Self Study Sentences To Fill In Cards

Bunpro
#1

Hello everyone!

I recently decided to move over my Wanikani progress to Bunpro for extra practice on vocab recall. However, a bunch of the cards are the “translate” type, and show the Japoanes and asks for the translation in English. This is not as useful as it is what is already done on Wanikani, and I am looking to test my memory on remembering the words in Japanese without having the kanji there.

So what I did was add example sentences to these items, but I am unable to change it to a “Fill In” card type even after adding the sentences. Is there is no way to set vocab with self study sentences to “Fill in”?

I also looked into a way to maybe change them to showing the English word then asking for the Japanese translation, as that would be good for recall as well…but this also does not seem to be something that can be done…

Thanks!

Edit: rephrasing and typos

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#2

If you added self study sentences then they should theoretically be in the fill in type of review. Of course it won’t change the main card, but it will add that self study sentence as a separate review. I’ll go check my settings to see if there is anything I’ve got which made this the case and come back with an edit. In the meanwhile try adding a self study sentence and immediately going to your reviews since it should appear there as a fill in type right after you save it.

Edit- there is the setting for vocab reviews on This page, you can select fill in and apply it to all cards. This is the default though so maybe you already have that setting. I think maybe you added the self study sentences in the lesson for a word and then during the immediate review it still showed the see the kanji and translate type of review. Is this the correct assumption? If so then don’t worry. You’ll still get that review but will also get a separate review for the self study sentences.

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#3

Thank you for your reply!

Yes you are correct, I was in the middle of reviewing the cards ad added them to the description/lesson page (there was no “Lesson” stage like with Bunpro cards as they were synced over from WK).

I did as you suggested and added a self study card and it worked! It added in the new sentence! The problem is I have 600+ reviews (lol rip) due to the Wanikani sync (on top of my grammar reviews I already have), so it will take a while for me to actually see them. But it was added which is awesome, and now I have a way to make these cards as I go!

And for others finding this thread in the future: I do have vocab reviews set to Fill In as the default, but have not run the “Update all Cards” so maybe I can try that if I were to try this without the self study sentences.

Thank you so much!

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#4

I think that you could set the WaniKani items to master and still keep the self study sentence reviews. Maybe this could help to reduce your reviews especially if you are confident that you can recognize the kanji and just want to practice outputting the word without the kanji. I’m not 100% sure it works. So I’ll try sacrificing one of my less important items and see if it still keeps my self study items in my review queue a little later and let you know what the result is.

From what I’ve seen there are quite a few vocab items that do not have the ability to do fill in reviews. Either they lack the example sentences to fill in or they have them, but they are not formatted correctly. I have reached out to the BP team about this before and they mentioned that they are still in the progress of adding sentences to enable that. So for now self study seems to be the best option.

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#5

I think that you could set the WaniKani items to master and still keep the self study sentence reviews.

Yes, you can set them to master on import too, but I wanted the extra practice for the burned stuff so I set it to import on Seasoned level so they don’t show up as often as newly studied words, but still get reviewed. I still wish to review them but more as fill-in/recall.

That being said that is a great idea to set the “translate” vocab card to mastered after adding a self study sentence (or a few) to reduce the review count. I tried doing it for one of the vocabs I did today and it looks like it worked! It removed it from reviews without removing the self study sentence. I will do the rest now and going forward will do the same.

Either they lack the example sentences to fill in or they have them, but they are not formatted correctly

Yeah I agree and think that is the issue. A lot of the synced words do have fill-ins and Bunpro pages with example sentences set up. Its just a handful that don’t seem to have them without adding self-study sentences. No system is 100% perfect hahaha and now there is a decent way to get them added in the meantime.

You are a master Bunpro genius my friend :grinning: :v:

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#6

It seems you are right! Although I really wish that self-study sentences would be cycled through like all other items on BunPro instead of having a separate SRS each.

I had previously tried to learn higher level vocab (that comes along with higher level phrases) using self study sentences, but got frustrated and gave up. Maybe setting them as mastered is a workaround…

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#7

Yeah, I think that setting them to mastered so you avoid swamping up your review queue is the way to go.

I also found myself wishing that they cycled through the self study sentences for the same reason. At first I was adding like 5 or 6 per vocab, but realized how quickly my reviews were piling up. These days I’ll just add one or 2 for the simple ones and stack up on the more complicated ones like onomatopoeia since they have so many different usages and I want ample time practicing them all. I think it would be nice if BP could add an option to cycle through them instead. It would save me from having 100s of reviews because I want to practice various conjugations or collocations for some words.

I will say, though, that having to repeatedly review those self study sentences (in addition to manually typing them when setting them up) has helped to to remember the vocab significantly better than the ones which come with premade sentences.

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#8

Yeah, I was thinking of starting to do some sort of vocab mining and preparing self-study sentences.

I never opted into the beta for custom decks. Do you know if community-made decks work just like self-study sentences? Not cycling is basically the reason why I was not excited about the custom decks feature.

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#9

The only community deck I’ve used thus far is @Jake 's core 4k deck since my basic vocabulary was lagging after deciding to focus mainly on grammar. There are plenty of words in the deck which come with premade sentences that do correctly cycle. Unfortunately, there are also quite a few which either don’t have any example sentences, or do but still don’t allow for fill in type reviews. Those are the ones I’ve been adding self study sentences to.

I think it is based on whether or not the sentences are added in during creation of the deck, but I’m not 100% sure since I haven’t tried making one myself yet. I was considering making one for Elden Ring since I was unfortunate enough to buy a second hand copy in Japan expecting it to have the option to change the language like every other game I’ve bought here. Unfortunately all the UI and menus are in Japanese which is a real pain in the grass. I might still do that, but its gonna be a huge undertaking which I don’t quite want to get into now. I think I can find some time today to make a short one using words from a song and see what the process is like and if the reviews do cycle through.

edit - upon further thought I don’t know how it would treat the cycle if I had anything less than 12 sentences. Would it cycle back to the first or just infinitely show the last or run into some other type of issue. For science I’ll try a few different instances and see what happens

edit 2: @btluppi I tried making one, but it seems as if any vocab that you add is searched against the vocab that is available on Bunpro and uses Bunpro’s example sentences. So it seems as if until Bunpro adds those missing sentences we are stuck with self study sentences

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#10

Yeah, I was looking at the sentences I made (I was adding 5 or 6) thinking it would cycle through them and it 100% does not lol
I am glad I noticed before making far too many cards.

Hopefully they add the feature in the future I agree.

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