely going to keep me doing some points for probably an entire year until I just remember all of these conflicts by rote memorization.

[John-Bunpro]

Hello! As one of the team members primarily in charge of the new Related Content feature, I just want to clarify one point for reference.

We’ve been working from N5 up to add Related Content for relevant grammar points. At this point, N5 to N3 has received an initial writeup and is available in a fully curated/edited form on the live site, but N2 (which we will hopefully be finishing within in the immediate future) and N1 (shortly after that) are still in progress.

The Alternate Answers (yellow hints) are something of a separate issue/task from these, and are being considered separately.

We are, of course, looking to flesh out both features as much, as thoroughly, and as soon as we possibly can, while also incorporating user feedback and paying particular attention to those entries or grammar points which seem to be of immediate interest or relevance to all of you.

While we’ll be doing our best to monitor this by keeping up with feedback and the forums, there’s still a chance that some things will slip through the cracks, so In the meantime if there are any points that you feel strongly need or warrant Related Content entries, feel free to leave a mention of them here and I would be more than happy to review them and prioritize creating/uploading writeups for them so that the most desired and important issues are covered first.

I’ve bookmarked this thread, so by all means, we thoroughly welcome and encourage all Related Content feedback here (for Alternate Answers regarding specific review questions – though leaving feedback for the specific sentence in question may be a more efficient way of tipping us off to needed additions).

Thanks as always for the valuable feedback and support of Bunpro!
We genuinely appreciate this sort of thorough attention and feedback from all of our users.

ということで、今後ともよろしくお願いします！

[rustx]

Hello me again, I need to flag this one grammar point in particular.

に則って・に則り (JLPT N1) | Bunpro

I first studied this grammar point on Jul 4, 2024. I’ve not missed a single day of bunpro and this point by far without exaggerating is the worse one out of all grammar points N5-N1 in terms of not recognizing when something could be a synonym. It matches with actually nothing in the system at all.

Bunpro teaches many ‘in accordance with’ type grammar points

And even more ‘based on’ type grammar points

Yet regardless if you try to use any of the grammar points in bunpros system (With correct use of a noun + following grammar point) It always marks it hard wrong, no hints ever with this point in particular.

I can’t see all of my stats, but for this particular point I’ve failed it (63!) times which is FAR higher then even points I’ve actually struggled to understand. I DO understand this point and how to use it, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to first think to try it every single time I see a noun and ‘accordance with’ or ‘based on’

[amberglade]

I run into this sort of thing almost every day.

The only time you learn nuance is by getting an answer wrong-ish in just the right sort of way to trigger a hint. I learn the pattern enough to get it right in the short term, don’t see the nuance for months then get it wrong. かたわら/かたがた/間に/内に/ながら/ながらに is a recent example. Another example:

V+ことではあるまいし also isn’t accepted but don’t know why. In general, when can you swap の/こと？

Some way to show all synonyms and nuance hints with contrasting examples for each cloze sentence question, regardless of whether the answer was correct, would help. A way to mine those examples on each question would be nice. Satori reader has some really great explanations on nuance differences. I have to manually add those on my own (via migaku) but mining content from Satori Reader is easy because you can copy examples and notes directly from popups or discussion notes on the current page.

Eventually, I would like to see an SRS system that tests English/Japanese synonyms and nuance differences between grammar construction and content like this book, except for grammar, or like the notes section of the dictionary of Japanese grammar series.

Kodansha’s Effective Japanese Usage Dictionary: A Concise Explanation of Frequently Confused Words and Phrases

by

Masayoshi Hirose; Kakuko Shoji

[Asher]

Hi there, and thanks for expressing youre concerns clearly! While adding more alternative answers is something that we are always working on, ideally what we would like users to be able to do in most cases is guess the right grammar point as quickly as possible, while still forcing them to do the work of remembering what fits best in the context.

I have been having a little bit of a think about the problem that you have pointed out here with に則って, and I think perhaps rather than the grammar point itself, something we could potentially do is give more emphasis on the type of words something is used with. For example rather than directing focus to the ‘in accordance with’ part of the grammar point, perhaps we should be directing more attention to the ‘used in relation to long standing rules and regulations’ part of the grammar point.

Many grammar points are used specifically with a certain style of word like this, and I think that the orange context words that are sometimes highlighted is something that we have fallen behind on providing recently. Although this won’t fix the whole problem, I think it will definitely help out with many grammar points that fall into this category. I will arrange for a sweep to be done through all of our grammar points within the next couple of months with a focus on fixing this specifically.

As for things you are getting wrong purely because of a conjugation mistake, a lot of those should be getting fixed very soon, as we currently have a few people working on adding alternative answer hints to all content.

Edit with example - How would you feel about something like this where you could actually press on the contextual words in sentences for a tooltip reminding you of how those words relate to the target grammar point?

[rustx]

Additional info like this would help a lot. However the exact same piece of text would definitely need to be on the grammar points page itself, there’s a huge amount of times in bunpro already where the hint becomes something like ‘More Formal’, but the formality isn’t expressed as special in anyway on the actual grammar points page, leading to a whack amole of guessing until you stumble into it.

I would still want the original hint text (EG ‘in accordance with’) to still show as for most users including myself that association is a crucial part of what we learned originally.

Would it be possible to include the N12345 level it came from somewhere on the page, or perhaps even in that hover tooltip? As soon as you haven’t seen a grammar point for a couple of months it becomes natural to default to all the variants you learned more recently, leading to a guessing game or just getting it wrong which is exacerbated by some points not knowing of its synonyms.